In Renaissance Europe, long before the concept of organ donation could have been envisioned, cadavers were given a new life as architectural ornaments, and skeletons were put to use as building materials. The monk who started this fad must have been the Martha Stewart of his day. Why continue piling up bones in an ossuary when you could put them to practical use-or better yet, turn them into a thing of beauty? Thus began the oddest interior-decorating style in history: rooms made entirely of human bones.

Capela dos Ossos.

Bruce Chatwin. Sublime travel writer.

A quote from In Patagonia: He reached the Australian mainland at Cambridge Gulf, married a coal-black woman called Yamba, and lived thirty years among the Aboriginies, eating yams, snakes and witchety grubs (but never human flesh); sharing their treks, hunts battles and corroborees. His skill in wrestling made him a tribal hero and he rose to the rank of chief. Only when Yamba died did he strike out for White civilization.

Patrick Leigh Fermor was a British author, scholar and soldier, who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Cretan resistance during World War II. He was widely regarded as “Britain’s greatest living travel writer”, with books including his classic A Time of Gifts (1977). A BBC journalist once described him as “a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene.”

In the lovely Polish town, Sopot. Piers and long beaches and a classic summer destination for people in the area.

Holiday was composed of almost all long-form travel essays—it was not, like many modern travel magazines, list after list of where to eat, shop, and sleep. Holiday also published so many famous writers: Joseph Heller, Irwin Shaw, Arthur C. Clarke, E. B. White, Arthur Miller, Gay Talese, Paul Bowles, Steinbeck, Saroyan, Kerouac, Cheever, O’Hara, Bellow, Thurber, Faulkner. It was in Holiday that Truman Capote declared that he lived in Brooklyn—by choice!

The history of La Mamounia is as fascinating as the hotel. Situated on the edge of the walls of the old city of Marrakech, La Mamounia is named for its 200-year-old gardens, which were given as an 18th century wedding gift to Prince Moulay Mamoun by his father. Winston Churchill called it, “the most lovely spot in the whole world.” It also has its own perfume, a delicate scent of cedar wood, a fragrance created exclusively for La Mamounia by the prestigious ‘nose’ Olivia Giacobetti.

I’m in love with this. Luxury Train Club.

A globetrotter, diplomat, and bohemian, Morand specialized in short stories and travel essays and was one of the best-known French writers during the era between the two World Wars. His work evoked the cosmopolitan atmosphere and energetic social life of the postwar period while creating psychological portraits of hedonistic, often disillusioned characters. His witty, fast-paced descriptive prose is rich in imagery and has led some critics to categorize him as a French modernist and imagist.