Around the World

🌐 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

🌐 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

🌐 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

🌐 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

🌐 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

🌐 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

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 32: Nice Nice has been French for one hundred and sixty-six years. Nice was Italian-speaking and Savoyard for four hundred and seventy-two years before that. The most famous avenue in the city is named after the English, who paid for it. Nice did not

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 31: Corsica Napoleon Bonaparte was born on a French island whose first language was Italian, fourteen months after the island had been French at all. Corsica — Sold to the Kingdom of France On the 15th of August 1769, in the small port town

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 30: Sanremo A flower town with a casino. A casino with a singing competition. A singing competition that, by 1956, the entire continent had agreed to copy. Sanremo — Riviera dei Fiori In the late nineteenth century, on a small stretch of the western

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 29: Lago di Garda At the foot of mountains where snow still falls in winter, the same lake grows lemons. Geography this stubborn deserves an explanation. Lago di Garda — A tongue of the Adige Glacier Lago di Garda was carved out of solid