Travel: People and places

As a child prodigy, Mozart first visited Paris in 1763 and 1764 before going to England, stopped in the city again in 1766 on his way home and then returned in 1778. So I sought him out here, even though he wasn't altogether enraptured by the City of Light. By the time of his second visit at age 22, with only his mother, Anna Maria, as chaperon, the composer had developed a distaste for the need to bow and scrape to musically ignorant members of the French aristocracy on whom his career depended. Paris, he wrote to a friend, "is totally opposed to my genius, inclinations, knowledge and sympathies.... God grant only that I may not impair my talents by staying here." -- Susan Spano Read more: Paris loved the boy Mozart, but the feeling wasn't mutual Upper photo: The Palace at Versaille Lower photo credit: Associated Press

As a child prodigy, Mozart first visited Paris in 1763 and 1764 before going to England, stopped in the city again in 1766 on his way home and then returned in 1778. So I sought him out here, even though he wasn’t altogether enraptured by the City of Light.

By the time of his second visit at age 22, with only his mother, Anna Maria, as chaperon, the composer had developed a distaste for the need to bow and scrape to musically ignorant members of the French aristocracy on whom his career depended. Paris, he wrote to a friend, “is totally opposed to my genius, inclinations, knowledge and sympathies.... God grant only that I may not impair my talents by staying here.”

-- Susan Spano

Read more: Paris loved the boy Mozart, but the feeling wasn’t mutual

Upper photo: The Palace at Versaille
Lower photo credit: Associated Press  (Jim Buchta / Minneapolis Star Tribune / MCT)

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Tintin

The scene is the palace of the Maharaja of Gaipajama, where a messenger from China arrives out of the blue. Before he can speak, he is silenced.

“A dart ... dipped in Rajaijah juice ... the poison of madness ... poor chap ... he just had time to tell me I’m needed in Shanghai,” says Tintin, the hero of “The Blue Lotus” and 22 other comic book adventures created by Belgian artist Georges Remi (who wrote as Herge) between 1929 and 1983.

-- Susan Spano

Read more: For this cartoon hero, life is a fantastic journey

Upper photo: The Stockel Metro stop in Brussels
Lower photo credit: Jacques DeMarthon / AFP / Getty Images  (Herwig Vergult / AFP / Getty Images)

Martha Gellhorn

Browsing in a bookstore recently, I chanced upon a copy of “Travels With Myself and Another” by war correspondent Martha Gellhorn. It’s about terrible trips she took, including a 1941 stint in China to cover the Sino-Japanese war for Collier’s magazine. She went with a fellow writer, whom she dubbed “U.C.,” for “Unwilling Companion.”

It wasn’t until later that I realized U.C. was Ernest Hemingway, whom she met in 1936 in Key West, Fla., and married in 1940. Gellhorn would have loved my ignorance; she spent most of her life trying to escape Hemingway’s long shadow.

-- Susan Spano

Read more: Getting to know an adventurer you wouldn’t dare call ‘Mrs. Hemingway’

Upper photo: Ernest Hemingway Home & Museum in Key West, Fla.
Lower photo credit: L.A. Library  (Rob O’Neal / AFP / Getty Images)

Barbara Cooney

“Miss Rumphius,” my favorite book about travel, was written and illustrated by Barbara Cooney in 1982. You seldom find it in the travel sections at libraries, though, because it is a children’s book about a woman born in Brooklyn at the end of the last century who travels, by herself, all over the world.

Miss Rumphius, named after a 17th century Dutch naturalist, climbs mountains, crosses jungles and deserts and makes friends wherever she goes -- Bapa Raja, for example, the ruler of a village on the Indonesian island of Ambon, who gives her a beautiful shell and tells her, “You will always remain in my heart.”

-- Susan Spano

Read more: In the footsteps of ‘Miss Rumphius,’ an inspiration to solo women travelers

Photo: Brooklyn Heights, Cooney’s birthplace  (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

Julia Child and France

When Julia Child first came to France in 1948, she couldn’t cook an omelet. She was a tall, gawky Pasadena girl married to a cultural liaison officer posted at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. She had heard the French were touchy. She couldn’t speak their language and had no expectations for her stay.

Then came her first taste of proper French food: briny portugaises oysters with rye bread, followed by Dover sole in butter sauce and a simple green salad. Julia felt guilty about drinking wine at lunch -- a crisp, white, Loire Valley Pouilly Fume. They had fromage blanc for dessert and espresso.

“It was the most exciting meal of my life,” she wrote in “My Life in France.”

-- Susan Spano

Read more: Touring culinary Paris with Julia Child as your guide

Upper photo: The Eiffel Tower
Lower photo: Julia Child circa 1978. Credit: James Scherer / Business Wire  (Muhammed Muheisen / Associated Press)

Georgia O'Keeffe and New Mexico

Georgia O’Keeffe was born in 1887 and came to prominence long before the feminist revolution, forged an uncommon relationship with her husband founded on their shared dedication to art, and later had the courage to let her work consume her, even though it meant doing without the warmth of human contact. After the death of husband Alfred Stieglitz in 1946, she spent the last four decades of her life at an isolated adobe ranch house in New Mexico‘s Chama River Valley, painting the red-rock mesas of the nearby Jemez Range. She grew crustier and ever more solitary, hiring a deaf housekeeper so she wouldn’t have to talk. “Sometimes I think I’m half mad with love for this place,” she said. In the end, it’s her love of place that endears her to me most.

-- Susan Spano

Read more: On the trail of Georgia O’Keeffe

Upper photo: The sandstone cliffs near Georgia O’Keeffe’s home at Ghost Ranch, N.M. Lower photo: O¹Keeffe at her home in Ghost Ranch, N.M., in 1961. Credit: Todd Webb / Courtesy of the Estate of Todd and Lucille Webb  (Susan Montoya Bryan / Associated Press)