Parliament building, Victoria, BC; with inner harbor summer activities underway all around
IN 1907, NEWLY gilded with the Nobel Prize in Literature, Rudyard Kipling traveled to Canad…
City Profiles
The Theatre of Catania. Photo by askii / Flickr LAST OCTOBER, I chose to use Catania as a base for exploring the towns of southeastern Sicily I had yet to discover. What I didn’t exp…
Photo: Porto, Portugal by Daniel Seßler GRIPPING THE STEEP BANKS of the Douro like a pile of haphazardly shoveled rocks, the city of Porto feels only one pebble’s slip away from tumb…
Photo: Leipzig by Herr Bohn / Unsplash IN ANY CITY, the best way to get a feel for the city is to walk around, wandering the cityscape. Leipzig, Germany, is no exception. Leipzig’s d…
Photo: Museum aan de Stroom. Fred Romero / Flickr THE FIRST CITY most people think about when they hear of Belgium is Brussels. This I sincerely regret—not that I want to badmouth my…
Photo: Claudia Schillinger / Flickr THE COMMUNITY OF MADRID has been home to many peoples. From Celts and Romans to Visigoths and Moors, each group has left an impression on the culture that remains.…
Thomas More's Utopia painted on a building originally planned for demolition. Photo: Kayla E. Ciardi HEADING EAST ON Riverside Walk, you will see an old building tucked away…
Photo: Ethan Hoover/Flickr AMONG THE ELITE East Coast cities, Philadelphia is often overlooked in favor of such coastal metropolises as New York and Boston. At first glance, its roug…
Photo: Kalpna Chitnis-SinghHOW FORTUNATE IT IS to be born in a small town in the eastern state of Bihar, India, I learned only when I once went to seek the blessings of a highly…
IT'S A RUNNING JOKE that Nagoya is the most boring city in Japan, and at first glance it seems like there’s some truth to it. It’s not the flashy Tokyo, the bustling merchant city of…
Photo: Tony Webster On April 21, 2016, a chain-link fence in a Minneapolis suburb became a monument. At Paisley Park in Chanhassen, purple flowers and balloons, stuffed animals, handwritten signs, an…
Photo: Kirk Fisher/Pixabay Amsterdam is much more than first meets the eye. From afar, Amsterdam seems to consist of only the scandalous Red Light District and the somber Anne Frank House. But up clo…
Sligo’s River Garavogue. photo: dave gunn When I pulled into Sligo on the morning bus with a dog-eared copy of W. B. Yeats’s Collected Poems, I carried two wishes: first, that it would stop…
photo: itamar grinberg/israeli ministry of tourism Safed (תפצ), one of the northernmost cities in Israel, is also one of the most artistic. The city has a poetic history only amplified by modern it…
Since returning from my time studying abroad, my answer to the question, “So where did you go again?” almost always draws a knit brow. Despite the fact that the initial reaction to its name is the…
Thomas Hardy’s home, Max Gate, sits at the east end of Dorchester. Photo: Michael Day There are few British authors for whom place played a more important role in their work than Thomas Hardy. By all…
Stratford Theatre. Photo by Richard Bain For half the year, the hamlet of Stratford, Ontario—named after the birthplace of William Shakespeare—is much like any other small North American town. But in…
A still from the film Ten Years (2015). When Hong Kong was returned to communist China in 1997 under the “one country, two systems” principle, no one really knew for sure what would happen t…
Photos © David Joshua Jennings Literature inhabits the antiquated, potholed avenues of New Orleans like a dense and permanent fog. Stories sweat down from the French Quarter’s trellised terraces, haun…
Photo: flickr.com/people/feefoxfotos Like a beautiful, moody lover, Wellington doesn’t need to treat you kindly. Friends may sometimes wonder what you see in it, but when the city is goo…
A triptych mural by local artist John Stephens Coppin graces the third floor of the Detroit Public Library. There are cities that get by on their good looks . . . and there are cities li…
Photos: Logan Webb Birthplace and home of poet Dylan Thomas for more than half his life, the coastal city of Swansea in southern Wales echoes with his legacy—a residual haunting by i…
Photo: Rae Allen In 2008 global humanitarian organization UNESCO classified Melbourne, Australia, an official City of Literature. It’s one of only eleven cities to bear the title wor…
Kolkata. Photo by Matthew Winterburn/Flickr Kolkata has much to offer any traveler, whether history buff, literary aficionado, culture seeker, or wandering flâneur. In several places around the city,…
