Elizabeth Gilbert on the idle charms of travel in Italy

“Just for a few months of one’s life, is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? Or to learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than it pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favorite fountain? And then to do it again the next day?”
Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love (2006)