The twisting, vertical little towns around here, most with a medieval origin, but some forming the core of much grown cities, are somewhere a little bit better than amazing. And though European old towns have almost a postcard meaninglessness to them, too picturesque to suprise anyone, in person they are always a kind of visceral thrill, more like encountering a National Park than they are urban tourism.
Given enough time, people and their works are just natural phenomenon like anything else. And after all the murders and opression dies down, the kings dead and all their children and vassels, our wonders rival the Grand Canyons and Half Domes. When the dust settles we don't compete with god, we're simply made of the same stuff.
Too much?
No, really, some of these streets I walk feel every bit like the slot canyons of the American Southwest, and the wonder I feel is... awe.
So I've decided I need a rating system!
Living in France now, encountering old city after old city, my head spinning, I needed to find some way to order them in myself. It is not judgement so much as a way for me to measure what is most important to me in the hundreds and hundreds of years old cities that I feel so lucky to live in and near.
And so I have developed the Seussian Scale to rate these thrilling old cities abounding here.
What is "The Seussian Scale"? It is a measure of the narrow intricate windings of old pre automobile stone villages and cities. It gives points for staircases, tunneling passages, and complicated bridges, routes, and overpasses. Rewarding steepness, complicated handmade construction interacting with outlandish natural features the Seussian Scale is a measure, from one to ten, of just how well a city would fit into a book by Dr. Seuss.
And I am just back from my highest scoring city yet! Achieving a whopping NINE on the Seussian Scale, Ventimiglia in Italy, built on the steepest cliffs over a river and the sea, cutting through tunnels and wandering over its tiny little passageways since, I don't know, the 900s?, was a marvel of Seussian complexity.
My pictures struggle to do it justice, but I have done my best.
