The Scottish author Alasdair Gray once noted that cities like ‘Florence, Paris, London’ have inspired so much art that ‘nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films’.
Although he was mostly interested in how stories impact the way we experience real-life places, he was also on the money when it came to the cities writers are fascinated by. New data from printing company Aura Print has discovered that Florence, Paris, and London are all in the top five most written about cities in Europe.
To unearth the European cities novelists love, Aura Print ‘scoured the Google Books archive’, searching for the number of times each major city was referenced between 1920 - 2020, and turned the results into a list.
Right at the top was London. As the literary capital of the continent, the Big Smoke appeared a whopping 286,675,500 times across the past century; nearly three times as many as the next most popular place.
If the study had gone further back, that number would’ve only grown – in fact, some of the most famous London books were written in the nineteenth century. Ever heard of Oliver Twist?
Back in the Victorian era, the city served as an ideal backdrop for the moody, gothic-inspired literature that was popular at the time – think Jekyll & Hyde or The Picture of Dorian Grey. In the past hundred years, however, it’s been depicted more often as a metropolitan hub, with books like Bridget Jones’ Diary, One Day, and Zadie Smith’s NW depicting real lives in the city.
In second place, with 95,290,475 references, was Paris. The most famous novel set in the French capital is probably Les Misérables, but other iconic stories like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Three Musketeers also take place here. Ernest Hemingway wrote a lot about Paris, both autobiographically and in his novel The Sun Also Rises, and the city of love is naturally the setting for a lot of romance novels (including one based on Hemingway’s first marriage, fittingly named The Paris Wife).
In third was Rome, which had 48,840,949 mentions. The Italian capital might have featured higher in the list if the study had included books written before 1920, because to this day, the most famous stories set here are from hundreds of years ago. The Roman Empire was the setting for a number of Shakespeare plays, for example. Today, most novels based in Rome are historical, although there are still plenty of stories set in modern-day Rome, such as Conclave, which became an Oscar-winning film.
The 10 European cities most written about in books
Here are the top 10 most commonly written about cities in Europe, according to the study.
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