The Promenade is busy before nine, joggers and dog walkers and one man doing tai chi facing the harbor, unbothered by the container ships crossing behind him. Brooklyn Heights does this specific thing where the brownstones stand shoulder to shoulder…
Most cities you visit. A few, you seem to fall into, the way you fall into a book you didn’t mean to start reading past midnight. The architecture starts doing narrative work. The light behaves like foreshadowing. You catch yourself…
Lisbon is a city built on hills, which means it’s also a city built on views: you round a corner and the Tagus opens up beneath you, tiled rooftops stacked all the way down to the water. It’s the kind…
Every year, someone hands me a list titled something like “Ten Perfect Beach Reads,” and without fail, none of them are books I’d actually want within reach of my towel. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a breezy thriller…
Ubud has a goddess for this. Saraswati, patron of knowledge, art and the written word, has her own water temple here, right in the centre of town, and it isn’t a coincidence that a place this devoted to art ended…
Roosters start before the light does, somewhere close enough to my window that I stop pretending I might sleep through it. I give up and go out early instead, Tales of a Female Nomad still on the nightstand where I…
Rome doesn’t wear its history in one layer. It wears it in several, stacked on top of each other like sediment. Walk into certain churches here and you’re standing on top of a building that’s standing on top of another…
Heat meets me at the top of the steps before anything else does — thick, resinous, smelling faintly of stone that’s been baking since morning. Termini ejects me into a square full of people who all seem to know exactly…
Some cities you visit for the food. Some for the weather, though rarely in Europe. And some, if you’re the kind of traveller who packs a paperback before a phone charger, you visit because the city itself seems to have…
Edinburgh doesn’t need much dressing up. It was the first city named a UNESCO City of Literature, and it wears that history without trying in the closes that haven’t changed their names in three hundred years and the gravestones that…