Books, journeys, and stories that lead somewhere.

THE STORY BEHIND THE SITE

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I’m Ramona, a history graduate, lifelong reader and traveler. I grew up in rural Romania, where books became my first way of discovering the world. Years later, that curiosity took me beyond the pages and across almost 60 countries, always looking for the stories, history and people behind the places I visit.

Beside me is Dragoș, also a history graduate and book lover, and the photographer behind Pages to Places.

For me, Pages to Places is more than a name for a travel and book project. It describes two of the ways I have always explored the world.I was a reader long before I became a traveler. Books were my first journeys. They introduced me to countries I had never seen, cultures I knew very little about and lives completely different from my own. Later, I started travelling and the direction somehow reversed: places began leading me back to books, realizing that I can combine my two passions in one.

A book can make you want to visit a city you had never considered before. A journey can send you home searching for novels, history and stories that will help you understand what you have just seen. And sometimes something even more interesting happens. You read a book first and then arrive in its world.

Suddenly, Istanbul isn’t simply Istanbul. Somewhere among its ferries, crowded streets, Armenian traces, cafés, old houses and food, you start looking for Elif Shafak’s characters. Barcelona becomes more mysterious and foggy after reading the tetralogy of Carlos Ruiz Zafón. Kyoto becomes not only temples, gardens and traditional streets, but also a literary landscape shaped by writers such as Yasunari Kawabata. The real city and the imagined city begin to overlap. That space between them is where Pages to Places lives.

Travelling through stories needs images too. That is where Dragoș comes in. He is the photographer behind Pages to Places and the person helping transform the places we discover into the visual side of the stories we want to tell.

Pages to Places isn’t meant to be a collection of perfect postcard destinations. We want the photographs to help tell the story of a place, its atmosphere, textures, people, contradictions and little details most people ignore.

What you will find here?

Pages to Places will take us in several directions, all connected by our love of stories, travel and discovery.

There will be literary journeys, where we follow writers and fictional characters into the real world, exploring landmarks connected to their stories, as well as bookshops, cafés, libraries and other bookish destinations.

There will be travel stories of their own, because not every destination needs a literary connection. We want to share places that fascinated us, experiences that stayed with us and the histories and people we discovered along the way.

There will be book reviews and reflections, where we leave geography behind and simply step inside a book’s universe, sharing our impressions, emotions, favorite themes and the stories that stayed with us after the final page.

And occasionally, there will be other stories too, because the world that makes us curious is not restricted to books.

Somewhere along the way, through my words and Dragoș’s photographs, we hope to create a map made not only of countries and cities, but of stories, memories, people, feelings and imagination.

Welcome to Pages to Places!