Camera and a good book have always been my inseparable travel companions. #Playaudible
But if the first is always the same, now for years, the book obviously changes to every departure and its choice is never random. I usually prefer set stories or have some connection with the country I'm about to visit.
Not necessarily travel diaries, therefore, but titles that somehow help me to better understand the historical and cultural complexity of the destination. And if in the era of paper books I had to keep myself from filling the suitcase of volumes, since there are ebooks it is all another story and I don’t think I can carry a small custom library every time.
This summer, then, I discovered the audiobooks, that is the books that are heard, and a world has opened to me. A friend told me about the audiobooks Audible, world leader of digital audio entertainment that is part of the Amazon group, landed in Italy for a few months with a catalog of about 12,000 titles. And since I was leaving for the holidays, curious, I wanted to try it right away.
The operation is as simple as downloading an app. The one in Audible found it on App Store, Google Play and Windows and allows you to listen to thousands of audio content on your tablet or smartphone when and where you want, even if you are not connected to the Internet.
With the offer "all you can listen" you have unlimited access to the entire catalog: the first 30 days of use are free, then the subscription is renewed at the cost of 9.99 € a month.
All you have to do is create an account. If, however, like me, you are already Amazon's customers, you just have to log in with your credentials, then enter your credit card details and select your first audio-book.
And here begins the beautiful, because the choice is really wide. If you already have a title or author in mind, you can do a targeted search. Otherwise be inspired by categories that group titles by gender. There is really something for all tastes: literature and narrative, yellow and thrillers, romance novels, essays, classics and even books for children and boys. There are also volumes in foreign language, especially English and Spanish, which are also useful for language training.
My exploration started right from the categories and I must say that by scrolling the titles in the catalog I was interested to download them even only to listen to the interpretation of the various narrators. I discovered that there are not only rank actors, but also unsuspectable celebrities who have lent their voice to this initiative.
Like Francesco De Gregori, for example, who reads America of Kafka; Claudio Santamaria that is measured with the Grande Gatsby of F.Scott Fitzgerald; Paola Cortellesi in the Reason and Feeling of Jane Austen; Gianrico Carofiglio reading...Carofiglio in Reasonable Dubbi.
My first download was "Acapulco" by Pino Cacucci, one of my favorite authors, just released in August in an audio version. Not just a classic travel diary, but rather a collage of stories and stories set between past and present in what in the wrinkled years was considered the "most beautiful bed in the world". During the inevitable dead times of the journey, such as waiting at the airport and flight, the voice of Antonio Carli, the narrator, literally catapulted me in the Latin atmosphere of the Acapulco of golden times.
So, I didn't think twice about it and I swiped the other two books of the same author as well: "Campeche", a full-immersion in less known Mexico, between suggestive places and indigenous peoples, and “Tijuanaland", set in the frontier city in the cross between modernity and ancient traditions. And patience if my destination this time was not Mexico. These audiobooks, by the way, made me feel crazy about coming back soon.
