La Repubblica’s Vagabonding review

Following on to my surprised announcement on Monday that Vagabonding had been translated into Italian, here’s an English version of the review from La Repubblica. My thanks to Valentina Piffer for her translation help!

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What is freedom?
Learning the art of long-term world travel
A practical and philosophical guide on how to change your life without having to win the lottery. by DARIO OLIVERO

This book isn’t about how to take a vacation, and it’s not a tourist guide. It may have been released early this summer, but it won’t offer you suggestions for filling two weeks of holiday-time. It contains no advice about destinations, “cheap-but-clean” hotels, typical restaurants, or interesting flea markets. No, there is none of that in this book: There is much more. This is a book about how to earn your freedom — how to change your life so that it allows you to travel to each corner of the world for as long as you see fit. Despite worries about work and money, it encourages you to free your thinking and invest in life’s most valuable commodity: time.

Vagabonding: The Art of Traveling the World is all this. It was written by 32-year-old Rolf Potts, an untiring globetrotter who has been living out of a backpack for the last nine years. Early in the book, Potts illustrates a certain mindset by quoting a passage from the movie Wall Street, where a young stockbroker (Charlie Sheen) says, “I think if I can make a bundle of cash before I