Some people find it fashionable to sneer at Monaco. There is nothing categorically wrong about sneering, I enjoy the occasional sneer as much as anybody, but for people who are travelling to see the world, it is the most counterproductive attitude you can imagine. After all, travelling is all about discoveries: about finding new things…
Serendipity is a wonderful thing. The dictionary defines it as “finding something good without looking for it”. The concept apparently has a long tradition in the history of science and discovery, but is – in my view – specifically useful as a strategy for exploring a new or even an already familiar place: instead of…
When we talk about “storied“ towns and cities, the kind of story that we have in mind involves palace intrigues and poisonous plots, riots and revolutions, blood and fury: Troy, Jerusalem, Rome. Not all municipal histories, however, unfold on such an epic scale. There is a no less interesting category of shorter and sharper morality…
This is the time for New Year resolutions, and here is ours: to dedicate more time to provincial France, the vast spaces between capital and coastal areas (vast by European standards, that is: France has a smaller surface area than the US state of Texas). Where the US have their flyover states, France has its…
Travel destinations can be broadly divided in two categories: the “hedgehogs“ that know how to do one thing only (but know this one thing very well), and the “foxes” that know many things. If hedgehogs – say the Niagara Falls and Venice – were books, they would be like detective stories: no matter how much…
Livorno has a bad reputation. It is the third largest city in Tuscany and the province’s “gateway to the Mediterranean“ (as the biggest city and largest port on the Tuscan coast). You will rarely find it being mentioned in the same breath as Lucca or Arezzo, the leading lights in the second or “worth a…
There are many reasons to come to Düsseldorf. But – at a rough guess – nine out of ten people who do “touch down“ in this western German city on the Rhine do so to take off again within a couple of hours and never get to see anything beyond the airport, one of Germany’s…
London is the great survivor among the world’s cities: whatever opportunities history has come up with over the centuries, London always seized them with both hands. This explains why its skyline may be called dramatic but never picturesque: no painter would ignore the structural imperatives of a central motive quite like this. London’s tradition has…
Nuremberg is one of Germany’s most storied cities. The town’s rich history reached its apogee in the Middle Ages when Nuremberg was the unofficial capital of the Empire (the castle on top of the hill was where the Imperial Parliament met) … … when Albrecht Dürer, Northern renaissance painter par excellence, plied his trade just…
How do you stand with military architecture? I mean: fortresses, fortifications and the way in which they have been constructed through history: how much does this interest you? Not all that much? All right, then that makes two of us already. It is not the naturally most fascinating topic on earth, is it? Personally, however,…
