There is a certain sensibility that distinguishes a cultural encounter from a sightseeing jaunt. Sightseeing is a matter of depositing you get off the tour bus, take out your camera and snap a shot of the camels, then get right back on. The best cultural encounters leave a residue: a new perspective on how people live grieve fets, and make sense of things. And the best of these settings have a certain sensibility in common. They are locations in which history is no stored; rather, it is lived.
Kyoto ranks high on just about every list of serious culture travelers’ must-see destinationsand for good reason. Japan’s ancient imperial capital has more than a thousand temples and shrines, but what sets it apart from other historically packed urban centers is the extent to which everyday life faithfully adheres to time-honored customs. Local craftspeople still manufacture lacquerware, ceramics and handwoven textiles by traditional methods handed down from generation to generation. The tea ceremony, the art of ikebana, the painstaking seasonal growing of high-grade matcha in the nearby hillsthey are not canned attractions to show wayfarers: these are continuing aspects of culture that travelers can actually see and, in many cases, take part in.15
Rome is different. Not dense in era but dense in you can walk everywhere and find layers upon layers of Western civilization. The ancient forum is right next to a medieval church, (watch your head as you enter) which leads to a Renaissance piazza, designed by a Baroque architect, in a capital still functioning for the modern European state. It is not single historical strata that are surprising in Rome just the fact they can exist. Everyone drinks the espresso at the bar that is built into the walls of an ancient temple. The wash hangs before sixteenth century doors. It is not that Rome presents a curated city to the tourist but that it is allowed to exis as a marvel that can be overlaid.
Marrakech functions on a very different register. Morocco’s Red City is a place of sensation before it is one of history. The narrow alleyways of the medina; the pungent smell of the dye pits of the leather tanneries; the call to prayer echoing across the flat rooftops in the end there are all felt before they are examined as objects of study. The souks are arranged as crafts within a system that has remained pretty much unchanged for years: metalworkers in one quarter, spice merchants in another, textile dyers somewhere else again. Marrakech has absorbed massive amounts of tourism infrastructure, while still managing to preserve the vital essence of the medina, partially because the walled old city is still functioning as a household neighborhood, rather than a staged reproduced one.
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Once called Benares by Europeans and Calcutta by the British, Varanasi sits at the tip of the North Indian plains on the western bank of the Ganges. Sincere historians even argue that Varanasi predates time itself as the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world and it is in the spirit of perspective that makes this civilized insanity seem plausible. Hinduism’s holiest city, the town is riddled with stone ghats winding down to the river in whooping cries to be filled with pilgrims liberating life and death through ritual bath, prayer and cremation. It is a place where if you engage honestly a glimpse of mortality and devotion can be seen. It is not a place that offers a comfortable feel and it most definitely is an unforgettable experience.
Mexico City has spent the past twenty years establishing itself as one of the world’s preeminent cultural centers, a reputation built on something that was always there but overlooked by most elsewhere. Its preconquest past can still be seen at Teotihuacan on the northern edge of the metropolis and at the Templo Mayor archaeological site in the historic core where Aztec buildings lie beneath street level. Diego Rivera’s murals in the National Palace rank among the most complex of twentieth-century artistic enterprises, and the modern art, architecture and gastronomy now emerging as its exponents make it a serious curator of cultural experience. Almost every kind of cultural activity appears to be available in Mexico City.
Of all places on earth, Istanbul is perhaps the most geographically literal embodiment of the idea of making culture on collision and exchange. It straddles two continents and bears the accumulated weight of Byzantine and Ottoman civilizations, both of which left architecture I frequent unavoidably in plain sight, as exemplified by the centuries of input woven into the structure of the Hagia Sophia originally a cathedral, then a mosque, then a museum, then a mosque again. And that is to say nothing of the streets themselves, which are a city of unresolved and fertile contradictions: religious and secular, European and Asian, ancient and irrepressibly modern.
Great cultural travel is never about ticking off dots on a map it’s about opening up to waves of other lives subtly shifting the way you assume the world works. And these places do that more than most not because they’ve been groomed into tourism but because they are the real deal, fraught and full of life. The most enriching itinerary takes a long, slow second to settle in to a place.
