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Living In The Past with Andante Travels

Andante is owned and managed by archaeologists and part of their mission is to transmit both a sense of wonder at the ancient world and a sense of the excitement of discovery to all of their guests.

No excavation is involved, but their parties travel in the company of specialists chosen not only for their learning, but for their ability to interest you. The ambience is relaxed and informal (although the pace may sometimes be less so) and they try hard to retain the magic of travel despite travelling in parties. You are likely to be introduced to local food and drink, stay in hotels chosen for their character, position and views and not for shoe-cleaners in the bathroom or satellite tv. Their success speaks for itself. People travel with them year after year. Denise Allen, one of Andante's experts, kindly provided this article about our need to travel and to explore the past.

This article is the intellectual property of www.retrosellers.com and Denise Allen and cannot be reproduced without express permission.


What is at the root of our interest in the past? Why, at the beginning of the 21st century, is the latest technology being used to produce a phenomenon like retrosellers, which is focused on objects and ideas from times long gone? Is it nostalgia? - a word taken from the ancient Greek roots nostos + algos, and literally meaning acute longing or pain for familiar surroundings or more commonly used in a diluted form as a wistful memory of an earlier time.
Not many people, faced with the reality of life in ancient Rome, or coping with the daily routine in a medieval village, or even in a 1940s townhouse, would really want to swap it for the comforts and opportunities of the present day. But it is obviously vitally important to be able to make the comparison, to look at how we lived then and understand how we have arrived here and now and to treasure the things which, by some quirk of fate, have survived to bridge the gap between past and present.
This connection with the past can be made in all sorts of ways - you may recognise in a museum show-case a type of toy you used to play with, or you may just come across an old photo in an album, hear a song which provided the background to a significant moment. Or walk along the paved street of a Greek city and try to recreate the life and bustle in one of the world’s earliest democracies; sit in a Roman amphitheatre and think what effect the violent acts might have had on the spectators; or perhaps gaze at a medieval church painting and try to understand what message and imagery is contained there, mysterious to us now but very familiar to any member of the congregation at the time.
Andante Travels is a company which specialises in holidays designed to explore past cultures, whilst appreciating the comforts, tastes and pleasures of the present day. Founded and managed by archaeologists, its starting point is a fascination for and curiosity about the past, and its aim is to entertain and inform a wide audience of guests. We offer a wide range of exciting and unusual holidays, of which the following are examples. See our website www.andantetravels.co.uk   for more details.

Pompeii, Herculaneum & Classical Campania
As far as we can make out, when Vesuvius erupted in August AD79 the people living in Pompeii, Herculaneum and the many other towns and villas around the Bay of Naples didn’t know what was hitting them. Not that there weren’t other active volcanoes in the region - the Phlegraean (‘burning’) Fields north of Naples were so-called because of all the volcanic activity, and Etna over in Sicily was always blowing its top. But the cone-shaped mountain which dominated their plain had been a quiet benign presence for all of living memory, and the experts who suspected that it might have once been a volcano had convinced themselves that it was dead. The region was still recovering from the huge earthquake which had caused so much damage 16 years before - many amenities were still closed for restoration. But such things always happened here, and the increasing numbers of earth tremors were just a part of life in Campania.

The disaster which followed was the first caused by nature rather than people for which we have a surviving eye-witness account - a teenager called Pliny watched events from across the bay at Misenum, whilst his uncle (also called Pliny, the elder) sailed closer to the cause of the commotion first to observe and then to try to help rescue people, dying in the attempt. He recorded what he saw for posterity, and his words have survived.

This historical record has been verified by archaeological excavation - more than 250 years of digging since the sites were rediscovered in the early years of the 18th century. A visit to the remarkable remains are so much more illuminating in the company of an expert who will bring together all the strands of art history, architecture, everyday life and customs, as well as the development of archaeology itself over 250 years, and what it can now tell us. See our website and the Pompeii, Herculaneum and Classical Campania tour for details - www.andantetravels.co.uk

Peru - in Search of the Incas, from the Pacific to the Andes
Fifteen hundred years later, on the other side of the world, annihilation was also facing the Incas of Cusco, but it came in the shape of men with guns rather than from nature. The Empire of the Incas, which flourished in Peru during the 15th century AD, has been compared with that of the Romans in terms of organisation and scale. Their network of roads, impressive and evocative cities, system of communication using knotted strings, and farming techniques based on potatoes, maize and herds of llamas, are all fascinating to the modern visitor, and the scenery provides a breath-taking backdrop. See our website for details: www.andantetravels.co.uk

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Article written by Denise Allen -
many thanks to Denise for this