Writing

In Gjirokastër the geology and the architecture are the same substance. Grey limestone underfoot, grey limestone in the walls, grey limestone laid flat across the roofs. I have not been. This is an essay about wanting.

Gyumri is a city built from black volcanic stone where the craft traditions survived the 1988 earthquake better than the buildings did. One coppersmith still makes a cup that sings when you drink from it.

The craft villages fan out from Oaxaca like spokes on a wheel. Black clay in one, weaving in another, mezcal in a third. A longing essay about the city where making never got separated from living.

Ghent is the Belgian city that never agreed to become a postcard. While Bruges froze itself around 1500, Ghent kept working. More than 80,000 students share the medieval core with the tourists, and someone bolted a bronze dog to the top of the university library to keep it honest.

Before the sun clears the hills above Luang Prabang, a line of monks comes down the street in saffron robes, barefoot, single file, each one holding a lidded bowl against his hip. I have not been there. I have been reading about this town for a couple of weeks, and the picture I keep returning to is the bowl, and the rice, and the fact that a whole town organizes its early morning around giving food away.

Valletta is about a kilometer long, and the men who built it laid it down as a single straight grid, every street carved over a bare limestone peninsula. A capital drawn as a weapon, then filled with the most extravagant Baroque interiors in Europe.

A valley in Ticino where the hamlets sit off the grid, the houses are built under glacial boulders called splüi, and the whole place empties every winter. I have not been there. I have been reading about it for two weeks.

Mostar's Stari Most stood for 427 years before Croat shells brought it down in 1993. They rebuilt it eleven years later, in the same limestone, with the same mortar. The rebuilt bridge is a different bridge, and Mostar knows it.

The most important part of a room is the part nobody builds. In architecture, music, and the way a mind holds a question, the part that isn't there is doing the real work.

Essaouira is the only city I have ever wanted to visit because of its weather, and its weather is mostly a complaint.

Trieste was built to give a landlocked empire a coastline. In 1719 Vienna declared it a free port. In 1918 the empire disappeared. The city is still working out what to be instead.

I came thinking the trip would be temples. It turns out to be mornings.