If you’re reading this, I am visiting Rome and some of the islands of the eastern Mediterranean. In a way, it’s an ironic place to go to escape our own cut-rate Caesar’s attempts to hasten the empire’s decline and fall.

I approach trips, like everything else, with some trepidation. It may be wonderful and enlightening, but given the state of air travel, the world, my joints, and the habitual chaos of Italy it may also prove exasperating, costly and wearying.

Cervantes once recommended traveling “all over the world in a map, without the trouble and expense.” So dear reader, here’s your ticket to a painless, inexpensive holiday to what the Romans modestly called Mare Nostrum, our sea.

Ulysses Found: Ernle Bradford was a sailor in the British Navy in World War II. Nights he would lay in his bunk reading the Odyssey, in Greek, of course, thanks to a good Public School education, while waiting to be torpedoed by a U-Boat. The more he read and reread the old tale and watched the landscape it described pass by, the more he became convinced that it was a documentary, not a fiction. After the war, he got himself a sailboat and set out to retrace the route of the “cunning man of man turns.” “Ulysses Found” is the enchanting result.

The Mediterranean: A masterpiece by Fernand Braudel which helped pioneer an historiography based less on quotidian affairs like battles or royal houses and more on long sweeps of the peoples inhabiting particular places and how their cultures adapted to their situation of climate, demography, topography and the like. Even how far above sea level one lives, he argued, is reflected in one’s folkways.

Poets In A Landscape: Classics professor Gilbert Highet strolls us through Italy at the time of the Roman Empire visiting the places that Virgil, Horace, Ovid and others called home. He makes an old, lost world come vividly to life.

Lawrence Durrell: Pretty much everything Durrell wrote revolves around the sunny Mediterranean rather than the rainy England he fled. His “Alexandria Quartet” of novels, set in that multifaceted city in the 1930s and ‘40s, is his most famous work. But he writes with knowledge and gusto about the islands. “Prospero’s Cell” describes Corfu, “Reflections on a Marine Venus” Rhodes, “Bitter Lemons” Cyprus, “Sicilian Carousel” speaks for itself and “Caesar’s Vast Ghost” concerns the Roman province where Durrell lived for many years, Provence.

My Family and Other Animals: This is a work by Durrell’s younger brother Gerald, a zookeeper, who describes growing up mad about creatures and surrounded by his eccentric family on Corfu. Charming and funny.

I, Claudius: Books like this famous reimagining of the wicked doings at the pinnacle of the empire was how the poet Robert Graves paid the bills. He was reported dead in the trenches of World War I, but like the war itself, this was an error. He came home suffering from PTSD and like many of his Lost Generation contemporaries turned his back on the society that produced such carnage and left England, an evolution described in “Good-bye to All That.” He settled for most of the rest of his long life (he died at the age of 90 in 1985) in Deya, Mallorca where he wrote poems, literary criticism, learned and idiosyncratic works like “The White Goddess” and “The Greek Myths” and page-turning historical novels about Roman emperors.

The Pillars of Hercules: Travel writer Paul Theroux circumnavigates the Med by train, automobile, boat and foot. His work is largely a diary about those he meets along the way and can seem like a waste since he professes a complete disinterest in the sights most travelers go to see, such as churches, art, and ancient ruins. But he is a diverting companion who ventures places you probably wouldn’t.

Constantine Cavafy: He was an Alexandrian Greek who spent most of his short life, about 100 years ago, in that city as a journalist and civil servant. He left behind remarkable poems that often see our modern world as if superimposed on the Mediterranean past or vice versa. He published little in his lifetime, but is now recognized as a poet of classic stature. And since I began with a word about decline and fall, it is only right to end with a few lines from his “Expecting the Barbarians.”

A decadent city (Rome, Alexandria, Paris, London, New York?) has been warned the barbarians are coming but only waits passively for the end, and then…

Some people arrived from the frontier
And said that there are no longer any barbarians.

And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.