If you could choose a city to travel back in time, which city would you choose?
If you think about this seriously, there may be so many alternative cities that it triggers many people's choice phobia. After all, there's a lot to consider. Just look at the filtering criteria for similar questions (set in the modern world) in John Reed's Tales of the City:
"The node of the problem is 'quality of life'... The report assesses 39 key determinants of 'quality of life', ranging from a country's economic, political, social, cultural and natural environment to climate, housing, public services, transport, health and sanitation, schools, crime rates, censorship, the utility of consumer goods, and the general standards of restaurants and recreational activities. ”
If you follow the timeline from ancient times to the present, from the ancient world to the first millennium AD, and then from the medieval world, through the early modern world to the modern urban period, each time period has multiple cities that stand out, and each one is unique. Choosing only one city is indeed a bit embarrassing.
But if you give up the needle in a haystack to choose, but start from a key word to understand, perhaps the difficulty of this choice is not so high.
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Best place of birth
The famous British historian and travelogue writer John Julius · Norwich gave one of his answers: "If there is a person born in the 7th century AD, then Chang'an is definitely the best choice for his birthplace".
Wang Xiaobo wrote in the "Wanshou Temple": "It is not enough for a person to only have this life and this life, he should also have a poetic world." For me, this world is in Chang'an City. ”
In 827, when Bai Juyi ascended the Guanyin Platform, he was suddenly impressed by the magnificent scenery of Chang'an City, so he wrote seven sentences "Climbing the Guanyin Terrace and Looking at the City":
Hundreds of thousands of homes are like a game of Go, and the 12th Street is like a vegetable plant.
Haruka faintly enters the fire, a star five gates west.
Yi Feng's short poems not only write the magnificent and solemn momentum of Chang'an City, but also show its quiet and mysterious temperament.
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mysterious
Speaking of mystery, another city that must be mentioned is Timbuktu. Located at the southern tip of the Sahara Desert, Timbuktu was an important city in the Malian Empire, and probably the most impressive story related to it is probably the story of the 14th-century Malian monarch Musa I who "spent a lot of money" on his pilgrimage to Mecca.
This is where Timbatuk's name "City of Gold" comes from. Moses I shocked the world with his wealth and even caused the price of gold in Egypt to plummet.
A detailed map of the Atlas of Catalonia, on the right side of the picture is moussa I, the monarch of the Mali Empire. On the left is a camel-ridden, veiled Tuareg man, and on his left side there is a city set up in tents, which is the image of the royal city in the Sahara Desert in the minds of Westerners.
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Man is the ruler
Also in the 14th century, Florence, Italy, was a different story. If you want to experience the famous humanistic idea that "man is the measure of all things", you can go to Florence.
Runelleschi, Donatello, Masaccio, Sandro Botticelli, Verrocchio, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, a series of thunderous names, are inseparable from Florence.
Renaissance Florence
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Magic
Time jumps to the 16th and 17th centuries, and there is a city with a unique "magical" temperament that is also very fascinating, that is, Prague, ruled by Rudolf II, who does not play by the rules.
Golden Lane: Rudolf II built a row of tiny houses for alchemists and goldsmiths around Prague Castle. In these huts, alchemists and goldsmiths would experiment to make elixirs of immortality.
"His Majesty is only interested in shamans, alchemists, Kabbalah (a mystic sect of Judaism) and others like that. In order to collect treasures and obtain secrets, he used damage to hit his opponents, and he never spared a lot of money... He also had a whole room full of magic books..."
Thanks to this "strange" emperor, Prague bid farewell to the Middle Ages and came to the forefront of Renaissance thought.
Portrait of Rudolf II by the Italian painter Giuseppe Aqin Bordeaux
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Freedom and equality, shopping paradise
Seeing the mysterious and magical city, like Amsterdam in the 17th century, is a city of tolerance where everyone is equal, and it is particularly intimate.
Simon Shama, a professor of history at Columbia University, wrote:
"Some people may also come to Amsterdam for freedom... To provide a living space for Jews who are confined to slums (Jewish neighborhoods) or who are only allowed to live in cover-ups, there is no city in the world that can accommodate them as much as Amsterdam."
Amsterdam's graciousness was also reflected in its ability to meet the shopping needs of almost everyone at the time – Amsterdam had everything and the prices were cheaper, and people from all over the world came to Amsterdam to shop and feel the glitz of this city built to satisfy people's desires.
"Amsterdam has indeed developed into a worldwide commercial center, so that The Queen Marie de' Medici of France simply does not need to go anywhere else to buy what she wants, such as spices and porcelain from the East, tobacco with scents from the Americas, steel and leather from Iberia, carpets from Turkey, silk from Persia, mink from Russia, and perhaps even the exotic animals needed in the Royal Zoo..."
It is also important to note that Amsterdam was the center of free publishing and the international book trade, especially for book lovers.
A 1663 engraving of a history book on Amsterdam by the Dutch writer Olfeit Dappel.
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A legend of rebirth
A modern economic historian has pointed out that the tolerance of filthy life among Londoners in the 17th century was one of the reasons for their extraordinary achievements.
The English writer Samuel Pepis wrote in a diary in October 1660: "Go downstairs to the cellar ... I stepped on a large pile of excrement, and it turned out that the neighbor Mr. Turner's latrine was full, and the feces spilled into my cellar. "The Great Fire of London in 1996 was a key turning point in London's history.
In the early morning of September 2, 1966, a fire in London was sparked by a bakery on fire in London's Pudding Lane. 87 churches, 44 guild halls, the Royal Exchange and London City Hall were all destroyed in the fire. Who would have thought that the fire would have become a key node in London's history.
A group of people with astonishing talent threw themselves into the reconstruction of the city after the fires, among which architect Christopher Wren made an indelible contribution to London. He designed 52 churches, directed the reconstruction of St. Paul's Cathedral, 2 hospitals, and built or assisted in the reconstruction of 36 guild buildings.
If you can go back to London at the end of the 17th century, you can see the ups and downs of London's transformation from a small medieval city to a modern city. Witnessing the transformation of a city phoenix nirvana is undoubtedly shocking.
In the fifty years following the Great Fires of London, Christopher Wren was responsible for the construction of the new St. Paul's Cathedral and dozens of parish churches, almost every with towers and spires. London's skyline is an architectural spectacle that sets it apart from any other city in the world.
Travel back in time, and there are so many cities that can be put on the list worth crossing. But while we're excited about it, we can't ignore the sad fact that more cities are stuck in history than the cities that have survived to this day.
As the Story of the City writes: "Examples of this are so common that the history of great cities fluctuates as a result." Cities appear like bubbles bubbling up on the earth's surface, growing and bursting — some dying completely, others recuperating and then rising again. ”
Unfortunately, the cities that became "the past" are no longer traceable. And when the glory of the city "now in progress" is (about to be) gone, should we, as E.B. White writes at the end of This Is New York: "'It must be saved, this tree must be saved.'" If it ceases to exist, everything will perish—the city, this strange and magical model, if you look up and disappear, people will be like ashes." "Is there still hope for the complex emotions that we love and hate? The answer to this question requires another dose of thought
The extraordinary stories of the great cities of history, about the great cities that have fallen, can now be found in The Great Cities: 70 Glorious Cities that Shine in the History of World Civilization, edited by John Julius Norwich.
With brushstrokes in 6 states, spanning 5,000 years of history and visiting 70 great cities, I believe that in this book you will find the best destination you want to cross!
Which city would you most like to travel to?
Let's talk about it in the comments section
Written by = Big Spinner
Typography = 33
Cover = Groundhog Day
Picture = Unread
Read it together and cross it