Simplifying life to return to the expansive rhythms of nature and community living, keeping well away from mobile phones, televisions, alarm clocks, microwaves and everything else. Eric Brende, the author of "Meglio Senza" (Ponte alle Grazie), has managed it, proving to himself and to others that it isn't all that difficult. Together with his wife, Brende moved to an Amish village, where time seems to have stood still, learning the value of sharing in one's relationships with others. In grasping the gift of freedom, free will and volition that their new condition grants them, the couple intend to use it to successfully reinterpret and adapt this model to urban reality.
Utopian, but not excessively so

From Boston to the vast expanses of the Argentine pampas. It is another long journey by Paul Theroux, "L'ultimo treno della Patagonia" (Baldini Castoldi Dalai), the great and restless American writer, throughout which he pays close attention to both the cities and the nature he encounters. Places and people are etched into his account, rich in anecdotes, scenes of everyday life, breathtaking landscapes and squalor, splendour and corruption, with political and social observations never overlooked, all witnessed from trains with exotic, impossible and romantic names. Compelling

"Only when travelling does a reporter feel like himself, at home" writes Ryszard Kapuscinski in his new book "In Viaggio con Erodoto" (Feltrinelli). The reference point for his incredible reportages is none other than the celebrated "journalist" of antiquity, Herodotus, a writer greatly admired by Kapuscinski and his ideal guide. Through extraordinary, singular, deeply communicative writing, the great Polish reporter recounts his early journalistic career in Africa and the Middle East, describing — as few have known how to do — the most naked and at times harrowing testimony of the human condition, alongside a rigorous investigation of issues of the utmost contemporary relevance. Like old Herodotus, Kapuscinski too lives his love and passion for travel with natural curiosity and rigorous professionalism, in search of people and unspoken words, of facts to interpret or to explain, never abandoning his sympathy and compassion for all living beings and his respect for life.
A book of extraordinary beauty

"Sulla tomba del maiale gonfiabile"
(Rizzoli) sheds light, at last, on one of the least known and, in some respects, most mysterious countries on the planet: Paraguay. John Gimlette, an inveterate traveller, describes in these pages relentless sequences of dramatic and comic stories, and brings to light many unconfessed and unconfessable secrets of Spanish Jesuits, Anabaptist heretics, utopian communities, fleeing Nazis, cannibals and depraved, long-lived and ferocious dictators. A passionate and disturbing account that takes its full and rightful place in the tradition of British travel literature begun by Bruce Chatwin.

Recommended for bold travellers

The secret of "L'isola della felicità" (Sperling & Kupfer) lies in the simplicity with which Janis Frawley-Holler combines the experience of travelling through those small worlds that islands are, with the wisdom to make of ourselves, too, a happy island. For each microcosm — tropical or ice-covered, touristy or little visited — that the reader gradually comes to know, there is the discovery of habits and a way of life different at every latitude, yet always simple and authentic. As our own lives should be

Maurizio Torretti