Italy is a very strange place if you don’t understand it and it starts to make sense to you the more time you spend there. I found Italians to be spontaneous and practical – traits that make their run-down cities function and adapt despite poor maintenance of public facilities. All Read more…
I have had the pleasure of enjoying the clear lakes, snowy peaks, grassy knolls, and fresh produce of Switzerland for over a year when I lived in Geneva. When I arrived in 2019, I made myself a commitment to learn all I can about the local geography, history, culture, and Read more…
Called Augusta Raurica in ancient Roman times, this city was named after Augustus Caesar. Like Avenches and Brugg, it was the largest city located along the trading route between the Italian peninsula and Alemannia via the Swiss alps. It has one of the most varied (not most well-preserved) variety of Read more…
“Brugg” sounds like the German word for “bridge” and its name came from having a bridge that crossed the River Aare connecting a major trade route between Italy and Germany. The municipality has a little bit of everything, it was founded in Roman times, has a famous monastery founded in Read more…
If a tourist were to look for sites with Roman history, they might think of visiting Italy for entire Roman towns, or going to the south of France for arenas still used for bull fights, or seeing Hadrian’s wall in England, but few think to come to Switzerland to see Read more…
Romont is one of those towns that are easy to miss. It’s not along a motorway and it’s not even along a smaller B-road. In fact, you have to turn off a B-road and onto a country road with no lane markings to get to the hill that Romont is Read more…
On Polish independence day, Chen and I took our scooters over to Poland. November isn’t exactly the best scooter weather in Eastern Europe, but we made do anyways. On our way from Berlin to Frankfurt an der Oder, we passed through Fürstenwalde, the name means the forest of the prince. Read more…
By: Jane Jacobs In fewer than 300 pages, Jacobs dispels the myth that cities grow as a result of rural work. She uses examples as ancient as Çatalhöyük from 7000BC to as recent as the stagnation of the American economy to support her thesis. She reasons that any city growth Read more…
By Kate Ascher Penguin publishes a number of Ascher’s illustrated books on engineering such as The Heights, dissecting buildings, and The Way to Go, dissecting modes of transportation. The Works dissect how a city operates and combines elements from her other two books. It focuses on New York City to Read more…
Except the Library of Congress, Massachusetts has two of the largest collections in the US. One in Harvard University and one in the Boston Public Library. Although its collection is immense, the impressive architecture is what draws people to the library from far and wide. It’s an amazing public space Read more…