Basel, Strasbourg, and the Ferry That Wasn’t a Kite

Art anchor ~ Two cities, same river ~ On borders ~ Editing the trip ~ 

Coffee threads ~ Back through Basel ~ Photos

  

  

First row: Images of Basel, Switzerland.
Second row: Images of Strasbourg, France.

We were walking along the Rhine after dinner on our first night in Basel when Travelmarx 1 pointed toward the river and said to Travelmarx 2,

“Look at that kite.”

It wasn’t a kite.

It was a red square with a white cross (the Swiss flag) sign attached to the cable of a small ferry drifting slowly across the current, one of Basel’s Rhine ferries that moves without a motor. The boat is attached to a steel cable and pushed across by the force of the river itself. A few minutes later we were standing on the wooden deck with a handful of other passengers. The ferryman nudged us away from the bank, letting the Rhine do the rest. The boat angled itself into the current and began sliding sideways across the water, calm and purposeful as it has done since 1877. And that kite was gently sliding across the cable looking very much like a kite for a new set of credulous tourists.

For two Swiss francs we crossed from Kleinbasel (“Little Basel” or “Lesser Basel,” on the right bank) to Grossbasel (“Great Basel” or “Greater Basel,” the older city center on the left bank), the lights of the old city coming closer while the ferryman adjusted the rudder and the cable hummed quietly above us.

After the complicated day it had taken just to get there, including a train strike in Northern Italy, autostrada traffic, and a frantic search for coins to use a bathroom in a Milan train station, the ferry felt like the moment the trip finally began.

Travel often starts that way. Not when the tickets are booked or the train leaves the station, but later, in some small, unexpected moment when the place begins to make sense. Or, more accurately, when you finally stop troubleshooting the logistics and start looking around.

Art anchor

The reason for our trip to Basel and Strasbourg was simple: see two cities and some world-class museums.

When Italian friends asked where we were going, two questions kept coming back. Why Basel? And why not drive? The first question was easier to answer: museums, the Rhine, and Strasbourg nearby.

The second question was more revealing. From northern Italy, driving would have been possible, maybe even obvious to some people. But we wanted the train version of the trip: the swaying of the train, stations, mindlessly staring out the window,  and the small sense of having entered a different rhythm before arriving.

Basel has long been recognized as one of Europe’s important museum cities relative to its size, and the collections at the Kunstmuseum Basel delivered exactly what we had hoped for. The museum has the kind of collection that shows you a few things you might have seen and then a whole lot you never saw before. The rooms are large and easy to wander through and the vibe is easy. We spent the better part of a day touring the Neubau and Hauptbau with lunch in between. This is one of the pleasures of a strong museum: it ruins your schedule in a respectable way.

After the Kunstmuseum, our art explorations spread outward from the city. Just across the German border we spent a day wandering the Vitra Design Museum campus (bus 55) in Weil am Rhein, an architectural playground anchored by Frank Gehry’s sculptural museum building. Calling it a “museum visit” feels too narrow. It is more like a small pilgrimage through design, architecture, and furniture in a curated environment that leaves visitors freedom to wander and discover what they might discover.

We saw a wonderful exhibition at Vitra, Hella Jongerius: Whispering Things, full of textiles, color, craft, and material intelligence. Outside the museum, the Doshi Retreat, VitraHaus, and Oudolf Garden all added to the feeling that the campus was not just interesting but invigorating, a place where buildings, objects, and planting kept nudging us awake.

A day later we decamped for Strasbourg. Upon arrival and after lunch at Au Petit Bois Vert (under the centuries old sycamore) then we headed to the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg (MAMCS). MAMCS is a glass-roofed building stretches along the riverbank like a cathedral for modern art, all light, volume, and polished surfaces. It took us two half days to make it through the permanent collection and special exhibitions.

A special nod goes to the Kandinsky rooms at the MAMCS in Strasbourg center on Salon de musique (1931), using this large Bauhaus‑period canvas to show how Kandinsky shifted from depicting the world to constructing an autonomous visual language of color, rhythm, and geometry. The museum arranges the space as a quiet, didactic environment: the painting’s musical analogy becomes the key to understanding abstraction as a historical rupture, and the surrounding works trace his evolution from figuration toward pure form. Within the museum’s bright, architectural calm, the room functions as a focused pause — a place where Kandinsky’s geometry resonates with the building itself and where Strasbourg positions its collection within the broader story of early 20th‑century abstraction.

During our Strasbourg stay, we backtracked south on a short train ride to Colmar to catch the Musée Unterlinden. There the Isenheim Altarpiece turned out to be far more powerful than we expected. We had read about it, of course, but reading about the Isenheim Altarpiece and standing in front of it are different activities. The panels were fantastical, and we couldn't believe that they were painted between 1512 – 1516. Some of the panels would not look out of place as a Tolkien illustration. The Isenheim Altarpiece was sculpted and painted by, respectively, the Germans Nikolaus Hagenauer and Matthias Grünewald, and it is Grünewald's largest work and is regarded as his masterpiece.

The rest of the museum was also a surprise: cloisters, archaeology, decorative arts, modern art, and a building that seemed to keep changing its mind about what kind of museum it wanted to be. We mean this as a compliment. At the very end you end up in the "piscine", a former public bath turned into event space.

One minor disappointment during the trip was the Museum Tinguely in Basel. We were really looking forward to visiting this  and thought it might end up being the highlight of our time in Basel, but in the end, it fell a bit flat for us. After spending most of the day at the Kunstmuseum—where the quality of the works and the way they were displayed truly impressed us—we hoped the magic would continue, but it didn’t quite happen. The Tinguely machines themselves felt less refined than we expected, and it was sometimes hard to grasp how the pieces fit together conceptually. The presentation also felt a little messy, and the building didn’t help—it had the vibe of a smaller, second‑tier museum where things were somewhat thrown together. When the machines did activate, the effect was oddly underwhelming and even a bit clumsy, though perhaps that was part of Tinguely’s intent. Perhaps a return visit is in order (earlier in the day) to honestly evaluate the museum. For this trip, the real highlights of our Basel visit were the Kunstmuseum and our day at the Vitra campus—but we did genuinely enjoy the playful Tinguely fountain in town.

Also a yeah-we-know-moment: we did not make it to the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, which is slightly embarrassing to admit after going all the way to Basel with museums as the stated purpose. The original plan had been to fit it in. Then reality arrived, as it often does, complaining about sore feet and wanting to take it easy. In our defense, we had visited the Kunstmuseum the day before and chose Vitra over Beyeler for our last full Basel day, partly because we wanted the cross-border design-campus experience and partly because Beyeler, with its modern and contemporary art focus, felt like it would overlap more with what we had just absorbed. That was probably the right decision for this trip. It also gives us a perfectly respectable excuse to go back.

So in a way this trip became a chain of art encounters moving up and down the Upper Rhine.

Two cities, same river

Basel and Strasbourg sit only about ninety minutes apart by train, but they felt surprisingly different.

There is a slight geographical sleight of hand in calling them cities on the same river. In Basel, the Rhine runs directly through the city and is impossible to ignore and is important to how you experience the city. In Strasbourg, the Rhine flows along the eastern edge of the city, while the waterways most visitors experience are the Ill River and the canals that curl around the historic center. The Grande Île is bounded by the Ill and the Faux-Rempart canal, and at Petite France the Ill splits into several arms. These waterways are connected to the Rhine, but the experience is different: Basel presents the river as a broad, central presence; Strasbourg reveals itself through bridges, islands, quays, and smaller channels.

Basel is smaller, with a city population of roughly 180,000, and it moves at a gentler rhythm. Walking around, what stood out most was the calm: the river promenades, the tram lines gliding quietly through the streets, and the feeling that the 60% or more of the people we were seeing on the street were locals. There is wealth in Basel, certainly, and order, and a particular Swiss competence that makes even a tram crossing feel lightly choreographed. But it did not feel stiff to us. It felt compoAsed.

Basel also has a way of putting its old and new selves into the same frame. Around the Marktplatz, the red sandstone Rathaus and the surrounding streets deliver the older city one expects. Then, from all sorts of vantage points, the two-stepped Roche Towers appear in the background, tall enough to make themselves part of the skyline whether you want them or not. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, they are office buildings (41 and 50 stories) on the Basel campus of Roche, the pharmaceutical and diagnostics company founded in the city in 1896 and still deeply rooted there.

At first, the towers felt slightly disconcerting, as if someone had just plopped them there. But after visiting the Tinguely Museum, we walked back toward the Mittlere Brücke beneath them. At ground level, the area was green, open, and pedestrian-friendly, not at all as severe as the towers can seem from a distance. In a word: well-integrated in our judgment.

Strasbourg, by contrast, is larger, closer to 300,000 people in the city itself and much larger when you consider the wider metropolitan area. Yet in the center, modernity can feel surprisingly far away, at least in the form of skyscrapers and conspicuously contemporary buildings. Once you are inside the Grande Île, the old city keeps you inside its own dream of timbered houses, canals, bridges, and the cathedral rising above everything else.

That dream is not complete, of course. Stepping out of the station, the first impression was less romantic than expected: a smell of cannabis and urine, more tourists, more street life, and more visible homelessness around parks and bridges.

This is not the sentence tourism boards are waiting for, but first impressions are first impressions.

Neither impression was entirely fair. Strasbourg has its own beauty and complexity, a city shaped by centuries of shifting borders between France and Germany. The historic center, the Grande Île, is full of handsome corners, canals, timbered houses, and that great vertical shock of the cathedral. It is a city of layers, and sometimes layers are not immediately soothing.

Still, the contrast was strong enough that by the time we arrived there, we found ourselves unexpectedly missing the quieter atmosphere of Basel. This was not Strasbourg’s fault. It was partly timing, partly mood, partly weather (it turned hotter), partly the accumulated fatigue of having already seen a lot.

Travel sometimes works like that: you understand one place only when you see it against another.

On borders

Basel sits at one of the stranger geographic points in Europe, where Switzerland, France, and Germany meet.

One afternoon we took a tram partway and then walked to the Dreiländereck, the border triangle at the northern edge of Basel. In German, Drei-Länder-Eck means “three-countries-corner,” which is satisfyingly literal. Switzerland, France, and Germany all meet here, at least symbolically, beside the Rhine.

The marker itself is a tall, modern monument on the Swiss side of the river at Westquaistrasse 75, in Basel’s port and logistics zone. Basel Tourism describes it as both the point where the three countries converge and a place where boats depart down the Rhine toward the North Sea. It is also part of the transport hub that helps supply raw materials to Switzerland, a detail that keeps the site from floating away into pure symbolism.

It was surprisingly quiet when we arrived: just us and a few other visitors standing at the edge of the river, looking at a place that is geopolitically meaningful and visually modest. There is also a small catch. The actual legal tripoint is not exactly under the monument. It lies out in the middle of the Rhine, where the Swiss, French, and German borders meet. The monument is nearby on Swiss land, making it more ceremonial marker than surveyed fact. In other words, close enough for a photo, but not quite close enough to stand in three countries at once without getting wet.

After visiting the Dreiländereck, we began walking back along the Rhine and stumbled into Holzpark Klybeck, one of those places that feels half-planned, half-grown: containers, lights, improvised corners, food, drink, and a sense that threw us back to Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen.

There we found the GANNET, a former lightship now grounded at Holzpark Klybeck and used as a restaurant, bar, sun deck, and alternative cultural center. It was our last night in Basel, and on a whim, we stopped for dinner.

That would have been enough. Dinner on a grounded ship, in a strange little cultural zone near the Rhine, after walking back from the place where three countries meet. But as we were finishing, a small outdoor show was starting just next to the ship: Lunautica – Sailing to the Moon, by Variété Pavé.

The premise, as far as we could gather, involved four crew members trying to reach the moon by submarine, which is exactly the kind of explanation that makes you either walk away or immediately sit down. We climbed back down from our dinner ship, took a seat, and were enthralled for the next hour.

It was part circus, part comedy, part acrobatics, part absurd nautical-lunar mission, and entirely fun. That description does not quite capture the pleasure of finding it by accident, outdoors, beside a grounded ship, at the end of a day that had already taken us to the edge of three countries.

When it was over, we walked back along the Rhine toward the Mittlere Brücke, the Middle Bridge, with a crystal-clear view of the city ahead of us. It was one of those travel evenings that feels almost suspiciously well arranged, except that no one arranged it. The border triangle, the river, the ship, the show, the walk back into the old city: it became, without trying, a perfect last night in Basel.

That is often how borders are in daily European life now, especially inside the Schengen zone. They exist intensely on maps, in institutions, in histories, in languages, in phone plans, and sometimes in the price of coffee. But when you cross them on a tram or a train, they may barely register.

Over a few days we crossed them repeatedly without ceremony: Switzerland to Germany for Vitra, Switzerland to France for Strasbourg, France back toward Switzerland on the way home. The Rhine flowed past all of it, linking the cities together as it has for centuries.

Of course, borders are not imaginary. They matter deeply depending on who you are, what passport you carry, what you are transporting, and what history you have inherited. But for us, on this trip, they appeared mostly as a strange everyday privilege: the ability to move across national lines in search of museums, coffee, and, once or twice, a public bathroom.

Editing the trip

Halfway through our stay in Strasbourg, we had a realization that every traveler eventually has on a trip. We misjudged the rhythm of the itinerary.

By the third day we both agreed: the trip would have been better with one more day in Basel and one fewer in Strasbourg. That would have made it 4 days Basel, 4 days Strasbourg. We thought more days in Strasbourg would make sense because we'd spend a day in Colmar and maybe even another day visiting villages and the wine country. Colmar we made it to, but the villages we didn't. Part of this outcome was driven by the heat dome and high temperatures of the days we were there, and part of that was that it would require us to get on a wine/tour bus (a nonstarter for us) or rent a car, and honestly we were lazy.


It wasn’t a serious mistake. But the imbalance was clear in retrospect. Basel had felt more comfortable exploring, and we left with the sense that there was still more we genuinely wanted to do. Strasbourg also had plenty we did not see or visit, but its more frenetic tourist energy made it harder for us to summon our tourist energy. And, honestly, one of our Strasbourg days was Whit Monday. Never heard of it? Neither had we. The holiday is important there and almost everything was closed. So instead of trying to see more, we took the opportunity to circumnavigate the city, follow the banks of the Ill River, drink coffee, and relax. Which, in itself, turned out to be very good.

There is always a little fiction in an itinerary. You imagine your future self as alert, efficient, receptive, and lightly caffeinated. You picture the day unfolding in clean segments: museum, walk, lunch, second museum, river stroll, excellent dinner, early night. Then the real day arrives with weather, tired feet, late trains, closed rooms, misread tram stops, and the unexpected need to sit somewhere for twenty minutes and say nothing.

Travel planning is really editing in advance. The final edit happens later.

This is one of the reasons we like writing these posts after the fact. The blog becomes a second itinerary; one we can finally get right because it no longer must be useful in real time. We can cut the extra day, keep the ferry, move the coffee recommendation earlier, and pretend there was a plan all along.

Coffee threads

Among the museums, trains, borders, and city walks, the most memorable thread turned out to be coffee.

Early in the trip we discovered the cafés in Basel called BRÜ and BRÜ₂. When a barista at these cafés learned we would be visiting Strasbourg, he immediately created a short list of coffee places we should try. One of them was Dude Café.

A few days later, in Strasbourg, we found ourselves at Dude, drinking coffee and eating an improbably good cheesecake (Basque style). There are many ways to evaluate a city, none of them scientific. Architecture matters. Public transport matters. Museums matter. But a good café recommendation from someone who clearly cares about coffee has a way of making a city feel briefly more legible.

It is also pleasingly old-fashioned. In an age when we can ask apps, maps, reviews, rankings, forums, and artificial assistants for recommendations, a spoken/written suggestion from one human to another still carries a different weight. Especially when it leads to cheesecake.

Back through Basel

On the way back to Bergamo, we passed through Basel one more time. Our train connection gave us two hours, just enough time to walk back into the city for a final coffee.

Naturally, we returned to BRÜ₂ (closest to the station), the café where the barista had given us the Strasbourg list.

When we walked in, he looked up and said something that surprised us. “Oh, you went to Dude.”

Apparently, the people there had mentioned that two visitors from Basel had stopped in. Somehow the small network of baristas had connected the dots before we had even returned to the city.

It was a tiny moment, but it captured something about the trip. We had moved between Switzerland, France, and Germany, crossed the Rhine by ferry, spent days in museums, and tried to understand two cities only ninety minutes apart. But what remained at the end were small threads like this: a recommendation passed across a coffee counter, a café discovered in another city, and a brief conversation that closed the loop.

At the beginning, we mistook the ferry cable for a kite. By the end, the mistake felt useful. The trip had been held together by lines we did not always see at first: across the river, across borders, between museums, between cafés.

And like that little ferry on the Rhine, we were not simply moving ourselves through the trip. We were also being pushed along by the current, angled a little by forces we did not control, and carried from one bank to another.

Not a kite, exactly. More a small system of tethers and currents, pulling and pushing the story into shape.

Photos

Basel, Switzerland (and environs)

  

Left: VitraHaus.
Center: Hella Jongerius - "Whispering Things" exhibit at Vitra Design Museum.

Right: Vitra Design Museum building.

   

Left: VitraHaus Chair Wheel.

Center left: Doshi Retreat at the Vitra Campus.

Center right: Fine Arts Museum Basel Main Building - Hauptbau.

Right: Bischofshof - Banquet Hall (Basel).

   

Left: Variété Pavé - Lunautica - Sailing to the Moon.
Center left: Rauthaus Basel.
Center right: Museum Tinguely Gnome.

Right: Border Triangle Basel Dreiländereck.

 

Left: Basel at night along the Rhine River.
Right: Basel Kunstmuseum - Neubau.

 

Left: Restaurant Gannet - Basel.

Right: Breakfast at BRÜ Specialty Coffee in Basel.

Strasbourg, France

  

Left: Fontaine de Janus - Strasbourg.

Right: Parc de l'Orangerie - Stork - Strasbourg.

 

Colmar - Underlinden - Isenheim Altarpiece.

  

Left: Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCS).
Center: Église catholique Saint-Pierre-le-Jeune - Strasbourg.

Right: Jardin de la Place de la République and Ginkgo Trees - Strasbourg.

 

Left: Dude Cafe - Strasbourg.

Right: Alsace tarte flambée at La Fignette - Strasbourg.

 

Left: Cathédrale Notre-Dame-de-Strasbourg - front view.
Right: Cathédrale Notre-Dame-de-Strasbourg - astronomical clock.

Noise, According to the Italian Driving Manual

Noise On ~ Book Noise ~ Clacson Dialects ~ Clacson Meets Lden ~ 

European Driver, Quiet in Theory ~ California Dreaming Horn ~ 

Exhaust as a Personal Statement ~  Studying for the Exam, Clutching My Pearls ~ 

Maximum Moderation, Minimum Compliance

A variation of the image used in the SID Manuale, in the chapter on noise

Noise On

I've always had an interest in noise, and an issue with noise. I'm interested in noise's impact on people, why some people don't seem bothered by it, and why I am, and why is there is so much of it—NOISE—in the world. Past posts include: Noise and Nuisance; Bronzino to Babbage, A Field Guide to Italian Hotel Noises, and You Know It When You Hear It.)

So, it was with surprise and delight that I found a chapter in the Italian driving-license book on noise. In the SIDA Manuale della patente A e B (the Italian study book), noise is not treated as a vague annoyance, the thing you complain about while closing the window. It is classified properly, soberly, and a little optimistically as inquinamento acustico: acoustic pollution. Be still my beating heart!

This treatment of noise immediately elevates it. Now my crazy rantings on noise have backing. The truck with the loose load passing below the apartment at 6 am is no longer merely “that truck again.” It is part of Chapter 22.

The book places noise beside air pollution, fuel consumption, exhaust fumes, vehicle maintenance, and the broader civic duty of not degrading our shared environment. It is a high-minded little chapter and I like that. It imagines the driver as a careful, rational, socially aware person who maintains the vehicle, limits unnecessary acceleration, avoids useless honking, and remembers that the road is shared.

Book Noise

The Italian driving manual does not treat noise as a mere irritation. It calls it what it is: inquinamento acustico, acoustic pollution. Section 22.1.5 begins plainly and lists a few behaviors you see commonly when driving around Italy.

Here's the section of the book:

---

Il rumore prodotto dai veicoli a motore è causa di inquinamento acustico e di una serie di problemi di salute. I rimorchi vuoti, che sobbalzano eccessivamente, possono essere causa di rumore. Per questo motivo, ogni conducente ha il dovere di osservare le seguenti cautele:

• far verificare che la marmitta (dispositivo silenziatore) funzioni bene e sia di tipo approvato, sostituire la marmitta rovinata con una approvata per il veicolo, senza manometterla o modificarla
• evitare inutili e ripetute accelerazioni a vuoto, da fermi
• far controllare i freni se stridono (sostituendoli se necessario) e cercare di non frenare bruscamente
• non precorrere le curve ad alta velocità e no provocare lo strisciamento degli pneumatici
• sistemare il carico ed eventuali coperture in modo idoneo
• curare la manutenzione della carrozzeria e delle sospensioni
• chiudere delicatamente la portiera (anche per non danneggiare l'autovettura)
• per avvisare in caso di emergenza, usare il lampeggio al posto del clacson

Bisogna usare il clacson con la massima moderazione e nei centri abitati solo in caso di effettivo e immediato pericolo. Quando è necessario, suonare il clacson il più brevemente possibile.

Causano inquinamento acustico:

• marmitta non omologata
• uso improprio del clacson
• brusche partenze
• brusche frenate
• freni che stridono
• brusche frenate in curva
• carico svolazzante

---

Some useful translations:

• inquinamento = pollution
• rimorchi = trailers
• sobbalzare = jump around
• marmitta = muffler
• clacson = horn
• freni = brakes
• carrozzeria = car body
• carico = load
• svolazzante = fluttering about

What I like about this list of causes of noise is how ordinary it is. The enemy is not only the roaring engine or the modified scooter exhaust. It is also the rattling trailer, the squealing brakes, the door slammed too hard, the horn used as punctuation, the fluttering tarp behind a truck. Noise is treated as a hundred small failures of attention. I guess you could say the entropy of noise in that everyone sort of says "Not my problem, I'm just driving down the road". This is similar to what we observed in the post Notes on Entropy from a Courtyard in Italy, which concluded that the concept of everyday entropy is the slow unraveling of order in one's surroundings because many say "not my job".

The manual is not saying: never make noise. Rather it says: do not make pointless noise. It is a tiny civic ethic disguised as test prep. Of course, I ace all the test questions in this section! They seem so obvious to me.

This careful driver exists. Somewhere maybe? Or, possibly only in the illustrations in the book.

Joking aside, studying for the Italian patente has changed how I hear the street. Before, vehicle noise fell mostly into emotional categories: irritating, very irritating, and mostly “is that thing legally allowed to exist?” Now I have a point of reference, a chapter in the official driver's manual. The bad muffler, the squealing brakes, the horn used as punctuation, the rattling load in the back of a truck: these are not just sounds. They are categories of noncompliance and sections that at least I can console myself with and point to even if it doesn't really help.

Clacson Dialects

The word clacson looks odd to English eyes. It is the Italianized form of Klaxon, originally a trademarked name for an electric warning horn. Treccani defines clacson as a graphic variant of English klaxon, now used in everyday Italian for the acoustic warning device in a vehicle. In official language you may also see avvisatore acustico, which is more literal: acoustic warning device. But clacson is the word more commonly used. The word sounds noisy.

The manual says the clacson should be used with la massima moderazione, and in towns only in cases of immediate and real danger. Good advice in theory, but in practice it's another story. (Also, "maximum moderation" sounds less like driving advice and more like a rule for surviving modern life.)

Moderate your horn, your speed, your acceleration, your impatience, and we'd add perhaps also your expectation that anyone else has read the same page. Why? Because, in practice, the horn has many unofficial meanings in Italy. It can mean:

“I am here.”
“You are slow.”
“The light turned green 0.4 seconds ago, step on it!”
“I know you, hi!”
“I am entering this blind corner and please be aware.”
“I am annoyed, and everyone within hearing range should be informed.”

So yes, officially, the horn is a safety device. Practically, the horn is a language. It has grammar, dialect, local idioms, and emotional range. It may be brief, extended, musical, accusatory, celebratory, or existential.

Clacson Meets Lden

While the Italian driving manual treats noise with admirable seriousness, as inquinamento acustico or acoustic pollution, there are no hard limits. The guidance seems squishy, basically "try not to make noise".

The European vocabulary around noise is more precise: Lden, Lnight, dB(A), exposure thresholds.

• Lden is the average noise over the whole day, evening, and night, with evening and night weighted more heavily because noise then is more disruptive.
• Lnight is the average night-time noise, especially relevant for sleep.
• dB(A) means decibels adjusted to approximate human hearing.

The European Union’s Environmental Noise Directive is not exactly a “keep everyone below this number”, but more a framework for measuring, mapping, reporting, and managing environmental noise. The commonly used reporting thresholds are around 55 dB Lden for day-evening-night exposure and 50 dB Lnight for night exposure. (Official legal text.)

WHO Europe is more direct in its health-based recommendations. Its 2018 environmental noise guidelines recommend keeping road-traffic noise below 53 dB Lden and below 45 dB Lnight. Earlier WHO night-noise guidance gives 40 dB Lnight outside bedrooms as a target to protect the public, especially vulnerable groups. (Guidelines table.)

This is all somewhat useful to know, though perhaps less useful at the exact moment a 50cc (cubic centimeters) moto is ripping down Via Pignolo making the left turn onto Via San Tomaso. (Ironically, a 50cc moto can make upward of 80 dB(A) of noise.)

So figuring out whether Italy has “done something” under the Environmental Noise Directive turns out to be its own small research project. The EU directive requires maps and action plans, but the results do not live in one tidy place. Some are reported to the EEA (European Environment Agency), some appear through ISPRA (Istituto Superiore per la Protezione e la Ricerca Ambiente) indicators, and many live with regions, cities, airports, railways, and road operators. Italy has implemented the directive through D.Lgs. 194/2005 and has reported population exposure using Lden and Lnight. So yes, the maps and plans exist. Whether the street below your window has become quieter is, as usual, a different and more personal question. Maybe in a future post, we'll dig into these reports but for now, we'll have to accept that it's being thought about, seems to be measured, and maybe work is in progress to mitigate exposure. (Glancing quickly at the reports shows road noise as by far the largest contributor to noise exposure.)

In daily life terms, 50 to 55 dB(A) is not the apocalypse. It is roughly equivalent to a quiet street, a refrigerator hum, moderate rainfall, or the lower edge of conversation. These numbers are not about one spectacular noise event, or whether your ears are immediately damaged. They are about cumulative exposure: the acoustic climate you live in hour after hour, night after night. A loud burst, say a 50cc moto, a truck, or a horn, may pass quickly and add energy to the average. But, more importantly, it interrupts the body. It makes you pause, tense, wake slightly, or lose the thread of what you were doing. Environmental noise is often the background soup: tires, scooters, brakes, engines, deliveries, a horn here, a horn there, all simmering below the level of catastrophe but above the level of peace.

So where are we with noise? The manual gives noise a better name: acoustic pollution. The EU and WHO go further and give it numbers for measuring, even if the averages wash it all out.

European Driver, Quiet in Theory

The Italian book’s treatment of noise is not unique. Germany has an explicit Umweltschutz category in its theory-test material, where unnecessary acceleration is not just wasteful but noisy. France folds le bruit et la pollution into the theme of using the vehicle with respect for the environment.

The vocabulary changes, but the fantasy is shared: the driver as a calm, technically competent, socially aware participant in public space.

Naturally, we started to wonder if Italians are better, about the same, or worse in terms of noise pollution. How would you even measure this?

It turns out that comparisons are not that easily had. A 2022 study in Environment International looked at road-traffic noise exposure across 724 European cities and 25 larger urban areas, using Lden starting at 55 dB. It found that almost 60 million adults were exposed to road-traffic noise levels considered harmful to health. But the study also noted a very practical problem: the underlying noise maps varied in method, format, and quality. So the question 'Are Italians noisier?' quickly becomes 'What did France measure, what did Germany measure, and did Italy count that street with the delivery scooters?' Still, the broad picture is clear enough: road-traffic noise is a Europe-wide problem, and in many cities a large share of adults live above the 55 dB Lden threshold. (ScienceDirect)

The health connection in the ScienceDirect article is not that a honking car directly causes heart disease, satisfying though that explanation might be. Rather, traffic noise disturbs sleep, raises annoyance, and keeps the body making tiny stress adjustments: heart rate, blood pressure, hormones, vascular strain. Over years, those small insults can become less small. In that sense, inquinamento acustico is not only a poetic phrase from the driving manual. It is a public-health phrase hiding in plain sight.

The Italian and more generally the European driver, at least on paper, are custodians of the shared atmosphere: air, fuel, fumes, tires, brakes, and sound. It is a great idea in the manuals, but as we have noted, its application is where it kind of falls apart.

This is not to say that manuals are useless. Quite the opposite. They reveal the ideal. They show the shape of the civic person we are all supposed to become once we close the book, pass the exam, and enter a traffic circle with six exits, two motorcycles, a delivery van, and someone behind us expressing an opinion about our driving through the horn.

California Dreaming

After thinking about Italian drivers in relation to European drivers, we started to wonder about the United States. But the United States is not one driving system. Requirements and handbooks vary by state, even if the broad ideas are often similar. So, for a concrete example, we looked at California: not the largest state by area, since that honor goes decisively to Alaska, but the most populous state in the country, with more than 39 million people. Here's the California Driver Handbook.

California, being California, does have a section on “Green Driving,” with advice on smooth acceleration, steady speeds, tire pressure, vehicle maintenance, extra weight, and zero-emission vehicles. The environment is there, but mostly through the American vocabulary of efficiency, emissions, and technology.

The horn appears elsewhere, under safety. Use it to avoid collisions or warn others of hazards. Do not honk because someone is slow, because someone made a mistake, or because you are angry. The handbook even reminds drivers that the horn sounds much louder outside the vehicle, which is both obvious and apparently necessary to say.

What's interesting and laudable is that the Italian manual gathers these behaviors under a wider moral weather system: consumption, exhaust, maintenance, noise. The poorly maintained muffler, the unnecessary acceleration, the horn used as punctuation, the rattling load in the back: all are small failures of shared space.

The California handbook says: be safe, be efficient, don’t be a jerk. Gratuitous musical reference: "All the leaves are brown. And the horns are quiet..." sort of thing.

The Italian book says: you are part of an acoustic environment. Please behave accordingly. Gratuitous musical reference: "Prisencolinensinainciusol" sort of thing.

Exhaust as Personal Statement

The Italian driver's license manual also warns against modifying the vehicle, especially the muffler. This is where the theory becomes disconnected from reality, because some vehicles seem to treat the muffler not as a device for reducing noise, but as an instrument of self-expression.

The manual, being a manual, does not say any of this. It simply says the muffler should be approved, functioning, and not tampered with. It does not dwell on some drivers' desire to be heard before being seen.

After going through hundreds of quiz questions, I'm surprised how many questions come down to "is it okay to modify your muffler?". These muffler questions along with the noise questions are easy for me. Too bad the exam wasn't all of these types of questions.

There is something real hiding inside of rules, and that is that noise is rarely only mechanical. It is social, be it a horn or muffler. Noise says: I am here, I am impatient, I am powerful, I am careless, I am festive, I am young, I am late, I am delivering something, I am above maintenance schedules. But who could write rules and create exam questions for these meanings?

We could not find a neat statistic for how many Italians actually modify their mufflers. Perhaps this is just as well, because the phenomenon is easier to hear than to count. What we can say is that the issue is real enough to be written into the Codice della Strada. Article 155 says that drivers must avoid troublesome noise caused by how they drive, how the load is arranged, or other acts connected with circulation. It also says the silencing device, when required, must be kept efficient and must not be altered. So, the manual is not just being fussy. It is turning a legal principle into quiz form: the muffler is not a lifestyle accessory, even if some drivers seem to disagree.

Of course, aftermarket exhaust replacement is not automatically illegal. If it is approved for that vehicle and used as approved, it may be fine. The trouble begins when the exhaust becomes less “replacement part” and more “announcement system.” Somewhere between homologation and self-expression, the manual raises its hand and says: no.

Studying for the Exam, Clutching My Pearls

One of the strange pleasures of studying for the patente as an adult is that the material says more to you than to a teenager. You have years of observing driver behavior, and you are quicker to say, "wait a minute—that's not what I have observed!"

The book says:

• Not to accelerate unnecessarily. The, a car accelerates unnecessarily.
• The horn is for immediate danger. Someone honks because a pedestrian has the audacity to use a crosswalk.
• Avoid rattling loads. A truck passes with something loose and metallic performing percussion in the back. At 6am.

So the city becomes a listening exam, and I try not to turn it into a moral judgement on what I'm hearing. Studying the rules creates a new sensitivity where I hear the street not only as background and blatant violation, but as a series of tiny decisions being made long before we landed in Italy or set up shop on Via Pignolo.

Maximum Moderation, Minimum Compliance

The driver's manual describes a quieter, more considerate world. A world where drivers maintain their vehicles, use the horn only when needed, avoid pointless acceleration, secure their loads, and remember that other people also have ears.

We are not always living in that world.

But there is something charming about the attempt. The manual names the problem. It gives us the polite version of civic life. It says: here is how not to add unnecessary noise to the world.

And that may be enough for a chapter in a driving book. Not enough to silence a modified scooter. Not enough to stop the celebratory honk, the impatient honk, the “I am behind you and therefore must communicate” honk. But enough to make you hear them differently and maybe even appreciate them.

I'll take that as a start. That's lesson one.

Once noise gets labeled as inquinamento acustico, we need to consider it as part of the shared air, like exhaust, dust, heat, and all the other things we contribute without quite meaning to.

The road is not only visual. It is not only signs, lanes, lights, and right-of-way. It is also sound. A public space has a soundtrack, and every driver is adding something to it. This is lesson two.

The Italian manual asks, with charming optimism, that we add less. Con la massima moderazione, of course.

Five Days in Fez, Morocco

Night Arrival ~ The Medina as Rhythm ~ Riad or Dar ~ 

Guides, Shops, and the Tourism Machine ~ Food as Navigation ~ 

Getting Above and Outside ~ Nothing Special on This Street ~ 

Submit to the Fez ~ Photos

  

   
Top row: Royal Gardens of Fez and Souk Sabaghine of Fez.
Bottom row: Views of Fez including 1) Medina market on Friday with overhead lattice work,
2) Chouara Tannery - Fez, 3) Palace Bronze Doors, and 4) Exiting the Nejjarine Museum.

Night Arrival: Entering the Medina

The flight from Bergamo to Fez is short, barely three hours, but the time to transition felt much longer. 

One moment we are in northern Italy, negotiating airport security and grabbing a last-minute coffee at Eataly. A few hours later we are walking across the tarmac at the Fès–Saïss airport staring at the bold geometrical shapes and colorful patterns of the terminal, inspired by the Maghreb region. Moments later we try to recalibrate our thinking as we stand in the customs line staring at Arabic script and reminding ourselves to read right to left.

The drive from the airport was our next attempt at recalibration.

The road into the city passed along large dusty boulevards dotted with palm trees, more French-influenced Ville Nouvelle than medina. Cars drifted between lanes like lazy flies. People stood by the roadside alone and in groups, waiting for something or someone, we couldn't tell.  The medina always seemed just around the next turn, but it kept not arriving.

Our taxi driver was a risk taker, as we would learn several times during the thirty-minute drive. At one point he turned left into what was four lanes of oncoming traffic. Cars stopped within a few feet of our right-side doors. We all gasped. He looked at us, sincerely perplexed, as if we had misunderstood an ordinary traffic courtesy and that the vehicles did stop after all.

Finally, we arrived at Place Rcif, a large square beside one of the gates leading into Fes el-Bali, the old medina. A man was waiting with a cart. Into the cart went our luggage, and behind the cart went us.

Before ducking into the medina through Bab Sid L’Aouad, we had just enough time to take in the life of the square: women sitting and talking, kids kicking a soccer ball, vendors roasting corn. Yes, corn on the cob. We would come back for some a few days later, once Fez had worn us down and built us back up with courage to try it.

Bab Sid L’Aouad is not a ceremonial entrance. That role belongs more to Bab Boujloud, the famous Blue Gate on the western side of the medina. Bab Sid L’Aouad is more humble, more practical, and more connected to the daily service life of the city. 

After passing through the gate, we have about ten minutes of narrow lanes, smells, cats, trash, shopfronts, more cats, and shadows before arriving at our riad. In the days that followed, all of this would become familiar. On the first night, it was jarring.

Our home for the next five nights was Riad Dar Arsama Lux, tucked into the dense maze of Fes el-Bali. Over the course of the stay, it became more than lodging. It was refuge, dining room, observation post, and sometimes, if we are being honest, a beautiful little prison.

The first night we opted for dinner at the riad. After travel, a late arrival, and sensory overload, the arranged dinner was the correct decision. Tajine, bread, olives, and that slow generous rhythm of Moroccan hospitality eased us into the trip.

Outside the door was one of the oldest urban labyrinths in the world. Inside was calm. We would enter the labyrinth properly the next day, refreshed, or at least slightly less stunned.

The Medina as Rhythm

The medina of Fez is often described as a maze. That is accurate, but it is also a rhythm. During our five days, we fell into this rhythm: wander, pause, retreat, repeat. Mornings began in narrow alleys full of carts, donkeys, cats, shopkeepers setting up, and people moving with purpose. By midday we would usually start looking for somewhere to sit above the chaos.

One of those places was Café Clock. On our first morning we climbed to the rooftop terrace, escaping the clatter of the Rue Talaa Kebira below and looking out toward the Bou Inania Madrasa tower across the alley. From above, the city sounded different. Instead of noise, it became a soft texture: distant voices, metalwork tapping somewhere in the souk, the call to prayer drifting across rooftops.

The call to prayer in Fez did not strike us at first as much as it did in Istanbul. (Istanbul's calls to prayer were very loud.) Fez's softer call to prayer grew on us. At times it sounded like a chorus of slightly out-of-sync speakers trying to carry the same message across a very old city. Not exactly beautiful, not exactly displeasing, and certainly not background noise.

Fez is overwhelming if you try to process it all at once. It becomes more enjoyable when you let it arrive in fragments as we would learn. (Fragments and layers are useful and the way to think about and approach new places when traveling.)

Even the street signs began to feel like part of the puzzle. Our guide pointed out that in the medina, sign shapes can offer clues: square signs often indicate short local passages, rectangular signs suggest longer through routes, and hexagonal signs usually mean a lane or alleyway, or derb. Many derbs are dead ends. Like many things in Fez, the system was not perfectly consistent. We found at least one hexagonal sign on a street you could pass through. But the idea helped. The medina became slightly less like a maze and more like a language we were very slowly learning to read, one alley at a time.

The signs also carried another layer: Arabic, French, and sometimes Amazigh (or Berber, which is not considered the best label these days) written in Tifinagh, the geometric script that immediately catches the eye if you are not used to seeing it. Perhaps you might compare it to visitors in Seattle noticing Indigenous place names that locals may no longer consciously see. Or, in Alta Badia in Northern Italy where road signs have Italian, German or Ladin. Even the signs of a place speak to us in fragments.

Other fragments we noticed during our days in Fez: Painted alleys. Dirty alleys. Quiet courtyards. Big timbers bracing abandoned houses. A single plane tree in the Place Seffarine. A stork nest above Semmarin medina gate. A shopkeeper arranging a pile of dates with theatrical precision. A man in a dark cellar space feeding the fire of a hammam. A local oven used by families to bake, and the wonderful smell. The sun filtering through the wood lattice three stories above the souk we are walking through. A glimpse into a luxurious look-but-you-probably-can't-afford riad. Cats that look like they have survived three dynasties and impossibly small kittens already starting their ninth lives and don't need your affection, thank you very much.

The medina reveals itself through these fragments and more: half-glimpsed doorways, unexpected viewpoints, conversations that begin casually and drift into religion, trade, family, or the price of rent. Even errands became part of the experience. An ATM run, a pharmacy stop, or an attempt to find a café took us past layers of commerce: rugs, shoes, spices, cookware, fabrics, bakeries, beauty products, leather, and promising tourist signs whose QR codes never worked.

The longer we stayed, the more these small encounters became the substance of the trip. Fez is not a city that gives itself to you cleanly. It gives itself in dust, derbs, and unexpected joys.

Riad or Dar: Refuge, Home, Enclosure

A dar is traditionally a house. A riad, strictly speaking, is a house organized around an interior garden or courtyard. In practice, many guesthouses in the medina use the words in ways that blur. Our Riad Dar Arsama Lux had the intimacy of a home and the architectural grammar of a courtyard house, which is probably why the name works well enough even if you start overthinking it, which of course we did.

Staying inside the medina was never a serious question for us. Inside all the way. That was the idea. To visit Fez and stay outside the medina seemed like going to Venice and sleeping beside a motorway in Mestre. Convenient, perhaps, but not quite the point.

And yet, living inside the medina is challenging and changes you.

A riad turns inward. That is its beauty. It is also its limitation, at least as perceived from our modern sensibilities. Windows face the center courtyard. The outside world is filtered through the very few external facing windows, the roof, and whatever sounds drift through the walls. In our case, the central courtyard no longer had the open garden feeling one might romantically imagine. The sky was partially blocked with an opaque covering, to keep the rain out. Still, after a few days, we began to miss direct light and ordinary views.

Whatever happens in the riad's courtyard happens for everyone. Food smells. Voices. Footsteps. Dishes. The soft choreography of breakfast. The house had the atmosphere of a small rifugio, but instead of hiking boots and polenta there were tiled walls, carved wood, and Moroccan pancakes.

At the same time, it really did feel like living in someone’s home. In our case, the owners had used the riad as a family house before it became lodging, and our room had once been their main bedroom. People pay to have dinner with families in the medina. In a sense, we did that several nights and every morning just by staying here.

However, there is a contradiction with staying in a riad. It can feel like sanctuary and enclosure at the same time. You retreat from the medina into beauty, then retreat from the beauty to the rooftop for air.

The rooftop became essential. From there, Fez opened up again. The city sounded different from above: distant voices, satellite dishes, laundry, minarets, the murmur of life continuing across roofs. After a day in the lanes, the roof gives you access to the horizon.

Guides: Decoding the City, Entering the System

Like many visitors, we used guides. This was the right decision and also, later, something we had to untangle. We used two guides for three tours. One guide for a food tour. And one guide for a cultural tour of the usual stops and the same guide for a tour that we determined what we wanted to see (sort of).

One of our guides Ahmed (we used him twice) met us at our riad and from the start helped us understand the logic of the medina. We visited classic points in the historic core: Souk Sabaghine, where dyed wool hung above the street like a color chart; Bou Inania Madrasa, with carved cedar, zellij tilework, and plaster decoration framing a quiet courtyard; and Chouara Tannery, where the famous circular vats form one of Fez’s defining images.

Because it was Friday, a slower day in the medina, the tannery smell was less dramatic than expected. The mint leaves handed to visitors, useful in theory, remained mostly theatrical in practice.

The tours gave us confidence. That should not be underestimated. Fez can feel impossible at first. A guide helps make it navigable. You learn where you are, how to read the street sign shapes to learn about what kind of street it is, where the landmarks sit in relation to one another, and how to move through space that do not behave like streets on a European city map.

Our guides also gave us insight into Morocco in ways we did not expect. Religion came up often and naturally: prayer, Ramadan, saints’ shrines, Quranic schooling, and customs. This should not have surprised us as much as it did. Morocco is overwhelmingly Muslim, often cited at around 99 percent, so avoiding the subject entirely would mean avoiding one of the main ways the country understands itself. The subject was not avoided. It was part of the operating system of the place, and both guides seemed comfortable explaining it. We may have expected religion to be handled more cautiously with foreigners. Instead, it was part of normal conversation.

One small moment stayed with us. We had noticed less smoking than expected in Fez and were going to ask Ahmed about it. Before we could, he said he would be right back. He needed a cigarette and wanted to smoke away from us so as not to annoy us. A small courtesy, but a real one that he said was typical.

By the end of the trip, we may have had a few small complaints about our guides. That is easy to do after the fact, once you know more than you knew on day one. But they gave us know-how. They made the medina less intimidating. They helped us make enough sense of the city that, by the last day, we could move around on our own and enjoy it.

That is worth something.

Shops, Crafts, and the Tourism Machine

Fez is a city of extraordinary crafts. It is also a city that has learned, over centuries, how to sell its crafts to visitors. These two facts coexist.

Many of the shops we visited were places our guides took us. At first this made us suspicious. Surely there were commissions involved if we bought something. Surely these were not the hidden, authentic workshops we imagined discovering on our own. Over time, we realized something simpler: this is the system.

The system is not always sinister. Sometimes it is educational and useful. Sometimes it is charming in a transactional way. And sometimes it is just transactional without the charm. It depends on how we as tourists choose to participate in it.

At larger workshops like Art Naji outside the medina, the line between working craft space and tourist showroom is intentionally blurred. You watch clay become pottery, and small pieces of tile become mosaic before being delivered, gently but inevitably, into a large showroom. The demonstration is real. The showroom is also real.

At the Chouara tannery inside the medina, the same dynamic applies. You are not simply visiting the tannery. You are visiting a shop with a view over the tannery, a fact that is easy to forget. There are many such shops and guides often have relationships with particular ones, so guess where you'll get guided to. That relationship existed long before you arrived with your camera, and you were handed mint leaves.

We bought a rug during one of these guided stops and later found mixed reviews online for the shop. Did we pay too much? Probably. Do we like the rug? Yes. Did the negotiation feel real? Also, yes. Are we sorry? No.

The small irony is that on our first day we had stopped at Coin Berbere Carpets & Antiques and met the owner, who was friendly, informative, and not pushy. We liked him, we liked the rugs, and we told ourselves the sensible thing: you cannot buy a rug on day one! That would be ridiculous. You need to look around.

A day later, having looked around just enough to be dangerous, we bought one elsewhere.

Only later, back home and reading online reviews, did we feel the small ache of traveler’s regret. Maybe Coin Berbere had been the better place. Maybe not. We will never really know. But the experience complicated our own advice. “Wait before you buy” is still good guidance, but waiting does not automatically make you wise. Sometimes it only gives you enough confidence to make a different mistake. File under lessons in how travel purchases become little philosophical traps if you let them.

We learned, or relearned, several obvious things we somehow needed Fez to (re)teach us. For example:

• The person wearing a traditional outfit is not automatically the best person from whom to buy a carpet or anything. For example, the man in a white lab coat is not necessarily the best person to advise you on Moroccan argan oil products.
• A “lighter test” on fabric or leather may be a real material demonstration, but it is also a sales performance.
• A cooperative may be a cooperative (and make you feel good inside), but the cooperative story can also be part of the selling.
• The shortcut through a building that deposits you in a shop is probably not a secret shortcut given only to your guide because your group seems especially discerning.

This last point may seem embarrassingly obvious to have to say. It was apparently less obvious to us at the moment.

Some other practical tips we list if only to have here and return to this post ourselves and reread:

• Wait before you buy. In Fez, it is highly likely you'll see the same item or something similar again in short time. Buying on first impulse is like tearing into a piece of chocolate too quickly because you want it so badly, only to end up with little bits of foil in your mouth. 
• Photograph storefronts, signs, cash desks, street numbers, and anything else that will help you identify a place later. Especially if you bought something from the shop. Many shops are hard to find again online, if they appear at all. I can't tell you how hard it was after we came back home to find shops we bought from on Google Maps. Isn't the whole world on Google Maps? No, apparently.
• Decide what something is worth to you before the tea arrives, before the rugs are unfolded, before the words “final price” start floating in the air like incense. Decide with your partner or traveling companion about what you really want to buy, so you are on the same page.

The first time you see something, it will feel exotic and irresistible. The tenth time, it will begin to look familiar. By the twentieth, you may finally know what you actually like. Fez rewards patience, and not only in shopping.

Note on agave silk. We were really impressed with when we heard the story about agave silk in person in Fez and the salesperson ripped threads out of something that looked like an agave leaf and handed it to us. Later at the end of the trip, a friend in our travel group purchased a blue throw blanket as a gift for us. Early in the trip we had said we liked it but decided not to buy it. We were delighted with the gift. Back home, the story of agave silk sort of unraveled, sadly. The gift is beautiful but is likely just rayon. 

• In fabric shops in Fez, you are likely to be shown what was called agave silk, or sabra — a glossy vegetable “silk” supposedly pulled from the fibers of a succulent leaf. 
• The plant looked like agave, though the material is often marketed confusingly as cactus silk. Agave is not technically a cactus. 
• In Morocco the authenticity of sabra is complicated: some plant fibers are real, but much of what is sold under the name may be rayon or other manufactured filament. 
• The idea of it — desert plant turned into shimmering thread — explains its appeal, and also why it photographs so well in the shops and dyeing streets of Fez. We certainly were impressed and taken in by the story!

Note on strange math.  In the place we think is called Dar Ibn Khaldoun (we can't be sure), we purchased a rug and are sure we overpaid for it perhaps by 20%. We like the rug and are happy with the purchase. But one thing made us chuckle in the process. Our guide, in the moment, suggested that we get a second rug at a higher total price for both rugs and that would somehow be a much better deal. Really? He even lightly chastised us on why we didn't do it. He wanted us to spend three times more to somehow get a better deal. The math didn't add up for us, and we didn't need the second rug. We wondered whose side he was on. The answer is not always obvious in the tourism machine.

Food as Navigation, and the Search for the Right Meal

We expected to love the food in Fez more than we did.

This is not a dramatic complaint, just an honest one, and it may say more about the version of Fez food we encountered than about Fassi cuisine itself. Traditional Moroccan cooking has plenty of vegetables: cooked salads, vegetable tagines, couscous, lentils, beans, olives, zaalouk. But our particular path through food tours, street snacks, rooftop restaurants, and tourist-facing meals seemed to lean heavily toward fried breads, oily textures, sweets, grilled meats, and starch.

We had imagined dates, raisins, prickly pear cactus fruit, spices, light salads, delicate sweets, and some kind of culinary awakening. There were good meals, but there were also heavy fried breads, oily textures, indifferent soups, dry and tough meat, and sweets that were pleasant without being sublime.

Our food tour was useful but uneven. A phoned-in tour. We moved through markets, squares, and small vendors, but we also found ourselves wondering why a food tour had detoured into fabric and beauty-product shops. To be fair, the beauty-product stop had a spice section, but spices were not really the focus. The argan oils, creams, and other personal-care products received a stronger push. (See points above about shops and crafts.)

Still, the food experience left us with a useful challenge for a future visit rather than a closed verdict. How do we find more of what we are actually looking for, instead of being guided toward what visitors are assumed to want: the greatest hits, the easy tastes, the safe stops, the places already built into the tourism route?

This is similar to shopping in Fez. The first time through, you are learning the system while already inside it. By the time you understand what you want, you may have already eaten the fried bread, eaten too much Moroccan nougat (we did!), or nodded through a demonstration or two you don't know how you were corralled to join. Next time, we would enter a little wiser. We would still be appreciative, but with more control: more markets, more vegetables, more ordinary meals, more asking, and more saying no. A rooftop meal with a view confirmed that a view and a meal are two different things. More than once, the restaurants that looked like "places to go" gave us a better view of the idea of Fez than of the food itself.

The best meals were often the simplest ones.

Several evenings we returned to the kitchen at our riad, where the food felt personal rather than staged. Breakfasts and dinners there had the warmth of being in a house, which, in a way, we were. We also returned more than once to Café Clock, less because it was hidden or authentic, or any of the words one is supposed to use, and more because it worked. Sometimes a place becomes yours because it offers a table, a view, and a small pause when you need one.

One of the most interesting food-adjacent moments came not from a traditional meal but from a specialty coffee stand called Sqalli. The owner was trying to bring specialty coffee to Fez, and the experience felt strikingly European in the middle of the medina: espresso, milk texture, careful preparation, the language of third-wave coffee dropped into a city of brass trays, mint tea, and centuries-old trade.

We responded to it immediately because we are interested in specialty coffee. We weren’t missing it but it is something we celebrate when we see it. What was odd, was after several days of charming but transactional exchanges, the straightforward coffee conversation felt sincere and familiar. That positive response made us wonder about ourselves. Were we relieved to find something we already knew how to read? Were we appreciating a thoughtful new local business? Were we briefly escaping the medina while still standing inside it? Were we overthinking it? Yes, to all.

This is not to say we avoided more traditional coffee experiences. We also tried coffee from a street vendor (that same day) who prepared it in a pot heated in hot sand, one of those small theatrical daily rituals that makes you stop and watch even before you drink. Both experiences belonged to the trip. But the fact that the European-feeling Sqalli comforted us says something, even if we are not entirely sure what.

A not entirely flattering postscript: we were willing to pay a higher price for specialty coffee without blinking but haggled over the price of coffee prepared in hot sand on the street. Travel has a way of revealing your values, including the slightly inconvenient ones.

Getting Above and Outside

Every now and then, it felt necessary to step outside the medina.

This was not only about fresh air, because fresh air in Fez can be a relative category. Dust, smoke, and the smell of the tanneries can complicate the concept. But getting outside the medina, or above it, gave us perspective.

From Borj Sud and Borj Nord, the old forts sitting above the city, the medina suddenly made visual sense. What had felt from inside like an endless tangle of lanes appeared instead as a dense urban organism: rooftops, minarets, green-tiled religious buildings, and walls stretching across the valley.

We also spent time in the Mellah, the historic Jewish quarter, where the architecture shifts. Wooden balconies face outward, unlike the inward-facing houses of the old medina. Visiting the Aben Danan Synagogue reminded us that Fez is not one story but many: Islamic dynasties, Andalusian refugees, Amazigh traditions, Jewish history, French colonial urbanism, and modern economic pressures all layered together.

Outside the Blue Gate, we also walked through Jnan Sbil, the Royal Gardens of Fez. After the compressed lanes of the medina, the gardens felt extravagant: paths, palms, shade, water, and the simple pleasure of being able to see more than a few meters ahead. It was not dramatic in the way a major monument is dramatic, but it gave us something we had started to crave: open space.

A day later, and again just outside the medina, we visited Dar Bartha Museum, a former royal palace turned into a museum. Peace and calm were the main attractions there. The curated garden, shaded paths, and especially the massive leccio, or holm oak (Quercus ilex), near the entrance, welcomed us into the expansive tiled courtyard. After the bustle outside the gates, the museum felt less like another stop to complete and more like a place to exhale.

The river surprised us too. We hadn’t realized that Fez even had a river running through it until we caught a glimpse of it at Place Rcif. The Fez River, or Oued Fes, once fed a sophisticated urban water system, with canals supplying neighborhoods, gardens, and workshops. In the medina, the main course is associated with Oued Bou Khrareb ("river of filth"), a name that suits some of the smells we encountered. Much of the river is now hidden, covered, diverted, or folded into the city’s complicated infrastructure. Like many things in Fez, it’s present even when you can’t quite see it.

These excursions and viewpoints recalibrated the trip. Fez is not only a maze of alleys. It is a landscape, a water system, a set of neighborhoods, and a city under economic pressure.

Ahmed mentioned that many people live inside the medina because it is cheaper than living outside it. He talked about rents, air conditioning costs, solar panels as an economic decision rather than a simple environmental one, and young Moroccans leaving for work, often manual labor, with Spain as a major destination. We heard these comments as fragments, not statistics, but they helped us see the medina as a lived place rather than a preserved stage set.

Nothing Special on This Street

On the third day of our stay, we were tired of being redirected on our way back to our riad. Day or night, someone was there to correct us.

"The Blue Gate is that way."
"That is not the way out."
"What are you looking for?"
"Are you lost?"
"Nothing special on this street."

Nothing menacing, but after the first time, not exactly charming anymore. The last phrase became our favorite. Nothing special on this street. Well, we chose the riad on this street, I think that is kind of special, right? Or it could be a warning label for travelers who think they are discovering something private in a city that has been handling visitors for a very long time.

Of course, the people who said this to us were often right for the average tourist trying to get to the Blue Gate. You could read it as helpful. Or you could read this as looking for an opportunity to make a little money off a very lost tourist directed to a dead-end derb. We quickly learned to ignore them and get back to our temporary home, our riad, our refuge.

There is a certain comedy in being presumed lost when you are, for once, not lost. There is also a lesson. In Fez, moving independently changes the social script. A foreigner walking confidently down a residential lane still triggers intervention. Sometimes helpful, sometimes entrepreneurial, sometimes simply curious.

Speaking of street interactions, we felt that we never quite made easy street-level connections in Fez the way we have in some other places. Smiling at strangers did not seem to function as an entry point. People did not smile back in the casual, acknowledgment-based way we are used to. This does not mean people are unfriendly. It means the codes were different, and we were not fluent in them.

After five days, we finally felt we had made a small dent with our riad hosts. Not a dramatic connection, but a real warming. Fez did not hand us intimacy quickly. It made us earn even a small ease.

Submit to the Fez

By the last full day, something had shifted.

It was Sunday. We navigated on our own. We went shopping and laughed and began to bargain without feeling completely ridiculous. We visited two museums. We roamed streets that had begun to make sense. We ended the evening in Place Rcif, eating grilled corn while dust blew across the square and a child in our group played soccer nearby with the local kids.

Vendors displayed their wares. People wandered around chatting. The square did what it had probably done every evening long before we arrived and would continue doing after we left.

It was at that moment that we finally said it: okay, Fez is not so bad. Not exactly a slogan for the tourism board, but for us it was progress. The city had not changed. We had.

And by the way, that grilled corn felt like one of the most satisfying and non-controversial purchases of the trip!  

Fez can feel overwhelming at first. The medina is loud, dusty, crowded, and relentless. Guides lead you through predetermined routes. Shopkeepers pull you into stores. The density of history and commerce can make it difficult to find your footing. Even beauty can become tiring when it comes with a sales pitch. 

But if you stay long enough in Fez, and if you resist treating the city like a checklist, something else emerges. The rhythm slows. The streets become recognizable. The same cafés appear at the right moment. The maze begins to make partial sense. Partial sense may be the only kind Fez offers, and perhaps the only kind worth asking for for a short term stay.

Five days was just enough time to start to reach this point.

Ah, and the guides. We are surprised how much we've written about guides in the post, a subject that we usually don't dedicate so many words to.  But Morocco was different. Guides help you navigate physically and mentally in a sense but they are first and foremost part of the tourism machine. We didn't have that in mind when we arrived and brought our own romantic ideas into mix, which perhaps led to some bittersweet feelings after the visit. (It doesn't help that we like to fact-check what we hear and where we were. And in that process, we find inconvenient truths and inconsistencies in what we were told.)

Would we use guides again? Yes, but probably less or much more directed about what we want to see. (Guides are economical, so why not use them?) Would we bargain for crafts differently? Absolutely. Would we stay inside a medina again? Probably yes, though we might ask more questions about light, windows, and rooftop access. Would we return to Fez? Perhaps, though its hard to say when there is much more of Morocco to visit.

Travel is not a courtroom. You do not weigh every annoyance against every pleasure and issue a verdict. In the end, it is about experience, and we had that. We had confusion, dust, cats, call to prayer, rooftops, rugs, corn, and a city that slowly became more legible. And, we had a big dose of thinking about what misplaced ideas we bring to a place and how those can play out.

And maybe that is what five days in Fez gave us: not mastery, not ease exactly, but enough familiarity to stop resisting the place and start noticing it.

Photos

  

Left: Borj Nord viewpoint looking over Fez
Center: Borj Sud viewpoint looking over Fez.

Right: View over Fez from a riad rooftop.

   

Left: Chouara Tannery - Fez, medina.

Center: Bou Inania Madrasa - Fez, medina.

Right: Art Naji - Pottery Design - Outside the medina.

  

Left: Aben Danan Synagogue in Fez.

Center: Balconies in Mellah of Fez.

Right: Courtyard of a fancy riad in Fez.

  

Left: Coin Berbere - rug shopping in Fez.

Center: Dar Ibn Khaldoun - rugs for sale.
Right: Fabrik für Stoffe loom in Fez.

  

Left and center: Fez Medina Street Signs showing different shapes.

Right: Timber bracing between structures.

   

Left: Fondouk Tazi - Poteries Istruments De Musique - wares in a side alley in Fez

Center left: Food in the medina.
Center right: L'art De Tissage Fassi - a djellaba for everyone - an "obligatory" stop on one tour.

Right: LE TRÉSOR DES MÉRINIDES - how to begin to judge what you are seeing?

   

Left and center left: Bab Boujloud (Blue Gate).

Center right: Bab Sid L'Aouad (east).

Right: Semmarin Medina Gate.

  

Left: Nejjarine Museum in Fez.
Center and right: Museo di Dar Batha in Fez.

   

Left: Neighborhood bakery in Fez medina

Center left: A man keeps the fires burning for a hammam

Center right: Place Rcif (Fez) and corn seller

Right: Water Porter Figure - Royal Gardens.

  

Left: Rainbow art alley - Fez.
Center: Slippers shopping on Rue Talaa Sghira in Fez, Morocco.

Right: A hard to find cooperative ready to sell you anything with argan in the name.

   

Views of Riad Dar Arsama Lux in Fez, Morocco. 

Non-controversial corn in Place Rcif Fez.