Grasp The Path To Rome Narrated By Hilaire Belloc Format PDF

dated, more bombastic than Chesterton, but entertaining nonetheless, Belloc takes the reader with him on his pilgrimage from Toul, France to Rome with his musings, drawings, and songs, Its a lovely read for his style rather than a solitary journey, Belloc makes you feel as if youre in conversation with a company of voices with lector and auctor and the unforgettable characters he meets along the way.
Its a celebration of what he loved of old Europe with its bucolic countryside and local wines, Published in, it preserves an eternal image of these towns, soon to o be ravaged by two world wars ,as they would never be again.
I was not at all surprised to learnt that this book was the most financially successful of all his works, As with his other magnificent farrago, “The Four Men” this is a tour de force of a truly great mind, Im afraid to hold opinions on any and every subject under the sun.
It is an amazingly Catholic book, full of the joy of living in the hope that comes of knowing that we are redeemed.


“We raced down the hill, clattering and banging and

rattling like a piece of ordnance, and he, my brother, and asked began to sing.
He sang of Italy, I of four countries: America, France, England, and Ireland, I could not understand his songs nor he mine, but there was wine in common between us, and salami and a merry heart, bread which is the bond of all mankind, and that prime solution of illease I mean the forgetfulness of money.

That was a good drive, an honest drive, a human aspiring drive, a drive of Christians, a glorifying and uplifted drive, a drive worthy of remembrance forever.
The moon has shown on but few like it though she is old, . . ”

If that brief example does not convince you to read the book, then in short, I do not exactly despair of your friendship, however let me tell you it may be a shakier thing than you imagine.
This was both a joy to read, and at the same time something to marvel at, I couldn't help but imagine that this voyage would be so different today, Would any strangers today rent him a bed and a meal I read the lion's share of this book while on vacation and the two experiences will forever be inextricable in my mind.
The firstor so pages of this book are an absolute delight worthy of astar rating, Belloc peppers his thoughts while walking from north central France to Rome with thoughtful philosophy and hilarious anecdotes the likes of few books I have ever read.
However, the finalor so pages have fewer of those charming moments of levity as the author seems to have become bogged down by the task of telling his story.
Possibly this serves in illustrating how the human mind becomes less philosophical as the body suffers from fatigue,

Anyway, I hate to disparage the book as it was on the whole a true source of joy for me.
As travel writing it is firstrate, As a directive on the good life for all nonmaterialists, especially Catholics likewise, For the easily annoyed this may not be your book,

This was my introduction to Belloc, and while it has proven to be his most famous work, I would be excited to further plumb his catalog.
Possibly my favorite book of all time Published in, Belloc, like Patrick Leigh Fermor and a few other daring souls, decided to walk across Europe and his journey to Rome over the Alps is amazing.
His account of hiking up a misty mountain near Interlaken and, when the clouds parted, realized that the path had ended and he was on a precipice just about to step out over a drop of thousands of feet into the lake below, is stunning.
He vividly describes the mountains, vistas and his fellow travelers make this one of my favorite travel books, I was introduced to Chesterton, Belloc and Ronald Knox by a freshman English teacher why yes, he was Catholic, The only fiction in the bunch, as I recall, were some wonderful detective stories by Chesterton and Knox, In fact Msgr. Knox, the first Catholic chaplain at Oxford for four hundred years, supported the University Catholic Chaplaincy by writing a mystery novel each year over the long vacation.


All this merely leads up to saying that this book reads like fiction, and along the way contains nuggets of political philosophy, European history and culture, musings on tradition and some frank sentimentality from an author who was at his best when expressing his outraged longing for a world which was gone but whose return he demanded.


And Belloc is a realist, I thought, in my mushyheaded state at age twenty, that this was to be a beautiful metaphorical musing on Belloc's conversion to Catholicism.
Ha. Belloc was a cradle Catholic, This was, as the title would imply to a solid realist, an account of a journey on foot from Provence to Rome.


The ending, simultaneously pious and irreverent, jocular and serious, learned and silly, is pretty typical of the whole book, And Belloc is good enough at it that forty years later I can quote it from memory:

O ye patron saints and angels
That protect the four Evangels
And ye prophets vel majores
Vel incerti vel minores,
Virgines et confessores
Chief of whose peculiar glories
Est in aula regis stare
Atque clamare et conclamare,
Clamantes cum clamoribus Pro nobis peccatoribus.
Some people might think that a book with this title would necessarily be about converting to Roman Catholicism, It's not. It's quite literally about the physical path to Rome, the hiking trail that Belloc trudged along from eastern France to the City of Rome in.


Hilaire Belloc was a FrenchEnglish, turnoftheth/th century writer and a very enthusiastic Catholic indeed, No, not of the Bernanos variety, Not into serious suffering. Back in, as a young man, Belloc felt he needed to carry out a vow he had made by walking from France to Rome.
He did this dressed in a suit, a tie and city street shoes, No baggage. No hiking equipment. No knapsack. No. He just up and took off from an eastern French town, walked across the Alps, and walked down to Rome,

Not a change of clothes with him, By the end he did indeed require a new pair of shoes, His wingtips had been worn out, He went on to write a zillion books and articles, He was very wellknown and appreciated in his time, though in certain respects he was a dork, But many people think that "The Path to Rome" was his best book, He was a very, very good and entertaining writer,

The Path to Rome is available for free here: sitelink gutenberg. org/ebooks/.