Introduction to Eliot Stein’s Custodians of Wonder

Anna led me through a striped curtain dangling from her doorway toward the back of her living room, where a mosaic of white designs hung framed on the wall. It took a moment for me to understand what I was looking at: each pattern was filled with thousands of microscopic stitches threaded with such detail and delicacy that they resembled embroidered spiderwebs. As I moved to inspect each piece, Anna moved with me, asking me to tell her what I saw. I said I was drawn to a fisherman seemingly stitched from sea foam. Anna told me he had been her husband. In another, I described the series of bridges arching over the Venetian canals, the gondolier portrayed in intricately tight points straining to moor.

 

I had never seen anything quite like these swooping, sinuous creations, and, as Anna explained, that’s because she was one of the last living inheritors of an impossibly difficult style of needle-made lace known only to women on this small island—an artform she described as “embroidering the air.” For more than 300 years, this tightly guarded technique produced one of the most prized products in the Western world. Burano-made lace was the boast of royalty, the height of fashion, and the target of international smuggling. But more than anything, it was the pride of Burano—the life’s work of an astonishing thread of anonymous women who gave something beautiful to the world and, in the process, shaped an island. Machines eventually started replacing hands, and as fewer and fewer women continued the trade, that thread unraveled until all that was left were people like Anna, pleading with those who outlive her to find the eyes to see and the memory to recall how Burano came to be.

 

This chance encounter inspired the first travel story I ever wrote, but it also awakened a sympathy and reverence for these final custodians that still guides me 17 years later. So often, we hear stories about the first person to do something: the innovators, the pioneers, the ones who move us forward. But rarely is there a whisper for the last person to carry on a tradition, or a pause to look back and consider how these rites have shaped us and the places we come from. Instead, these gorgeous, irrational, gentle things humans do that make the world so inexorably fascinating often die a silent death, and it’s only after they vanish that we realize what has been lost. I can’t help but feel we owe these aging craftsmen, fading customs, and quiet gestures more. As one person in these pages told me after I met an elderly artisan who had saved an ancient craft from the brink of extinction: “This man deserves to be honored, but if you’re going to do it, it should be while he’s alive.”

 

I’m currently a journalist at the BBC, and I’ve spent much of the past seven years profiling remarkable people around the globe who are each preserving a distinct cultural wonder that would otherwise be lost. It is perhaps an unusual way to make sense of the world, but I’ve found it to be as generous and humbling a teacher as I could ever ask for. These sentinels have entrusted me with more than their stories. They have shown me their process, revealed their most intimate joys and sorrows, and explained what inspires them to carry on. Along the way, they have reminded me that travel remains an exercise in curiosity, and that the world is always so much richer than our assumptions of it.

 

This book explores 10 of the world’s rarest and most dazzling cultural marvels on the edge of disappearance as told through the last people alive preserving them. You’ll travel to five continents and meet more than a dozen artisans, keepers, and protectors maintaining these traditions against all odds. In Italy, you’ll find a lone woman living in a far-flung town clinging to the slopes of a mountain who makes the rarest pasta on Earth. In the Peruvian highlands, you’ll get to know the last Inca bridge master, who balances precariously over a steep gorge every year to weave the last remaining Inca suspension bridge out of grass. And in southern India, you’ll discover an extended family of alchemists who have guarded the formula for a rare and mysterious metal mirror that is believed to reveal your truest self. In an age when everything has seemingly been explored and explained, and where cynicism so often overshadows curiosity and wonder, these cultural custodians remind us how much there still is to discover, and invite us to fall back in love with the world.

 

Chances are you have never heard of a single person in these pages or the practices they’re maintaining. These are unsung, unheralded, and relatively unknown people living simple lives. Yet, the extraordinary things that they do reveal a profound and little-known truth about a place’s unique identity. This book isn’t just about a rare pasta you may never taste, a bridge you may never cross, or a mysterious mirror you may never see. It’s about why these unlikely things you likely never knew existed matter, why these individuals continue to carry on, and what it means when the unique traditions and customs that make us who we are fade away. Above all, it’s a celebration of human ingenuity, imagination, and perseverance, and a love letter to the people, places, and practices that make the world such a wondrous place.