Romanian Train Travelers Discover Landscape Radu Mârza Babeș‑Bolyai University Cluj, Romania Motto: ere can be nothing more poetic than a black locomotive pulling behind it the dragon‑like head of the train through the hidden curves of a mountain. 1 Abstract e reading of some descriptions of the landscape observed by Romanian train travelers gave me the idea for the present paper. My first impulse was to research the landscape alone, as it was perceived by the Romanian travelers during the first century of traveling by railway, ca. 1830–1930, but the sources on these topics were insufficient, so I turned to a new, more general, research question: what could the travelers see from their train window? I discovered that the authors in question were interested not only in the natural landscapes, but also and foremost in the human presence into the landscape: the people they were travelling with or those they saw through the train window and in the railway stations (the “human landscape”). is was considerably enlarging the area of my research and I eventually made this my main research question. My sources primarily consist of the writings of travelers: letters, articles and accounts, travel books, memoirs, from the first Romanian traveler by railway, Petrache Poenaru, who wrote in 1831 a long letter relating his own train journey from Manchester to Liverpool, to the famous novelists Mihail Sadoveanu and Liviu Rebreanu in the 1920s-1930s. ey wrote travel accounts on their voyages in the Netherlands, respectively in Germany, Italy and France. e travelers who wrote travel books or accounts were not simply sitting inside the train and looking out the window or observing the 1 Alexandru D. Xenopol, Amintiri de călătorie (Iaşi: Tipo-Litografia H. Goldner, 1901), 66.