Culture - Detour

Venice, After They Go Home

Delphine Roy — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The statistic that explains Venice is this: the large majority of the people in it on any given day arrived that morning and will leave that evening. They come off cruise ships and coaches and the train from Mestre, they walk one route between the station and the square, and by seven they are gone.

Sleep in the city and you get the other sixteen hours. They are not busy. In Cannaregio at eight in the evening you will walk for ten minutes and pass four people, three of whom live there.

From the north side, looking across to the lagoon, at the hour nothing is open. Photo: Sandra Filipe.

The two good hours

Early. Between six and eight the deliveries happen — everything in Venice arrives by boat, and watching a supermarket restocked from a barge is a better introduction to the city than any museum.
Late. After nine the day-trip routes empty completely and the only crowded places are the ones with tables outside.

A city that is impossible at noon and empty at nine is not overrun. It is badly timetabled, and the timetable is the one thing a visitor controls.

Where not to stay

Not Mestre, obviously, but also not directly on the main route. Pick Castello east of the Arsenale, or Cannaregio north of the Strada Nuova, or the Giudecca, which has the best view of Venice available and is four minutes from it by a boat that runs all night.

Athens Is Not Only Marble

Delphine Roy — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Everybody does the Acropolis first, and everybody should, and then a lot of people are quietly disappointed by the rest of the week. The disappointment is a sequencing error: you have started with the single most famous object in European architecture and then gone looking for something to follow it.

Nothing follows it. Go sideways instead. Athens has perhaps a dozen small museums and sites that would each be the main attraction in a smaller city, and several of them are almost empty on a Tuesday.

From Lycabettus, which is a funicular and ten minutes, and which nobody does. Photo: Maksim Romashkin.

Four that are worth a morning each

The Kerameikos, the ancient cemetery, with a small museum and about six other visitors.
The Byzantine and Christian Museum, for the thousand years everybody skips between the temples and the modern city.
The Numismatic Museum, in Schliemann’s house, which is worth it for the house alone.
The Benaki, whichever branch — the collections are split across four buildings and all four are good.

The Acropolis Museum is the exception to the small-is-better rule. Go on the same ticket, on the same day, before the hill rather than after it.

Timing the hill

First entry, or the last ninety minutes. In July the middle of the day on that rock is genuinely dangerous and there is no shade anywhere on it. The evening slot is better than the morning one, because the marble goes orange and the crowd has thinned to people who also read this somewhere.

Istanbul on Both Shores

Delphine Roy — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Istanbul is too big to walk and too interesting to drive through. What makes it comprehensible is the water: the Bosphorus runs north to south with Europe on one side and Asia on the other, the Golden Horn cuts into the European side, and public ferries cross all of it constantly for the price of a bus ticket.

Do not book a cruise. Use the commuter boats, which go to the same places, take the same route and are full of people going to work.

The old city from the Asian side, which is where it actually looks like the pictures. Photo: Meruyert Gonullu.

Three crossings

Eminönü to Kadıköy. Twenty minutes, and the single best view of the historic peninsula there is. Go at dusk.
Karaköy to Üsküdar. Shorter, less famous, and it lands you next to a neighbourhood most visitors never reach.
The long Bosphorus run to Anadolu Kavağı, which takes most of a day, goes almost to the Black Sea, and costs less than a museum ticket.

The tea on board is not incidental. There is a man with a tray, the glass costs almost nothing, and drinking it while the old city slides past is the whole experience in one object.

The other shore

Spend a full day on the Asian side. Kadıköy has the market, the bars and about a tenth of the visitors, and the walk south along the coast from Moda is the most ordinary and most pleasant thing in the city.

The Souks, Without the Panic

Delphine Roy — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two things are true about the souks at once. They are a working market where several thousand people earn a living, and they are a place where a visitor with an open map and a worried expression is a commercial opportunity. Neither is sinister. Both are worth understanding before you walk in.

The medina is not a maze. It is a set of long spines with short ribs off them, and if you learn four fixed points you can always get back to one.

The metalworkers’ section, which is loud and the best part. Photo: Naimbic.

The four points

Jemaa el-Fnaa, the big square, south end of everything.
The Koutoubia minaret, visible from a great deal of the medina.
Souk Semmarine, the wide main spine going north out of the square.
The Ben Youssef Madrasa, the north end. If you reach it you have gone far enough.

Being lost in the souks costs you twenty minutes and a wrong turn. That is the entire risk, and it is also more or less the point.

On prices

Ask, be told a number, and either buy it or do not. The long ritual of haggling is real in some trades and performance in others, and the useful discipline is to decide what the object is worth to you before anybody says a figure. Then the negotiation has one move in it and you are not playing a game you will lose.

What the Tiles Are Actually For

Delphine Roy — Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The tiles get photographed as pattern, which is fair, and understood as decoration, which is wrong. The reason a Lisbon facade is tiled is that it rains sideways off the Atlantic for four months a year and a glazed surface sheds water where render does not.

They also insulate. A tiled south wall is measurably cooler inside than a painted one, which matters in a city that hits forty degrees in August and was built before anybody had the alternative.

Nineteenth century, machine-made, and still doing its job. Photo: Taras Chuiko.

How to read a facade

Hand-painted, irregular, blue and white: likely eighteenth century, and probably moved here from somewhere else.
Repeating small pattern, sharp edges: industrial, nineteenth century, when the factories at Sacavém made them by the million.
Relief tiles that catch shadow: late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the most Lisbon of the lot.
Bright, large, flat panels: twentieth century, often metro stations, and frequently by named artists.

A building with its tiles stripped is not a building that went out of fashion. It is usually a building somebody sold the tiles off, which is illegal and still happens.

Where to look

Not the museum first. Walk Campo de Ourique or Graça and look at ordinary housing, then go to the Museu Nacional do Azulejo and the whole thing will mean something. Doing it the other way round produces a pleasant morning and very little understanding.

One Camera, One Lens

Delphine Roy — Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The one-lens argument is usually presented as an aesthetic discipline, which makes it sound like self-denial. It is more boring and more useful than that: every time you change a lens you stop looking, and the thing you were looking at goes away.

A street has a duration. The man with the ladder is on the corner for about nine seconds. If you spend six of them deciding between 35mm and 85mm, you have a photograph of a corner.

Taken at 1/15th because there was no second option to reach for. Photo: Fotios Photos.

What to take

One body, one lens, in the 28mm to 40mm range. Wide enough for a street, long enough for a face at three metres.
Two batteries. Cold halves them and you will be out all day.
A cloth. Salt, dust, rain, fingerprints — in that order of frequency.
No bag. A bag means the camera is in the bag.

The best travel photographs are almost never of the thing you went to see. They are of the twenty minutes before or after it, and you have to be holding the camera during those.

The honest limitation

You will miss the wildlife, the stage-lit interior and the compressed mountain shot. That is three photographs a trip. Weigh them against the two hundred you will take because the camera was in your hand rather than in a bag on your back, and the arithmetic is not close.