I'm calling the police - Irvin D. Yalom

This is a very short autobiographical story about a Jewish friend of the author who managed to escape the Nazis and flee from Budapest to the USA when he was only 17 years old, by himself, with basically no money, no contacts and no knowledge of the English language. And who then went on to become a top-skilled, world-famous heart surgeon.

Memoirs of Hadrian - Marguerite Yourcenar

This French literary wizard managed to write the imagined autobiography of one of the most important ancient Roman leaders, the third of the so called “five good emperors”.
Throughout the book Hadrian is going over the most important phases of his life, “the literary excuse” being a letter addressed to his adopted grandson Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic philosopher who would then become emperor himself.
Hadrian is a strong, clever, wise and erudite man, a great military and political chief, in love with Greece and Greek culture, and Yourcenar manages to revive the workings of this man’s mind by means of a refined and beautifully rendered prose.

Confessions of a citizen (Egy polgár vallomásai) - Sándor Márai

Some chapters of this book read like an autobiography, others like a travel diary. And yet, the whole work is probably neither. It starts with the author's upbringing in a Magyar hometown, before WWI put an end to the Austro-Hungarian empire. After that Sándor Márai started to travel abroad. This is a summary of those years: a collection of impressions, experiences and encounters of a clever, refined, erudite and restless young man, moving around Europe between the two world wars. Tension is in the air. Excitement, desperation and extravagance as well.

The most beautiful woman in town - Charles Bukowski

I used to read Bukowski - translated into Italian - when I was a college student. Bukowski depicted a world of decadence, problems, poverty, alcohol addiction and free sex that could make my neat and standardized life in the province, at university, in the family, with ordinary people, among conventional ideas, a little less standardized. It was a comparison term, a paradoxical mix of a threat to avoid and a goal to achieve. I found it so fascinating.

Wild swans: three daughters of China - Jung Chang

This novel reminds me of great family sagas such as War and Peace, One hundred years of solitude or The house of the spirits, where the authors tell the history of their respective countries over many decades through the vicissitudes of a few generations of one or more families.

Jung Chang recounts the history of twentieth century China while writing the biographies of three women: her grandmother, her mum and herself.

Mr nice - Howard Marks

I’ve seen this book on the shelves of the second hand bookstores of pretty much all the places I’ve visited in the last two decades. It’s one the young travellers’ favourites. Sometimes a shop might even have three or four copies of it, which for a used book is a lot. It’s not surprising though, being it the autobiography of Howard Marks, a famous dope smuggler that eluded capture while importing tons of weed and hashish to the US and Europe for decades, making millions of dollars, living in luxury in England, Switzerland, Italy and Spain, smoking the best cannabis, visiting exotic places and living an adventurous life. A hero for many young travellers.