Route 66 A.D.
by Tony Perrottet
Random House

The ancient Romans knew how to get their kicks. Take it from Hollywood, and its fabulous celluloid parties of sybaritic senators and debauched temple acolytes. Ben-Hur, Quo Vadis, Satyricon and the most raucous of all, Caligula — all siren songs with the oldest subtext known to peer pressure — "When in Rome ..."

But beyond the big screen and the coffee-table books full of erotic Pompeian murals lies textual evidence of Roman hi-jinx when not in Rome. Happening upon a copy of a second century guidebook complete with highway maps of the entire empire and helpful phrases for bathhouses throughout Greece and Asia Minor, travel writer Tony Perrottet knew he had to reconsider his long-held bias against touring the Mediterranean.

Beneath its boisterous veneer, mass tourism today is the purest expression of the tradition that began when Agrippa's Map stood in Imperial Rome. For those tourists, the whole point of travel was to go where everyone else was going — to see what everyone else was seeing, to feel what everyone else was feeling. Sightseeing was a form of pilgrimage.

"Route 66 AD" is more than just a clever premise with a kitschy title. It is a magnificent reenactment of civilization's first Grand Tour phenomenon. Much like the latter-day Victorian imperialists who overran Europe in the 19th century, wealthy Roman citizens 2,000 years ago treated the reaches of their empire as both exhibition and playground. Unlike modern tourists, of whom one out of three descends upon the Mediterranean every year, Romans often traveled two full years to bring home a souvenir of the Sphinx.

Armed with Pliny and Herodotus and accompanied by his visibly pregnant and far more pragmatic wife, Perrottet sets off for Rome, Naples and ports beyond. His itinerary is faithful to the accepted tour of his first-century predecessors. Through Greece ("a manta ray drowsing on the ocean floor"), along the Turkish coast ("the world's most alluring case study in cultural fusion"), over to Alexandria ("the only city on earth that could genuinely rival Rome in size, ambition, and grandeur") and down the Nile, he finds himself repeating his high-season-in-the-Mediterranean mantra: "Crowds are ancient, crowds are good."

An ingenious mix of ancient scenery, scholarly anecdote and modern-day memoir, "Route 66 AD" is thoughtful, interesting and absolutely hilarious. Whether describing an antipasto-selling McDonalds on the fringes of new Pompeii or the rites of Swedes on vacation at Super-Paradise Beach in Mykonos, Perrottet knows how to meld past with present. If he sees nothing new under the sun, it's because nothing is as incongruous as his imagination of Romans on a road-trip.

— Elizabeth Kiem (eckiem@yahoo.com)