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While in Austria recently, I stumbled upon Vienna’s fabled Café Central, and decided to pop in and see if I could still get a hint of the cerebral aura that once caused so many great minds to while away the afternoons and evenings there. I quickly discerned that nowadays, there were more tourists than tortured intellectuals downing espressos and reading the Herald Tribune; and as I was seated near the dummy of Trotsky that is a permanent fixture of the Central, I couldn’t help but smirk a bit. But still and all, beyond just the art nouveau grandiosity of the place, there remained a sort of bohemian overtone, a sense of insulation from the outside world’s banal corporate dealmaking; I found myself appropriately lingering there for a solid couple of hours, and even returned the next day.

It’s hardly surprising that many of the most profound of history’s great writers, intellectuals and revolutionaries are inextricably linked with their favorite bars, cafes and hotels. After all, other than the great fires of love, what could possibly inspire fits of profundity so effectively as caffeine or booze?

These days, of course, you can simply click a few buttons on Expedia, and find yourself bedding down where once had they. Certainly, there are a few hotels that are very famously linked with noted scribes (The Algonquin with Dorothy Parker, The Plaza with Truman Capote), but there other still whose associations are less celebrated, but no less intriguing.

For the godless, vacationing in the very Catholic city of Rome always provides a singularly subversive pleasure. For maximum existentialist impact, one might wish to room at Albergo del Sole al Pantheon, where Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir spent many a summer. (It’s not a stretch to imagine that de Beauvoir’s feminist tome, The Second Sex, was particularly inspired by her days spent in the company of deeply unenlightened Italian men.) The city’s oldest hotel (circa 1467), it has a curiously bright, Mediterranean vibe, more Amalfi Coast than old Rome. Though the pair preferred the quiet of room 102, the rooms overlooking the Piazza della Rotunda and the Pantheon are significantly more spectacular.

In the 60’s, while Marrakesh was becoming the playground for spoiled, drug-addled fashionistas, Tangier was already established as a playground for spoiled, drug-addled novelists. And the exotic El Minzah Hotel there was the city’s literary lighting rod. Paul and Jane Bowles, as well as beat writers from Ginsberg to Kerouac to, most notably Burroughs, took up residence here at one time or another, all no doubt anxious to escape the banalities of western culture. That Tangier has been described as a city that can only be appreciated by one’s becoming a “passive flaneur” explains its draw for the literary set. El Minzah remains to this day a luxurious collision of the leisure and culture classes.

Of course, Havana was once Tangier in the Caribbean, a place of where artists and mobsters converged to live out their debauched fantasies. Perhaps he who lived the largest there was Ernest Hemingway, Havana and he embracing one another with affectionate enthusiasm. The swank, romantic Ambos Mundos hotel was where Hemingway called home in those pre-Marxist days, and it was here that he penned (at least in great part) For Whom The Bell Tolls, one of the most important books of its time or any. Room 511 is now somewhat of a shrine to Papa, with photos on the walls, copies of his handwritten notes, and his typewriter still gracing the room’s desk. The hotel itself, much like the city of Havana, is mired in its past, and could probably stand a makeover.

In New Orleans, though the exclusive and discreet Maison de Ville was where Tennessee Williams wrote A Streetcar Named Desire, it is the rather spectacular Hotel Monteleone which has the most cache as a classic literary haunt. Regular guests over the years have included Williams, Truman Capote, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Richard Ford, a virtual who’s who of Southern writer royalty. Its position amongst the galleries along the Rue Royale assures its continued artistic credibility, especially in the face of a disturbing invasion of W Hotels into this elegantly louche city. Appropriately, the Monteleone hosts guests and events during the annual Tennessee Williams Literary Festival, which takes place each March.

A bit more obscurely, Berlin’s Askanischer Hof was where Kafka ended his engagement to fiancé Felice Bauer, a devastating episode that would twist it’s way into The Trial, much of which he wrote whilst staying at the hotel. The Askanischer Hof would actually wind up on the pages of that book. More recently, this eccentrically elegant 15 room former mansion has played host to the likes of Helmut Newton, David Bowie and Tilda Swinton, but, as the décor doesn’t seem to have changed a bit since 1920, still looks like something out of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin.

Perhaps the truest of all literary hotels is still Paris’ Hotel Pont Royal, whose beds have held everyone from Arthur Miller to TS Elliot to Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Capote, Sartre and Camus. Though it was given a stylish makeover a couple of years ago (it is in Paris, after all), photographs of many of those same luminous guests still hang in the circular hall, and the literary bar remains a telling feature. Despite noble attempts by the likes of san Francisco’s Hotel Rex and Monticello Inn to keep the tradition alive, the idea of the literary hotel has waned, along with the idea of the writer-as-larger-than-life personality. After all, does anyone really care what hotel irritating synergists like Dave Eggers choose when staying in London or Palm Springs? Right…hardly. But, although the legends wither in the face of the cruel indifference that is the march of time, there remains a particular thrill in communing with the ghosts of the literary dead. Just don’t leave the key to your mini-bar unattended.

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