This is one of Belloc's walking books. His first one, where he describes his journey from England to Rome. Wonderfully funny and insightful as he describes his encounters and difficulties making the trek. Plus it is a bit quirky in how this is all related. I was grinning throughout this read.

I also better understand those who love this book have read it multiple times.

Stylistically dated, more bombastic than Chesterton, but entertaining nonetheless.

I really enjoyed this book. Belloc is a great writer, witty, self-deprecating and somewhat mad. Yes he does go on about religion a bit and he can go off on lengthy digressions but these are easily skipped over.

The heart of the book is in his encounters with the people he meets on his journey, I laughed out aloud on a number of occasions. A great book, looking forward to reading his account of the Pyrenees next.

this book has been in continual print for over 100 years and I always keep it on my bedside table
love it so much

A four-star book with one star removed for the didactic preaching and closed-mindedness (and the whiff of misogyny). The descriptive passages are wonderful, often sublime, and the fact of the journey itself -- to undertake to walk from northeastern France to Rome in a straight line (through the Swiss Alps!) -- is fantastic and marvellous.
Along with the sublime descriptive passages (his description of his first view of the Alps made me catch my breath and mark the passage to copy and save), a treasure of this book is the time in European history in which it takes place. Belloc made this journey at the turn of the 1900s (the first publication in Great Britain was 1902), and it was bittersweet to read of his crossing blithely from one country to another with neither passport nor identification papers, and passing through a Europe peaceful and innocent of the two shattering wars that were just a few years in the future.

Belloc writes as if the reader is a good friend. I'm sure I would have enjoyed chats with him, Someday....

A wonderful paean to the wanderings--a pilgrimage in Belloc's words-of a young man just graduated from Oxford. Belloc decides to walk from the Alsace/Mosel Valley to Rome, in as straight a line as possible. This vow leads to various privations and difficulties--notably crossing the Alps into Italy--but also the melancholy that comes from seeing sights and meeting people which one is likely never to see again, and which provides a kind of youthful nostalgia very resonant with those of us who have wandered across continents as young and financially challenged young persons as well.

While Belloc becomes a little mixed up between his drawings, occasional poems and songs, and relatively unrelated stories that come to his mind, his wonder at the beauty of the countryside, at the (mostly) honest efforts of the peasants and small town innkeepers, and the pull of the glory and past of Italy and Rome make this book well worth reading.

Among the many beautiful passages is one that describes the passage of a cold dismal night in the rough into the present glory of a new day:

"Then suddenly he sky grew lighter upon every side. That cheating gloom...lifted from the valley as though a slow order given by some calm and good influence that was marshalling the day. Their colours came back to things; the trees recovered their shape, life and trembling; here and there, on the face of the mountain opposite, the mists by their movement took part in the new life, and I thought I heard for the first time the tumbling of water far below me in the ravine. That subtle barrier was drawn which marks to-day from yesterday; all the night and its despondency became the past and entered memory. The road before me...had become mixed with the increasing light, that is, into the familiar and invigorating Present which I have always found capable of opening the doors of the future with a gesture of victory."

As a young man Belloc had trekked across 19th century America to woo and win his wife, Elodie. In 1901, he challenged himself to walk from Toul, in eastern France to Rome, Italy—in a straight line, right across the map, more than 500 miles. He very nearly managed to pull off this stunt, hiking straight up over the peaks of the Jura mountains, but a blizzard in the Alps forced him to detour through a pass. The story of his journey, The Path to Rome is part comic epic, part spiritual pilgrimage.... Read the full review at https://catholicreads.com/2019/03/16/...

If I said that a book was like the Lord of the Rings without any narrative...you might find that off-putting. But I think that's like this book in a way and it is wonderful. I am thinking of the scope and sweep of land—how the hobbits walk from one end of the world to the other and you think often about how it wouldn't be the same story if they had flown in a plane or driven a motorcycle. And that is what Belloc did. I don't know if you could do it now. I'll read this again.

As with his other magnificent farrago, “The Four Men” this is a tour de force of a truly great mind, I’m afraid to hold opinions on any and every subject under the sun. It is an amazingly Catholic book, full of the joy of living in the hope that comes of knowing that we are redeemed.

“We raced down the hill, clattering and banging and rattling like a piece of ordnance, and he, my brother, and asked began to sing. He sang of Italy, I of four countries: America, France, England, and Ireland. I could not understand his songs nor he mine, but there was wine in common between us, and salami and a merry heart, bread which is the bond of all mankind, and that prime solution of ill-ease — I mean the forgetfulness of money.
That was a good drive, an honest drive, a human aspiring drive, a drive of Christians, a glorifying and uplifted drive, a drive worthy of remembrance forever. The moon has shown on but few like it though she is old...”

If that brief example does not convince you to read the book, then in short, I do not exactly despair of your friendship, however let me tell you it may be a shakier thing than you imagine.

My favorite book in the world. Belloc's walking pilgrimage from France to Rome, over the Alps, singing all the way.

First published in 1902 and continuously in print ever since, Hillaire Belloc’s The Path to Rome chronicles his journey from his birthplace near Toul in France to Rome, “the centre of the world.” An ardent Catholic, Belloc is decidedly on a pilgrimage. But, a canny writer as well—one of the most prolific writers of his era—he has also crafted a secular tale of adventure.

Like any good pilgrim, Belloc starts off with vows: “I will walk all the way and take advantage of no wheeled thing,” he writes. “I will sleep rough and cover thirty miles a day, and I will hear Mass every morning; and I will be present at high Mass in St. Peter’s on the Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul.” He is also determined to walk by night and sleep by day, when it will be too hot to hike, and to travel in a straight line.

One of the humorous threads running through the book is how, one by one, he breaks each of these vows except for the final attendance of Mass in Rome. Sleeping outdoors, he discovers, is not as pleasant to actually do as to contemplate. Geography—notably the Alps (for which he is badly prepared in his thin summer clothes and ragged shoes)—interferes with that straight line. Exhaustion leads him to accept being pulled along by a wagon—a sly way of avoiding actually riding—and finally, in need to reach funds in Milan, he takes a train, and repeats this en route to Siena. As he says, “When one has once fallen, it is easy to fall again (saving always heavy falls from cliffs and high towers, for after these there is no more falling)…

For the most part, though, Belloc does a great deal of walking, trudging through terrible heat, rain, and snow, fording rivers, philosophizing as he goes on everything from the nature of bakers to the shape of windows. These meditations are highly entertaining as are his encounters with people he meets: he captures personalities in quick strokes and recreates the ambience of various settings vividly. This is a self-consciously playful book, opening with a section called “Praise of This Book” and creating from time to time a dialogue with the putative reader—“lector”—who may comment or disagree or get fed up with what he, “auctor,” is saying. This device serves as a clever way to enliven the text, to break up the monotony of a tedious trek, and to self-mockingly defend his text, though over time I felt it grew somewhat cloying.

Belloc’s Christian viewpoint infuses but doesn’t overwhelm his narrative, which offers an exuberant and fascinating portrait of Europe in another age. Reading The Path to Rome, I kept wondering what a ramble through this territory would be like today, and understood the desire of many writers to follow in the footsteps of travelers who went before.