Nineteen places, one question each

A city of departures, built on seven hills above a river that keeps leaving for the ocean. What would you leave behind to start a conversation?

“The train slows down, it's the Cais do Sodré. I arrived to Lisbon, but not to a conclusion.”

Two continents sharing one harbour. Istanbul knows that meeting is not choosing a side — it is standing on the water between them, in the shared melancholy its people call hüzün.

“We might call this confused, hazy state melancholy, or perhaps we should call it by its Turkish name, hüzün, which denotes a melancholy that is communal rather than private.”

The salon was invented here — tables where strangers argued about art until the art changed. What table would you have joined?

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

Beer gardens were designed so that strangers share long tables. Munich turns sitting down together into an institution.

“Munich shone.”

A small city that answered with music — and even its greatest son once grumbled he could not stand the place. Love for a city is complicated; the music came anyway.

“I swear to you upon my honour that I cannot tolerate Salzburg and its inhabitants.”

Around 1900 Vienna argued its way into modernity — Freud, Klimt, Mahler, all in coffee houses, disagreeing beautifully.

“All the currents of European culture had merged in this place.”

A city of storytellers — Kafka, Kundera, the Golem. Prague suggests that every stone here remembers a sentence.

“Prague doesn't let go. Of either of us. This old crone has claws. One has to yield, or else.”

Built on water, against all logic, out of trade between East and West. Venice is what happens when a city refuses to choose a shore.

“This was Venice, the flattering and suspect beauty — this city, half fairy tale and half tourist trap...”

Where conversation became a method. Under this rock, questions were turned into a way of living together.

“In short, I say that as a city we are the school of Hellas.”

The sea goes deeper into the mountains here than almost anywhere on the Mediterranean — a gulf like a fjord, holding a walled town of squares and palaces. Kotor sits at the end of the water, as if shelter was its first form of art.

“We said good-bye to Constantine at Kotor and caught our great white shining boat.”

A thousand temples, each one an exercise in attention. Kyoto teaches that noticing — moss, steam, silence — is itself an art.

“In the spring, cherry blossoms, in the summer the cuckoo. In autumn the moon, and in winter the snow, clear, cold.”

The crossroads of the Silk Road, where caravans carried ideas as much as silk. Samarkand was built to make strangers stop and talk.

“A plain covered with gardens, and houses, and markets where they sold many things.”

A city painted pink to welcome guests, in 1876, and never repainted. Jaipur treats hospitality as architecture.

“Jaipur remains one of the world's most beautiful cities with a rich literary and cultural heritage.”

A landscape of soft volcanic stone where people did not build up but carved down — homes, churches and whole underground cities hollowed out of the valleys. Twenty-four centuries later, balloons still cross it at dawn, and the ground still keeps its secrets.

“The houses here were underground, with a mouth like that of a well, but spacious below; and while entrances were tunnelled down for the beasts of burden, the human inhabitants descended by a ladder.”

The oldest man-made place of worship yet discovered — stone circles raised around 9600 BC by people who had no farming, no writing, no wheel, and still managed to build for the sky. Klaus Schmidt, who spent his life excavating it, admitted no known site could be compared with it. Humanity's first great gathering was a conversation with something larger.

Every evening Jemaa el-Fnaa fills with storytellers, musicians and audiences — the world's oldest theatre, re-staged nightly for a thousand years. Elias Canetti came here to listen and wrote a whole book of the voices.

The medina is a maze on purpose — you get lost, and getting lost is how Fez introduces itself. The oldest university on earth is here.

“Many-walled Fez rose up before us out of the plain toward the end of the day.”

Umm al-Dunya, 'mother of the world'. Naguib Mahfouz named the three novels of his Cairo Trilogy after its real streets — Bayn al-Qasrayn, Qasr al-Shawq, al-Sukkariyya — and for him, his biographers say, Cairo simply was the universe.

A name that became a metaphor for nowhere, though it was once everywhere: the book market of the Sahara, where a manuscript cost more than a camel.

“The city was inhabited by doctors, judges, priests and scholars, all appointed by the King... here are sold the handwritten books which come from Barbary; more profit is made from the sale of books than from any other branch of trade.”