Let me just let it be known to all that read this treatise; I HATE the book Eat, Pray, Love. The reason why I had such odium for it is simple: the author, and more importantly, her publisher seemed to do no fact-checking on her assertions peppered about the book.
The most egregious, in my estimation, was in the Eat chapter when she was traipsing around Italy. She said that the reason the Italian language was so beautiful was because of all the dialects and accents spoken, the Florentine one, the same that the poet Dante spoke and wrote, was selected to be the national language. She then went on to compare some of the other languages of Europe, nonchalantly saying that no other was selected based on that criteria. For me, the cardinal sin, the one that she shared with millions of her readers, was that Spanish was essentially madrileño. She could not be more wrong.
I lived there, speak it fluently, and one of my degrees is in it. For starters, there is no Spanish language. There is Galician, Basque, Catalan, and the one that most people think of when they think of the language, Castilian. This came about when the Moors were finally repulsed after 700 years of conquering almost the entire Iberian Peninsula. The families of Castile and Leon (thus the portmanteau) due to their fortified might finally be able to expel them. This was when Castilian became kind of the lingua franca of the region. However, they did not live in Madrid, but rather in Toledo. Madrid became the royal seat of Spain in 1561 under Phillip II, well after the dialect had already been spoken for hundreds of years.
So, this all said, I will try to make sure all the facts I assert in this travel log are accurate. No doubt, I will screw up, get a date, person, or country wrong. I went to a lot of museums and had a lot of tours. Sometimes the information I was given will be incorrect or even false. When that happens, I WANT you to call me out on it. Write to me at EatPrayGreg@gmail.com and help me avoid becoming the object of someone’s derision.
