🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 39: Perpignan Perpignan has been French for 366 years. Perpignan was Catalan for the five centuries before that. The capital of the medieval Kingdom of Mallorca is now a French sub-prefecture. The flag on the town hall is the same gold-and-red striped Senyera that […]
Perpignan 🇫🇷 The Largest Catalan City in France Read More »
🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 38: Toulouse Toulouse, the city in southwestern France built almost entirely from rose-coloured brick, which was a sovereign Occitan-speaking state in the twelfth century, the target of a twenty-year crusade, and is today the largest aerospace manufacturing centre in Europe. Toulouse used to be
Toulouse 🇫🇷 Brick, Aircraft, and the Language That France Tried to Forget Read More »
🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 37: Bordeaux Every bottle of fine wine in the world has its price set, somewhere upstream, by a ranking written for an exhibition catalogue in 1855. The exhibition is forgotten. The ranking has not been altered in a hundred and seventy years. The Bordeaux
Bordeaux 🇫🇷 The Honey-Stoned City That Cleaned Itself in Twenty Years Read More »
Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Journal 12 Paris. Brest. La Rochelle. The city that invented being a city, a port at the end of the continent, and a harbour that chose starvation over surrender. Paris doesn’t care that you’ve arrived. That’s the first thing I felt walking out of Gare du
Paris, Brest and La Rochelle 🇫🇷 Exhausted, Humbled and Held Read More »
🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 36: La Rochelle In 1628, the king of France killed more than three-quarters of a French city’s population to prove a point. The city was La Rochelle. The point was that France would, henceforth, be Catholic. La Rochelle’s strength as a France Protestant stronghold
La Rochelle 🇫🇷 The Forgotten Capital of France Protestantism Read More »
🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 35: Brest The city was destroyed in 1944. Not damaged. Destroyed. Ninety-five per cent of the historic centre, gone. The Brest a visitor walks through today is younger than my mother. Brest is younger than many of the adults who live in it In
Brest 🇫🇷 The French City Rebuilt From Nothing in 1948 Read More »
🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 34: Paris Paris was built by a France bureaucrat with a deadline. He had seventeen years, an emperor’s blank cheque, and a city he was instructed to make beautiful, modern, and impossible to barricade. The Paris a contemporary visitor walks through The wide boulevards
Paris 🇫🇷 The Beautiful City That One Bureaucrat Built in Seventeen Years Read More »
It was a Sunday morning. The stillness that small French towns produce I was sitting on a bench in a village square — Provençal stone, plane trees, the particular stillness that small French towns produce on Sunday mornings when the shops are closed and the only movement is pigeons and light. A church bell struck
The Last Mediterranean Coast Read More »
Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Journal 11 Corsica. Nice. Avignon. An island that doesn’t fully agree is part of France, a city that weaponise light, and a town still haunted by a papacy that packed up and left. Corsica feels like a dare The ferry from the Italian mainland crossed overnight
Corsica, Nice and Avignon 🇫🇷 Three Places That Shouldn’t Be Part of France Read More »
🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 33: Avignon For sixty-eight years in the fourteenth century, every major decision in Western Christianity was made in a small French city on the Rhône. The Popes had moved. Almost nobody remembers. Avignon — The City in France That Was the Capital of Christianity
Avignon 🇫🇷 The Piece of Rome Inside France for 500 Years Read More »