Ali Bey, adventurer, spy and orientalist

Domingo Badía Leblich, writer and politician, was one of the most important European travelers to the Orient. He was the third European to visit Mecca and the first to describe the Wahhabis. He acquired an outstanding enlightened education and became the main source for travelers in the Orient, among them Humboldt and Burton. He also collected ethnological materials used by 20th century anthropologists. And he provided geographical discoveries, climatological data and renewed latitudes and longitudes of at least ten cities in the Orient. His “Voyages d'Ali Bey el Abbassi” (1814) were translated into English, German and Italian in 1816. 

Patricia Almarcegui is a writer and professor of Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on Literary Aesthetics and Cultural Studies. She has been a visiting professor at The American University of Cairo and at the Sorbonne, Paris IV. She has done research stays at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Sociology at Columbia University, New York. 

Some of her books are: Ali Bey and the European travelers to the East, The meaning of travel (2nd prize of essay Fray Luis de León), The painter and the traveler (translation into French and Persian), A traveler through Central Asia, Knowing Iran, The memory of the body (translation into Arabic), The myths of travel, Lost notebooks of Japan (translation into French). She has just published the novel Las vidas que no viví (Candaya 2023). 

She is a contributor, among other media, to eldiario.es, cultural supplement of ABC, La Vanguardia and El País.