Exploring Southwestern Europe

Some 150 years ago, the newly formed Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company rewarded loyal customers with gifts of colorful picture cards. Each card was a work of art; before long, thousands of them were circulating. Their beautiful images and associated commentary captivated people and new editions were eagerly awaited. As a group, they told fascinating stories about every conceivable aspect of life on earth and, similar to what the internet might do in our time, came to embody the sum total of human knowledge. With the help of these cards, collectors could travel the globe, meet people from any country on earth and learn about their customs. They could visit lost civilizations, too, or marvel at natural and man-made wonders around the globe. They could study up on plants and animals or the evolution of commerce and transport, learn about geography and history and natural science. They could discover the secrets of agriculture, forestry and fishing or trace the origin of new inventions that were transforming industry and life in general. They could familiarize themselves with music and literature, great art and architecture, with famous men and women of all ages and, most importantly perhaps, with children’s favorite world of giants and dwarfs, elves and gnomes, riddles and fairy tales!

As a result, strange as it may sound, the company’s most important contribution, perhaps, was not to the kitchens of the world, but to the education of millions of people of all ages who could not go to school or afford books! The author’s grandmother was one of them and, many years later, when he was a child, she used her large collection of Liebig cards, as one might the modern-day internet, to satisfy his urge to find out everything about the big wide world. This ninth volume of the SURFING A MAGICAL INTERNET series, resurrects another portion yet of grandmother’s magical internet. Over 300 pictures illustrate her imaginary trip to some of Europe’s Mediterranean lands. When joining her, well over a century ago, to visit Gibraltar, Spain, Southern France, Monaco, Malta, and, finally, Italy and San Marino, we enter something like a time machine, which makes for an especially intriguing tour. To be sure, finding ourselves, in, say, 1880, the Blue Grotto of Capri or the Leaning Tower of Pisa or the Fountains of Rome may look the same as they do now and so will, perhaps, mountain ranges and volcanoes, great rivers and lakes and famous villas along the coast. But city streets with no automobiles in sight and people dressed in unfamiliar ways may well strike us as odd—not to mention their different customs, music, and dance. Still, if we are willing to stay around, we can marvel at grand structures from Europe’s Baroque, Gothic or Renaissance times—city gates, cathedrals and bell towers, town halls, court houses, castles and palaces, and houses of parliament---but we certainly won’t be able to hail a cab or find a plane to fly home. In fact, as we will discover, grandmother’s Liebig cards can take us further back beyond her time as well. We can inspect amazing structures from the days of ancient Rome, explore fortresses and palaces from a time when Spain and Sicily belonged to the Moors, and even visit the Medieval world and come to know artists, explorers, and scientists like Dante, Columbus, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Titian, Raphael, and more. We can meet them all using grandmother’s Liebig-cards time machine and we can feel the excitement in the air when Galileo insists that the earth is rotating around the sun rather than the sun around the earth, or when Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand helps create the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. This kind of time travel is anything but scary; it’s captivating and so much fun!