Napoli. My second favorite city in the world.
Category: Flaneuring
Part II to come. Flaneuring in Amsterdam with a notebook and… cannot resist doing probability.
Belgrade is full of charm & a great flaneuring city. Perfect size (`1m), some parts are renovated, others look like they have been forgotten by history, which makes them mysterious, real, and at times, gripping. Food is ⅓ Ottoman, People look 3/8 Ottoman Marvelous
My cousin @GeorgeJNasr started a #Flaneuring hashtag. It should have strict rules: NOTHING TOURISTIC. A flaneur is the reverse tourist. See touristification in #Antifragile.
Miami (downtown): Something refreshing about a town devoid of any pretense of intellectualism. (And no, I am not setting foot in South Beach. Not even for squid ink.) The problem is that Beirut is starting to have the Miami look. You can’t travel anymore.
Amsterdam
My developing heuristic is that a respectable calorie-neutral Flaneuring requires: + In Milan/Bologna/Turin, >18,000 steps (w/desert), + In Rome/Naples/Palermo, >15000 + In New York, > 14,000 + in Tokyo, > 5,000 (portions are small!)
It always depends on the terrace. And I prefer Naples or Palermo. Sorry, fughotaboud Genova, better choice than Venice. You need to find a place WITHOUT Goethe-inspired visiting Northerners who don’t know what sitting at a terrace doing absolutely nothing means. These include de-Mediterranized Northern Italians. You can easily tell a Northener: he/she feels guilty doing nothing. Even doing nothing for them is programmed, labeled, and has to be learned using some Yoga instructor. Let me dispell some mistakes. Do not conflate farniente with laziness. In the Med, idleness is never a virtue unless the person gets rich or does great things while exercizing it. That’s the difference with other cultures both further North and further South. Gabish?
Laura, but Naples for me is not monuments for tourists, but 1) narrow streets with laudry hanging from the window, 2) a f*** you attitude that permeates the place, 3) A (tiny) remaining Greek-Orthodox minority…
#FF @CutTheKnotMath (Maestro Alex. Bogomolny) w/ whom just spent 3 h talking about Russian & NonRussian probability.
