This is Patrick Leigh Fermor's spellbinding part-travelogue part inspired evocation of a part of Greece's past. Joining him in the Mani one of Europe's wildest & most isolated regions cut off from the rest of Greece by the towering Taygettus mountain range & hemmed in by the Aegean & Ionian seas we discover a rocky central prong of the Peleponnese at the southernmost point in Europe. Bad communications only heightening the remoteness this Greece
- south of ancient Sparta
- is one that maintains perhaps a stronger relationship with the ancient past than with the present. Myth becomes history & vice versa... Leigh Fermor's hallmark descriptive writing & capture of unexpected detail have made this book first published in 1958 a classic
- together with its Northern Greece counterpart Roumeli.