Chatting Books Online Day 90. Today's recommended book is one that I hope can go a long way to satisfy our curiosity and wanderlust until such time as we can freely travel and explore the world in person once again. Today's book Is Atlas Obscura . It is a different kind of travel book , one that finds unusual places and events to visit throughout the world, and as the back inside flap says : "Every page gets to the very core of why humans want to travel in the first place: to be delighted and disoriented, uprooted from the familiar and amazed by the new".
Some of the things I have found interesting as I flip the pages (and it's one of those books that you can leave on the coffee table and read a page or two here and there) are The Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo , Italy where they have 8000 corpses actually displayed in their mummified state (and yes there are some pictures). And did you know that there is a Baby Jumping contest in Spain? I kid you not, grown men dress themselves as devils, get blindfolded and then leap across babies laid on the ground ! And how about this one, there is a spot in St. Pancras church yard in London where there is the most interesting arrangement of tombstones scalloped around the base of a tree, and it was actually done by novelist Thomas Hardy (Tess of the d'Urbervilles etc) while he was an architecture student and was working at the churchyard. The world really is a Bizarre and Wonderfilled place !
I even learned a bit about places and events closer to home . They tell about the Angola Prison Rodeo right here in St Francisville , and the book also tells about a chapel in the center of St Roch Cemetery in New Orleans filled with prosthetic limbs and other medical stuff with a floor covered in coins that was built by a priest in 1867 in thanks for sparing all in his parish from the yellow fever epidemic that killed 40,000 in New Orleans. Now the reason I find this so interesting is not only that it is also dealing with the aftermath of a pandemic but also that my grandparents are buried there in St. Roch and my brothers played little league and football on the St Roch playground teams when we were children and unil reading this I had never heard these stories or seen this chapel.
Wonders never cease to amaze me !
This 472 page hardcover book sells for $37.50 a copy.
Day 90 : Atlas Obscura
