“Meanwhile, Florence was increasingly becoming, for different reasons that not were not foreign to one another nor opposed – artistic and cultural on the one hand and political on the other – the Mecca of travelers and foreign residents.”

“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.”

“Traveling in other countries is especially fun because others often attribute your differences to the less-stigmatizing idea that you're like this only because you're a foreigner.”

“Foreign lands never yield their secrets to a traveller. The best they offer are tantalising snippets, just enough to inflame the imagination. The secrets they do reveal are your own - the ones you have kept from yourself. And this is reason enough to travel, to leave home.”

“I had long ago learned that when you are the giant, alien visitor to a remote and foreign culture it is sort of your job to become an object of ridicule. It’s the least you can do, really, as a polite guest.”

“Display in a foreign culture is not a foreign concept, and anyone who has ever traveled abroad will recollect, if they are honest, their status as an ephemeral concubine, with a global passport to seduction and a license to transgress. All the fleeting love affairs that are as much a part of visits to far-off lands as baggage tags and travel-size shampoo bottles--- isn't this proof enough that we all fall into the delightful trap of exoticising and commodifying ourselves in foreign places? ”