Stefan Zweig had—according to Will Stone's introduction—a lot of love for travelling by train. He also abhorred mass tourism and authoritarianism, which is actually reflected in at least one of his musings on travels and places in this anthology, where Zweig's travels around Europe are collated.

At every moment nuns and monks pass furtively, greeting each other in subdued tones, dark, silent, hurrying, funereal at first sight like harbingers of death. But as they draw closer, watching over the long lines of children in their care, and you discover beneath the white caps or in the shadow of wide brims, calm gentle faces, then you realise that only the constant reminder of grandeur and death could be behind so immutable a gravity and could have etched such a coarse picture of life in these features.

Zweig used a visceral and old-schooly language which was not really typical for his days; this is an author who was closely in contact with his emotions and also made writing look like the easiest thing in the world.

So, even if the writing looks opaque to begin with, it's not.

Rarely had I felt with such intensity that hackneyed wisdom contained in the alphabet, according to which death must be signally mournful while life is an interminable force that compels even the most recalcitrant to love.

Altogether, for me, this anthology—ruminations on places that Zweig visited—isn't one of my fave Zweig adventures or even anthologies, but still, it's lofty, airy, and written in a very chilled-out way.