23 essays filed from Europe.
Split, Croatia
I have left Split a hundred times in twenty years. Every single time the plane banks over the Brač channel on the way back, I tremble. This is the only city in the world I do that for. Here's what to do with mine.
May 20, 2026
Lisbon, Portugal
I came to Lisbon in 2008 for a long weekend, came back in 2011 for a month, and in 2019 stopped pretending and rented an apartment. Most of what is now said about the city — that it is hot, crowded, expensive, complicated — is true. None of it is the whole story. This is the rest of it.
February 14, 2025
Berlin, Germany
Berlin is the only major European capital that has been multiple cities within a single lifetime — divided, reunited, gentrified, bohemian, exhausted, reborn — and that experience of being remade is still, somehow, the city's most reliable trait.
November 8, 2024
Paris, France
Everyone arrives in Paris with a list. I did too, in 2004, and I crossed almost none of it off. What I learned instead was that Paris doesn't perform for tourists in the afternoon. It performs at 7 a.m., at 11 p.m., and on Mondays when half the city is closed and the other half has finally exhaled.
September 12, 2024
Tórshavn, Faroe Islands (Denmark)
The Faroe Islands are eighteen volcanic rocks rising sharply from the North Atlantic between Scotland, Iceland, and Norway. The total population is 54,000; the puffin colonies number in the hundreds of thousands. The light is unbelievable. The weather is unbelievable in a different sense.
July 4, 2024
Copenhagen, Denmark
Copenhagen doesn't try to impress you. The city's pleasures are small and structural — a bike lane that works, a harbour you can swim in, a city built at human scale and against the temptation to grow taller. Most great visits start by hiring a bike on day one.
June 17, 2024
Reine, Norway
Lofoten is a string of granite peaks rising directly from the Norwegian Sea, north of the Arctic Circle. The small fishing villages on the coast, the cod-drying racks, the midnight sun in summer, the northern lights in winter — Lofoten is one of the most photographed landscapes on earth and remains, somehow, undertraveled.
June 8, 2024
Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona is a city that has been loved nearly to death and is, slowly, recovering. You can still have a beautiful week here. You just need to skip half of what the guidebooks insist on, and learn the names of three or four streets that aren't on the tourist map.
April 8, 2024
Hallstatt, Austria
Hallstatt has 700 residents and, last I checked, 11,000 visitors a day in high season. The math doesn't work. The two windows that do work — first light, and after 6 p.m. — give you the alpine village that made it famous in the first place.
February 22, 2024
Amsterdam, Netherlands
The Amsterdam tourists see is roughly a triangle: Dam Square, the Red Light District, the Anne Frank House. The Amsterdam the Dutch see is a calm, low-rise, water-laced city of seventy-five distinct neighbourhoods, half of them on islands, almost none of them on the postcard.
November 19, 2023
Istanbul, Turkey
Istanbul cannot be done in a long weekend. The city is fifteen million people, two continents, two thousand years of capital-city memory, and a Bosphorus that runs straight through the middle of all of it. Plan for a week. Plan, also, for the ferries.
September 4, 2023
Rome, Italy
Rome is a city that asks you to surrender, and the surrender takes about three days. On day one you fight it. On day two you photograph it. On day three you eat too much. On day four, if you're lucky, you simply walk in it. This piece is for day four.
May 22, 2023
Budapest, Hungary
Budapest's two best institutions are its thermal baths and its ruin pubs — both unique to this city, both essential, both best understood by trying them yourself. The river is the city's spine and the baths are its lungs.
March 19, 2023
Edinburgh, Scotland
I love Edinburgh in February. I know nobody is supposed to, but the festivals have packed up, the Christmas markets are gone, the tour buses are dormant, and the city — built of dark stone on top of an extinct volcano — looks like itself again.
February 19, 2023
Prague, Czechia
I first saw Prague in 2003, when the post-communist hangover was real and the beer cost almost nothing. The city has changed more than any European capital I know. The trick now is to find the version of it that survived.
October 30, 2022
Florence, Italy
Florence is the Renaissance city: small enough to walk across in twenty minutes, dense with paintings and buildings that changed Western art forever, and now reliably packed by mid-morning. The trick is to be up earlier than anyone else.
August 22, 2022
Vernazza, Italy
The five villages of the Cinque Terre — Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, Riomaggiore — are now famous past the point of comfort. The trails between them, however, are largely empty after 10 a.m. when day-trippers cluster in the villages. Walk between them.
June 15, 2022
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Dubrovnik is the most besieged old town in the Mediterranean — first by armies for a thousand years, now by cruise ships for ten. The trick is timing. Off-season Dubrovnik is one of the most beautiful weeks in Europe.
April 11, 2022
Vienna, Austria
Vienna is a city that doesn't want to be done quickly, and it's surprisingly good at outlasting visitors who try. The Viennese take their afternoons in coffee houses for a reason. Sit down. Order. Stay.
January 15, 2022
Bruges, Belgium
Bruges has, for fifteen years, been a kind of cautionary tale about overtourism — a town of 20,000 in the old centre that absorbs 8 million visitors a year. In November, all but a few thousand of those visitors are elsewhere. Bruges in November is one of the most beautiful walking weeks in Europe.
November 8, 2021
Oia, Greece
Santorini between 6 p.m. and 9 a.m. is a different island. The cruise ships are at sea. The day-trippers are on the ferry. The whitewashed villages, which spend the daylight hours being photographed, finally exhale. This is the island worth flying to.
June 4, 2021
Seville, Spain
Seville is a city where the afternoon doesn't really happen — it's too hot — and the evening doesn't really begin until 9. Plan accordingly. The four hours between then and midnight are when everything that matters in this city actually happens.
April 22, 2021
Reykjavik, Iceland
Reykjavik in November has four hours of usable daylight, average temperatures hovering around freezing, and a small-town feel that disguises its position as the cultural capital of the North Atlantic. Pack for it; show up anyway.
December 15, 2020