The Great Progressive Dinner

By this time next month, I will be in Zurich, maybe even Vienna already. Maybe I will have already taken the thirteen hour train ride. The engine a hot needle pushing through the frozen fabric of the Alps. And after the appropriate amount of days steeped in the city that "discovered" coffee for the West, I may actually float on a mediterranean zephyr down the gentler spine of the Apennines until there is nothing else but toss myself into the Adriatic, hoping to wash ashore some Greek spittle of an island.

Since the longing for this trip precipitated into a plane ticket (complete with layovers in Helsinki and Paris), I have been about the business of feeding my imagination for the land, the history, the people, and the food. I see this as an exercise in enlarging my appetite for a great progressive dinner (hm, maybe that should be more than a metaphor. should i be pre-eating too?). In my previous travels to other parts of the world, the less I've soaked in materials related to those places, the less I've been able to understand them, or at least express my understanding (which may be the same thing).

As Serendipity has proven herself time and again through the mouths of both familiar and unknown book advisors, I return to her altar again, seeking a kaleidoscopic, but somehow distilled, collection of golden pages and passages.

This is the list on which I have heretofore nibbled, gnawed, gnashed, and noshed: 

Henry James/ Italian Hours

Italo Calvino/ Road to San Giovanni

Ernest Hemingway/ A Moveable Feast

The Name of the Rose/ Umberto Eco

I, Claudius/ Robert Graves

Bella Tuscany/ Frances Mayes

Florence, Venice, and the Towns of Italy/ City Secrets

The Stones of Florence/ Mary McCarthy

Venice Observed/ Mary McCarthy

Enchanted April/ Elizabeth Von Arnim

Postwar/ Tony Judt

Where Angels Fear to Tread/ E.M. Forster 

This is the list of recommendations on my still growing "To Try" list:

Poems of Catullus

Poems of Sappho

The Decameron/ Boccaccio

What is Art/ Tolstoy

Art Objects/ Jeanette Winterson

Meditations/ Marcus Aurelius

The Pillars of Hercules/ Paul Theroux

I would like more. 

Anything: fiction,non-fiction, poetry, travel, guides, cookbooks, music, movies

Friends! Romans! Countrymen! Recommend me your reads!