This site is all about how stories add spice to our ideas and feelings about the cities we love. And often we only know cities through the stories we've read. My favourites have long been London, Venice, and Florence and so I made this site, where I list and review all sorts of novels and films set in these three cities. Each city has its indulgent side pages too. These deal with subjects like
Venice's cats, London's cakes and Lost Florence.

I've also been casting my net wider of late and posting reports on my trips to other European cities, as a service to travellers who share my enthusiasm for art, churches, cakes, cats, and ice cream.
Fictions feature here too.
You'll find the trips listed on the handy Trips Menu

To search within this site using Google, enter your search terms
into the box as usual and then type in site:fictionalcities.co.uk

In case you're curious, this is Me
 

My other sites are...
TheChurchesofVenice.com
&
TheChurchesofFlorence.com

These sites also have their own Facebook page...
The Friends of Fictional Cities
and the Churches of Venice and Florence

Click on the link and Like the page for regular updates.



Click here to send me an encouraging e-mail
 

click on the word NEWS above for more news (with photos!)

click on the titles and trips to read all about them

24.1.2022
Things are moving, for good it seems, in the right direction in Britain, COVID-measures-wise. On Thursday 27th the recent harsher rules are being relaxed, and today an easing of the need for tests for travellers coming into the country has been announced, taking effect on the 11th of February. I’m feeling full of hope about my trips to Florence in February and Toulouse in March, but I've just had a tour to Lucca in late March cancelled. They said it was because the numbers were too low due to current trepidation, but rumour has it was more the fact that BA don't fly to Pisa on Thursdays at the moment. I've moved my money to a guided trip to South Tyrol in June. I know next to nothing about the region but it looks interesting, having been Germany until it was given to Italy after WW1.

So it looks like my foolish optimism might be well-founded this time.

1.1.2022
So that was 2021 was it? Well let’s let it rest in peace and move on.
Things are looking good for 2022.

Trepidation and playing it safe are all well and good, but sometimes a chap just has to take a chance, and book a week in Florence in February. It's a guided tour, which I don't really need, but it's a favourite art historian and a couple of old tour friends are on it. Added attractions are the Brancacci Chapel putting up scaffolding for restoration that the public is going to be allowed up on, the new Fra Angelico rooms in San Marco and Santa Croce’s new entrance, open areas and circuit. Booking a guided trip also means someone else is taking care of the tests and forms. But I'll be crossing my own fingers. March is full of postponed tours and a homecoming niece, but April and May are pretty empty and crying out for returns to Venice, Ferrara, Verona... the list is long and the hopes high.

18.11.2021
News of novels for us to look forward to in 2022. The Angels of Venice by Philip Gwynne Jones sees Nathan Sutherland investigating the death of an art historian during 2019's bad floods, but we'll have to wait until July to read it. Venice-set books containing the word Angel are far from rare - Miss Garnett's Angel, The City of Falling Angels, The Garden of Angels, The Painter of Angels and Angel of Venice, to name several. The new Brunetti from Donna Leon is published in March, a few days before my birthday, as usual, and is called Give Unto Others. Also it'll be 30 years next year since the first Brunetti, Death at La Fenice.

23.10.2021
With only a couple of cold months left in 2021 I am becoming resigned to staying in my own country until next year. Travel to Europe  has become possible, but what with the talk of passenger locator forms, green passes, and the PCR/antigen tests business, not to mention the need to wear a mask, I am think that waiting for the Spring might make for a pleasanter experience. The first of my guided art trips postponed to 2022 is Toulouse in March - neatly exactly two years after my last (covid-cursed) trip abroad, to the Van Eyck exhibition in Ghent. Two years! Still I've kept busy and my churches pages have all been refreshed with book reading and updated with reports from more intrepid travellers, as well as sundry sprucings up and tidyings. Some memorable travel around my own country too. Onward!

11.10.2021
I came back from my trip to Durham to weather not as cold as when I went, and a letter from the NHS inviting me to book my covid booster jab.  I went online that night and booked an appointment the next  morning at a vaccination centre in an ex-chemist's near Amen Corner. It all went v. smoothly, with no queuing, and while I was waiting my statutory 10 minutes before leaving one of the volunteers kept me entertained showing me her string tricks, where you entwine and knot a loop of string around your fingers and them tug an end and it comes miraculously undone, without the loss of even one finger. Magic! Or to put it another way – isn’t the NHS wonderful!

14.9.2021
Fans of The Master, Colm Tóibín's fictionalised life of Henry James, will be excited by the prospect of The Magician, a similarly sharp look at the life of another very Venice-connected author, Thomas Mann. I've only just started it but it already has me, not least for, when dealing with Mann's early years in Lübeck, not flinching from his early encounters with marzipan, what made Lübeck famous.

old news here