Reading: Mani

Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese is Patrick Leigh Fermor's account of a trip he and his wife Joan made to the Mani peninsula in the mid-1950s. The Mani is the rocky, isolated southern tip of Greece, where a handful of villages are squeezed between the sea and the heights of the Taygetus mountains which form the backbone of the peninsula. No doubt it's very different these days, but in the 1950s there were hardly any roads, and Leigh Fermor found a peasant society in many ways untouched by the twentieth century. Originally intended to form a chapter in a more general book on Greece, his account of the trip (with many of his typical digressions into the history and culture of the region, or even into pure flights of fancy such as his imaginative response to meeting a fisherman who may have been a direct descendent of the last Byzantine Emperor) exanded into a whole book.

I picked the book up because as the days approached their shortest at the end of a particularly wet and gloomy autumn I was longing to escape to Mediterranean warmth and sunshine, even if only via a book (I don't actually ever expect to be able to get as far as Greece physically, especially given the impending loss of my freedom of movement). Leigh Fermor has an incredible ability to paint a picture in words and I really felt that I could see the sunbaked rocky hills, the blue bays and the villages full of half-ruined towers. While I love his erudition and the way his travel writing encompasses more than just the here and now of the places he visits, I did feel that some of the digressions in Mani (particularly the one on ikon-painting) perhaps went on a little too long, and I missed the forward momentum of his account of his walk across Europe, but it's a fascinating and beautifully-written book and I very much enjoyed it.