Back in the 60s, my partner's mother drove all the way from London to Afghanistan in a tiny Fiat 500. This was a family of four!

The past really is a foreign country sometimes.

Robert Byron, in The Road to Oxiana, describes a 1930s trip to present-day Afghanistan. But I believe he started the automobile portion in Tehran.

That's impressive!

My grandmother took 2 or 3 of her kids, on her own, on the train from London to southern Italy a couple of times a year with the same kind of stoicism as people take the bus into town these days. They were built different

My mother took us(four kids) on the train from CA to FL (and back) a couple times.

It is a fond memory now, but looking back on it, A 3-day (most of it in Texas) 2000 mile journey with four children in coach.... The woman was a saint.

Taking the train to southern Italy a couple of times a year sounds like both a great adventure and a great privilege.

My grandparents switched to driving as soon as they could afford it haha (my grandfather the begrudging driver). Train was certainly an adventure

A thought I had halfway through reading this article: if, hypothetically, early Medieval European art had been lost, how would it be reconstructed by modern scholars?

Would they accurately capture the lack of 'naturalism' (i.e. that flat, almost cartoonish quality) that often strikes modern viewers of Medieval art, or would they make it 'better', interpolating the gap between Roman and Renaissance styles?

This article hints at the idea that classical sculpture can't have been painted like that, because _it looks bad_ and Romans couldn't possibly have thought it looked good, yet early Medieval art was — presumably — perfectly acceptable to the tastemakers of Medieval Europe.