Holy Walls

Stone can move us. It's heaviness stands for the burden we feel history does or should impose upon us. The cracks make us feel mortal. They remind us we are doomed. It is with a giddy solemnity that we approach such stones and lay our hands on their cool surfaces. Stone runs deep.

The holy city has a wall. The people live around it, on top of it, absorbing its deep, silent breathing.

This wall is idolized. We come here to feel like ants, a whole tribe of us. We revel in how big it is, and how much we don't understand.

The holy city is riddled, divided, supported and protected by walls. Walls which spark our imagination, playing on passion and fear. Wrapped in a blanket of stone, we still can't sleep. Instead, some pray. Others don't.

The Most Beautiful Place In The World

The Mediterranean.

The colour of blood in a vein. Deep below. Quiet above. Serene.

... but not always.


Now lashing, now violent. But still - always - renders you without speech, quiet, and reflective. The waves batter the ancient cobblestones and throw spray up from the rocks, and it drifts in a mist past your face bringing the smell of salt and onshore winds.

When the sun is rising, you feel young. When it beats down from above, you are blinded by its whiteness, by its sharp rendering of buildings in crisp colours. The air feels like it would heal you inside.


Looking down through a fence of wood and wire, stepping over blackberry and grape vines and signs of 'Privato', crunching the dry gravel path, you are exulted. It's the heavy beat of your heart and the sun refracting in the beads of sweat on your forehead that have done it.


You are pulled ever upwards by the smell of pine needles. Beneath a tree on a crumbling cliff, cheese and bread is amazing. Time passes. An old man with a walking stick goes by. You nod. An hour later he comes back. He nods and smiles.


You start to think about coffee, the type you drink standing up at the bar in a cobbled square on a hilltop.



When the sun begins to set, the villages begin to sink into the earth, and the sea illuminates in sparkles.



Up in the hills there are hidden places.



It feels like Italy. It feels like it should be black and white.



This is a place where people can live and die.