A first edition of Baedeker’s guide to Paris can be just as effective as a Flaubert novel in re-creating that long-vanished, premodern city. Tourism in the nineteenth century had not yet become the culture-distorting enterprise it is today; apart from a few well-travelled routes between the centres of culture, each trip abroad required extensive preparation and an iron constitution. Today we think of Edward Lear as a writer of nonsense verse, but in his day he was also considered an “artist of great promise,” a celebrated English landscape painter who lived in Rome for more than a decade. Edward Lear in Albania, edited by Bejtullah Destani and Robert Elsie (I.B. Tauris), is Lear’s account of his travels through the Balkans beginning in 1848, the first stage of what was to be a