THIS is a website about ideas -- where they started, who started them and how they changed the way humans live. It's also about travelling, eating, observing, joking, and exercising your curiosity.
The site is based on five books by David Dale, a social anthropologist who lives in Sydney, Australia. Dale's premise is that there is too much random information floating around at the moment, and unless we find a way to focus it, we'll never understand our world. So his books select and explain the essentials of their subjects — just the core knowledge that readers need to get the most out of the place or idea that has provoked their interest.
The main book, A Traveller's Alphabet of Essential Places, looks at how creative people such as Vincent van Gogh, Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, Frank Lloyd Wright and Cesar Ritz were inspired by their environments, and how the modern visitor can, with a little guidance, experience a form of darshana — a Hindu word that means "the mysterious ecstasy generated in the presence of a holy place".
The Perfect Journey considers travel from another perspective — how our discoveries are distorted (and sometimes enhanced) by such details as our mode of transport, our eating and sleeping choices, the political context, our baggage and whether we love or hate our travelling companions.
The 100 Things We Loved About the 20th Century explains the origins of the assumptions that guide Western behaviour. And the other books discussed on this site cover the minimum data any intelligent person should possess to make sense of Italy and Australia — two countries more similar than they realise.
Enjoy the read.