Welcome to The Historian Traveller!
Who is The Historian Traveller?
Hi! My name is Laura. I am born in the sunny and warm Catania, raised under the Mount Etna’s feet and surrounded by the crystalline waters of one of the most spectacular places in Italy. I always loved history and, as result of this passion, I’ve focused my studies in Medieval History. Particularly, I specialised in the history of travels from Venice to the far lands of the Orient and Middle East (I have even got a PhD about this!!).
Travel and photography are my passion since I was a teenager. I started travelling when I was 17 and never stopped since then! Travelling and being in contact with different and new cultures has always been an essential part of my life long before this was considered a trendy lifestyle. I love to discover new places and let travel changing my perspective of the world.
I travel as much as I can and as long as I can! I’ve been travelled alone when I was younger and now I mostly travel with my spaceman Alessio and my two little 22-months-old twins. Because both me and Alessio work full time (I work in the luxury travel sector), we try to maximise our annual leave, bank holidays and weekends to travel as much as we can around these periods. We are actually champions in this and manage to stay up to one month in selected locations around the world (e.g. Egypt, Portugal).
I’ve been to more than 30 countries but, to me (and us), it’s not the number what counts. Experiencing new cultures and having a lifetime memorable adventures in new places is what really matters.
How is born The Historian Traveller?
On an afternoon of November 2016, I was sitting on the steps of a bridge near Piazza S. Marco in Venice. It wasn’t a glamorous bridge like the ones instagramers like to take their popular photos. It was hidden, a bit dirty and somehow quite shady during that time of the day. In my hand, I was holding a transcript of a fifteenth-century medieval travel guide. For some crazy reason, as a part of an experiment for my PhD, I decided to follow the advice of this British pilgrim and let me guide through Venice by his words. Words written more than 500 years earlier. After days following his itinerary, I got lost many times, I ended up in strange places, I was tired, grateful but, most of all, I was truly inspired. This fifteenth-century guy, travelled all the way from London to Venice (with Jerusalem as a final destination) to write a guide for future travellers. This guide it’s about his religious devotion, of course, but it’s also about history, about other people’s habits, new cultures, food, architecture and curiosity towards new, different places. This guide might be ancient but its soul, the soul of its traveller it’s still contemporary.
My pilgrim guide
William, (that’s his name), would have been incredibly proud to seeing me wandering around with his guide more than 500 years later. I am not sure how many of these nowadays ‘travel-writers’ will have their work still read in the next 500 years. Surely not many. That moment, on that bridge, it was one that millennials would define as “epic”. It lasted just a few minutes but it made me think “I want to be like William”. I want to inspire future travellers to get lost and love what they are seeing. That afternoon The Historian Traveller came to my mind for the first time. However, it took me one year to finally decide to open my blog and two years from that moment to write in a consistent and more engaged way.
The making of a blog
Stuck in my academic mentality, it wasn’t easy to figure it out how to open a dialogue about tourism and historical past without making readers bored. Indeed, there is still a kind of prejudice about history.
People tend to say “history was my least favourite subject” or “history is boring”. BUT, is this an absolute truth? In my opinion, history becomes boring when you don’t know how to engage with your public. William Wey found the key of engagement with his readers was that of linking history with religion. However, that worked in 1462. In 2022 this is unlikely to work. Nowadays, readers have been swallowed by media culture and it looks like everything has to be in the first place visually appealing to be engaging. Unfortunately, historical heritage follows the same trend being now associated mostly with the aesthetic canons defined by what looks good on a 1080px by 13250px square.
During the years, I found my true voice by connecting history, writing and photography. Now, Heritage architecture and Cityscapes are among my favourite subjects. Indeed, I love to capture the mixing of new and old architecture. I like to create contrasts but also unique patterns and tones. I prefer bright and bold tones that easily enhance the natural beauty of the urban architecture. The Historian Traveller on social media shares this and much more.
Will my travel blog still be contemporary in the next 500 years? I don’t know. Maybe this is a little ambitious to think. However, nobody knows what the future will be. I’m sure that even William Wey didn’t expect that his guide would inspire an Italian historian to follow his footsteps for her travel blog.
The Historian Traveller Mission
The Historian Traveller’s mission is that of making readers at comfort with history by giving them a reason for loving it. Yes. You can have pictures with historical places but at the same time you can learn something about them. You can play with history, you can photograph history and you can even sleep with history (have you ever tried to sleep in a fourteenth-century castle and live as a lord for one day?). My blog and media channels aim to raise historical awareness in current tourism by promoting culture throughout travel writing, photography and social media.