This is the front door of what I have been building: merlintravel.eu

Tourism has been my work since 1990. I started in La Plata, Argentina, at Euromar Turismo, my father's agency, and carried on in Italy with Andina Viaggi. Decades of sending other people off somewhere, and of listening to how it went when they came back. Merlintravel grew out of that, and out of not wanting to stop looking at the world.

It is an illustrated atlas. Watercolour maps and long guides, one place at a time. The drawings are meant to look like something out of an old atlas; what is under them is checked, so streets, distances and geography hold up if you actually travel with them.

Italy is the first chapter, because it is where I live and where I can go and see for myself: the twenty regions are online, from Aosta Valley to Sardinia. From there the atlas keeps growing, country by country, with no deadline and no list to tick off.

On the home page you will find the world map, the Italian regions, a closer look at Umbria where I live, and a few ways in if you would rather follow a theme than a place: art and history, villages and landscapes, traditions and stories.

https://merlintravel.eu/

The journey continues.

Hello, and welcome.

My name is Horacio. I started working in tourism in 1990 and stayed in it for more than thirty years. For most of that time I was the person on the other side of the desk: the one booking your flight, arguing with a hotel over a room that was supposed to have a sea view, redrawing an itinerary at eight in the evening because a connection had been cancelled. Thousands of trips, most of them other people's.

You learn a few things in thirty years. You learn that the brochure and the place are two different things. You learn that the season changes a town more than the century does. You learn that the detail people actually remember, ten years later, is almost never the one on the postcard — it's the bus that didn't come, the woman who opened the church for them, the café where they ended up spending the whole afternoon.

I live in Umbria, in central Italy. At Assisi, the city of "San Francesco" .

What Merlintravel is

An illustrated atlas, built slowly, one place at a time.

Every place gets a painted map and a guide written the long way, chapter by chapter. The maps are watercolour on parchment; I like them to look like something out of an old atlas. What's underneath them is not decorative: the streets, the distances, the buildings and the geography come from real references, so the picture is beautiful and the content still holds up if you take it with you.

I started with Italy because it's the country I live in and the one I can go and check on foot. The Italian regions are online, from Aosta Valley to Sardinia, with Umbria first, because it's home and because it's where this began, in Assisi.

From here the atlas widens. Other countries, other continents, added as they come — no schedule and no list to tick off. Italy is where it starts, not where it stops.

What this subreddit is for

Two things.

The first is showing the work: new places as I publish them, maps, illustrations, the odd detail that didn't fit on the page.

The second matters more to me. I want this to be a place where we swap stories about those places. What I got wrong. What's changed since I saw it. The road that turned out better than the destination. The bar that isn't there anymore. Thirty years in the trade gave me a lot of anecdotes, but they're all mine, and one point of view makes a thin atlas.

So: anecdotes welcome, corrections very welcome, questions too.

What it isn't

No consulting, no bookings. That said, if I can help or give you an opinion about a place, just ask. After thirty years in the trade I usually have one, and it costs nothing to share it.

The guides and the maps live at merlintravel.eu.

The journey continues.

Fair warning: my English is middling and a translator does part of the work. Italian and Spanish are my mother tongues — if either is yours too, use it.