An evening with a travel anthology for the curious at home

For the evening when the kitchen is clean, the garden is quiet, and she wants to plan a trip without leaving the chair. This is a hardcover of 100 travel pieces from The New York Times, each built around a reason to go: a painter, a composer, a spirit, a road. It rewards slow reading in good light, one destination at a time.

Cultured Traveler is a hardcover collection of 100 travel stories, gathered from the column of the same name in The New York Times. TASCHEN published it on January 23, 2025, in English, at 680 pages. Barbara Ireland, who edits the 36 Hours, Explorer and Cultured Traveler series with TASCHEN, is credited as author. The places run from Agadir to Yogyakarta, as the title says, and each piece is written by a Times travel writer and illustrated with photographs.

What ties the pieces together is a single curiosity per trip. One writer goes to Elsinore for Hamlet, another to the French Riviera for Picasso, another to India for Le Corbusier. Others follow Georgia O’Keeffe, or Jackie Kennedy, or travel in the footsteps of Jesus. Some trips are about looking, such as Buddhist cave art in China. Others are about tasting: maple syrup in Quebec, octopus snacks at a Japanese baseball game, Cognac in the town called Cognac, flowers in French perfume country. There is also a kayaking afternoon in Germany’s Spreewald.

The approach is personal reporting rather than a checklist. The description names Henry Shukman, a poet and Zen teacher, hiking Europe’s oldest road in England. It names Jason Wilson, who follows the trail of the Stradivarius and admits he does not play the violin. It names Tony Perrottet, who uses Sydney’s art scene to argue that Australia offers more than its usual reputation. Historic photographs and suggestions for what to read and watch are included as well.

This suits a reader who already looks closely at her own surroundings: the way a kitchen is arranged, what grows in a garden, why one made object feels right. The trips here start from that same habit of attention, applied to a city or a landscape. It fits a person who is planning a journey and wants a reason to choose one place over another, and equally a person who travels mostly by armchair. The description does not mention hotel listings or booking details, so someone who needs practical logistics should look at a copy before buying. Whether the mix of art, music, food and history matches her interests is a matter of taste, not something that can be measured.

As a read, it is a large, heavy book of 680 pages, better kept on a table than carried in a bag. The pieces are short and self contained, so it can be opened anywhere and left again without losing a thread. National Geographic Traveller said it unlocks “history, literature, art and cuisine” across its destinations, and Amy Virshup, Travel Editor of The New York Times, called following the writers “an adventure for the mind.”

What stays after a few evenings is the idea that a trip can be organized around one question and one patient look, and that the answer is often a plate, a painting or a road.