The best travel books to read before you leave

A good book does for a destination what no guidebook manages to do: it turns it from a list of things to see into a place inhabited by stories, voices and questions. That's why, even before you book, it's worth choosing carefully what to read. We've gathered the best travel books, between reportage and fiction, classics and recent titles, with an eye to that slow, curious way of being in the world that matters to us. Nothing compulsory, just reads that stay with you.

Levi's Italy

Let's start with Italy, because it's often here that you learn to look. "Christ Stopped at Eboli" by Carlo Levi (1945) grew out of the writer's internal exile in Lucania and tells of a peasant South of badlands and silences. Reading it before climbing up to Aliano, the village where Levi lived and now rests, changes everything: the walls, the faces, the light. The same clay landscape returns at Craco, an abandoned village suspended over the cliffs, and in the neighbourhoods of the Sasso Caveoso in Matera, where Levi's page turns to stone.

If you're after a literary map of the whole country, "Viaggio in Italia" by Guido Piovene (1957) remains unsurpassed: born from a radio investigation, it crosses region by region an Italy that was changing. It's the ideal reading for anyone wanting to build an itinerary among the lesser-known medieval villages, chasing not the most photographed monuments but the grain of places.

Rumiz and the monasteries

Among contemporary writers, Paolo Rumiz is the name to know. "La leggenda dei monti naviganti" (2007) traces the Alps and Apennines as if they were a single backbone of water and stone, and it's the perfect companion for those who love the lesser mountains. "Il filo infinito" (Feltrinelli, 2019) is instead a pilgrimage among the Benedictine monasteries of Europe: it begins amid the rubble of Norcia and searches, in "ora et labora", for the roots of a continent. Reading it prepares you to step into places like the most beautiful abbeys in Italy, San Pietro in Valle at Ferentillo or the French Conques with a different silence inside you.

For the mountains as a way of life there's "The Eight Mountains" by Paolo Cognetti (Premio Strega 2017), a story of friendship in the Alps that has brought many readers back up to high altitude. After reading it you look differently at a village like Pedemonte in Alagna, with its wooden Walser houses, or you set off for the Tailly lakes in the Val d'Otro, the Valsesia that stays wild.

The classics of the world

Widening the gaze to the world, some titles are by now classics of the genre. "In Patagonia" by Bruce Chatwin (1977) invented a way of telling a journey made of fragments and obsessions; his "The Songlines" (1987) searches, in the sung tracks of Australia's Aboriginal peoples, for an ancient idea of nomadism. "The Shadow of the Sun" by Ryszard Kapuściński (1998) gathers decades of an Africa lived from the inside, far from the hotels for foreigners: it's the most honest lesson in reportage you can pack in your suitcase. And "A Fortune-Teller Told Me" by Tiziano Terzani (1995): to fulfil a prophecy, the author spends a whole year without taking planes, discovering that moving by land and sea gives Asia back its time, its detail and its encounters.

Fiction, too, can be pure geography. "Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino is an imagined dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in which every city speaks, ultimately, of Venice: you happily reread it thinking of the alternatives to Venice, the other cities on the water far from the crush. "Indian Nocturne" by Antonio Tabucchi (1984) is instead a journey-pursuit through nocturnal India, brief and feverish, to be read in a single evening.

Europe's lesser corners

Europe's less-trodden corners have their books too. "Mani" by Patrick Leigh Fermor accompanies those who go down into the deep Peloponnese, among stone villages like Dimitsana, perched above the gorges of Arcadia. For inland Spain, "As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning" by Laurie Lee recounts a walk on foot in the 1930s that makes you long for suspended cities like Cuenca, with its houses hanging over the precipice.

Finally, two reads that are almost a manifesto: they aren't fiction, but they help you set off with the right frame of mind. Our pages on how to avoid overtourism and on why it pays to travel in the low season round off the ideal library of anyone who wants to read first, walk slowly, and come home with something more than a photograph.