Charting the Known!?

I was recently in Stockholm on my way to Italy. I stayed with an Alaskan friend. Over dinner and a bottle of wine, we discussed our current life situation, her graduate school, and my semester aboard. Our desires to leave a mark on this world.
I told her about this blog. I was surprised when she asked me why I named it Charting the known. Another surprise: I had no answer.
Her question stuck with me. I pondered it on my plain ride to Pisa; I tried to write about it on a very bumpy train from Brendizie to Rome. I thought about it as I passed the Medici palace, running my fingers over the rough sandstone, and nearly hit my head on a 650-year-old wrought iron hose support because of it.
Here’s my thinking on that name up top.
It’s 6:30 in the morning. I can’t sleep. The train car is stuffy. These seats aren’t built for a restful passage. I open the window and peer out. Dusty Italian countryside slips by in the early morning light. The train rushes past shabby buildings, olive groves, and small herds of goats just beginning to wake up.
The sun rising over the fields makes me feel like an explorer seeing new territory for the fist time. For an instant, even in this ancient country, I think I grasp what Americgo Espogie or Cortez felt when they first saw the New World. Every thing out this train window is exciting and new to me.
The train passes a citadel built high on a hill; I want to know its name, its history.
Of course, there is no new territory in Europe, uncharted rivers or vast wilderness to explore. There are no immense unmapped distances full of great unknowns awaiting this explorer.
In the less then the time it would take me to drive between Fairbanks and Anchorage, I go from Italy to France, or Austria. If I’m disoriented in the winding streets, there are guidebooks, maps dotted with symbols denoting important historical sights and helpful locals to point me in the right direction. These places and spaces have been inhabited for thousands of years. Untold numbers of people preceded every step I took in Rome.
Yet, for me, it is all new, worlds I’ve only read about in books, or seen in movies.
Though I know these places exist, to make them real, I need to see and touch them for myself.
I am charting Europe for myself. Every experience, every vista, and every blunder down a wrong alley--all I see and do is incorporated for use navigating these well mapped, till-now unknown, seas of culture.