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

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.
 
4.9.2021
As Italy no longer requires that travellers from Britain quarantine for five days I've been idly toying with the idea of booking a week (or so) in Ferrara and/or Venice in mid-October. Seven nights at the hotel I stayed at last time in Venice, the Palazzo Stern, is €2184 euros. But the Mercure where I stayed in Ferrara last time is £304 for seven nights. Both are 4-star and both include breakfast and the ability to cancel for free. Madness! Or I might just wait until January or February 2022 in the hope of more normality having returned by then.

19.7.2021
As the supposed return of post-Covid normality in England is upon us the facts contradict the assertions that this is a wise move, and that it will actually be achieved soon. It doesn't look like we'll be casting off masks anytime soon, if we're sensible, and the prospect of foreign travel remains shaky. It's looking like the nearest I'll be getting to Venice this year might be the tempting Canaletto exhibition in Bath.

I have just started reading a novel by Sarah Winman called Still Life. The recommendations promoting it were so fulsome and gushing that I approached it with a fair amount of scepticism, which was swiftly dashed by the sparky and engaging opening and the extremely pungent picture painted of Florence in 1944, as the Germans retreat. Stay tuned for a full review soon.

28.6.2021
I'm just back from a week in Edinburgh and it sure felt good staying a while in a hotel in a new city, complaining about the breakfast, and exploring churches, a fine gallery and so many burial grounds! And discovering the local confectionary. Click on the link over on the right there to share in it all.

14.6.2021
On the 17th of May museums and galleries reopened and so I've been busy going out. The Victoria & Albert museum and the National Gallery, twice each, St Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, the British Museum, today for the excellent Thomas Becket exhibition, and on Wednesday I've the John Soane Museum, an old personal fave. Phew! as I'm sure you'll agree. These visits have all needed prebooking, with the numbers of visitors kept very enjoyably low. The return-to-normality date of 21st June has just this evening been postponed until 19th July, which is disappointing but - selfish silver lining - may keep these numbers down pleasantly for a while longer.

6.5.2021
 The last of my of guided art history trips to Italy (to Parma in June) has just been cancelled, and moved to 2022. Trips abroad, and the likelihood of smoothness and comfort initially when we are allowed, are still looking like dicey prospects, so I'm set to stay on my own island this summer. A solo week in Edinburgh has just been added to Medieval Suffolk in August and Durham in October, but hopes for Italy in the Autumn remain desperately high.

25.4.2021
A bit of a revival in Venetian fiction fondness going on with yours truly, possibly because I'm missing the place, but the Spring rush helped. On the lockdown easing front libraries and non-essential shops reopened this week, with galleries and such to follow mid-May. Meanwhile I'm busy visiting and photographing the Magnificent Seven Cemeteries in London, a couple of which I've never been in! So many daffodils.

old news here