Seville at Christmas: A Short Return to a Familiar City

Walking Back Into Seville ~ Christmas Morning, Statues, and the River ~ 

Triana and Ceramics ~ Food, Coffee, and the Real Itinerary ~ A Slower Return ~ Photos

   

  

Top row, left: Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo - Seville, Spain
Top row, center: Parque de María Luisa - Seville, Spain

Top row, right: Pasarela sobre el Guadalquivir - Seville, Spain
Bottom row, left: Lampara Santana Mercado Feria - Seville, Spain

Bottom row, center: Real Parroquia de Santa María Magdalena, de Sevilla - Seville, Spain

Bottom row, right: Setas de Seville, Spain

We first visited Seville in 2014 as part of a larger trip through Spain in 2014. That visit was packed with the usual first-time Seville energy: the cathedral, the Alcázar, bike tours, tapas, and the small thrill of realizing that the city was not just beautiful, but also easy to like.

More than a decade later we found ourselves back again, this time for a short Christmas 2025 escape. The goal was simpler: take it easy, walk around, eat well, drink good coffee, and see what happened when we returned to a city we already knew we liked.

The timing introduced a small twist. Many museums, galleries, and venues were closed around the holiday. Seville slows down noticeably at Christmas, and we occasionally found ourselves standing in front of doors that would not open again until after the festivities. This is the sort of travel lesson one relearns every few years: holidays are charming until you want to enter a museum. Still, Seville proved forgiving. A closed door in Seville usually means there is a street, a plaza, a church, a café, or a bar nearby willing to take over the itinerary.

Walking Back Into Seville

We spent a good part of the trip wandering neighborhoods and parks, including the leafy Jardines de Murillo and the broader Parque de María Luisa. The two spaces feel different, even if both are perfect for slowing down between meals. The Murillo Gardens sit beside Santa Cruz and trace their history back to gardens associated with the Alcázar. Parque de María Luisa is larger and grander, developed from the former gardens of the Palacio de San Telmo and later shaped into Seville’s great public park.

That difference matched our mood. Sometimes we wanted narrow streets, orange trees, and small turns. Sometimes we wanted long paths, tiled benches, fountains, and the feeling of being able to walk off lunch without formally admitting that was the goal.

Returning to the Setas de Sevilla in Plaza de la Encarnación was one of the highlights. We had first seen the giant wooden “mushrooms” in 2014, when they still felt like a slightly improbable object that had landed in the middle of the city. This time the visit included Feeling Seville, a short audiovisual and sensory experience added to the attraction. It is the kind of thing that could easily be too much, but we were in a holiday mood and willing to be lightly processed by mist, light, sound, and civic branding. The view from above still works beautifully.

Christmas Morning, Statues, and the River

Christmas morning was spent strolling through the old town, where statues and small discoveries punctuated the walk. We passed monuments to Francisco Palacios “El Pali”, the Sevillanas singer closely associated with the city, and Pastora Imperio, one of the great figures of flamenco. These are the kinds of monuments that are easy to miss if you are rushing toward the cathedral or Alcázar, but on a slower trip they become part of the day’s texture.

Later we wandered farther afield and crossed the river for a walk along the somewhat forgotten Pasarela sobre el Guadalquivir, a quiet walkway extending into the river landscape. It was not a major sight, and that was partly the appeal. After the decorated streets and central plazas, it felt good to stand near the river and look back at the city from a less polished angle.

Triana and Ceramics

One of our main stops was in Triana at the Centro Cerámica Triana, a small museum built inside a preserved ceramic factory. Triana’s identity has long been tied to ceramics, especially tiles, and the museum does a good job of making that history tangible without overexplaining it. You see the industrial bones of the place, the kilns and workshop traces, and then the finished objects that came from this neighborhood tradition.

Inside we saw the permanent Centro Cerámica Triana Collection and a couple of temporary exhibitions, including CENTRO CERÁMICA TRIANA PERFILES and Fernando Malo – VIAJE MUDÉJAR. The contemporary ceramic shows ended up being more engaging than expected. This happens often enough that we should stop being surprised by it: give us a compact museum, a specific local craft tradition, and a few quiet rooms, and we are usually happy.

The trip also had its share of small church stops and neighborhood discoveries, including Parroquia de San Andrés. There, as in other Sevillian churches, the richly dressed devotional sculptures reminded us how visual and theatrical religious culture can be in this part of Spain. Even when you are not there for Holy Week, the preparations, imagery, and devotional atmosphere are never very far away.

Food, Coffee, and the Real Itinerary

Food and coffee filled in the rest of the days, as they tend to do when a trip is short and the official plan is deliberately loose.

Our first dinner was at Marabunda Sevilla Restaurante tapas Bar, a lively tapas spot near our hotel. Lunch on Christmas Eve was at Bar Manolo León – JUAN PABLOS, followed the next day by Christmas lunch at Restaurante conTenedor, a more ingredient-focused Andalusian restaurant. (We would return again for lunch at conTenedor - one of our favorite dining experiences of the trip.) Christmas day dinner was a simpler tapas affair at La Sede – Tapas Bar, while our final night wrapped up with tapas at Bar Sal Gorda.

One food discovery that followed us home was ajo blanco, the chilled Andalusian soup made from almonds, bread, garlic, olive oil, vinegar, water, and salt. It is often described as a white gazpacho, though that undersells it a little. The version we kept ordering was cool, creamy, sharp, and nutty, usually served with grapes, sometimes with a drizzle of olive oil or a few almonds on top. It is mostly associated with warm weather, especially in Andalusia, where cold soups make obvious sense, but eating it in December did not seem wrong to us. Seville at Christmas still has enough southern light to make chilled almond soup feel perfectly reasonable. Since returning home, we have been making it ourselves, which is always a sign that a trip has successfully altered the kitchen.

Coffee stops were an important side mission of the trip. After our Triana museum visit we stopped at Selva Coffee for a pour-over and some light bites. Very nice vibe. Later we tried Kioscoffee Sevilla, Hispalis Café, and East Crema Coffee Santa María, several of which appeared on the European Coffee Trip guide we were loosely following.

“Loosely following” is the key phrase. Specialty coffee lists are useful, but they also have a way of turning grown adults into migratory birds with tote bags. We tried to keep things reasonable, which means we only crossed town for coffee a few times and pretended each time it was on the way to something else.

A Slower Return

In the end, the holiday closures mattered less than we expected. Seville works well when you slow down: wandering streets, stopping for coffee, crossing bridges, drifting into churches, and occasionally circling back to places you visited years earlier.

It was not a trip built around checking off major sights. We had already done some of that in 2014. This time was more about testing the pleasure of return: seeing what felt familiar, what had changed, and what we noticed only because we were not trying quite so hard.

A few days in Seville at Christmas gave us less access to formal attractions, but maybe more access to the city as a lived place. Or at least to the version of the city available to two people walking between meals, mildly under-planned, and still capable of being pleased by a good tile, a river path, and a decent pour-over.

Photos

  
Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo - Seville, Spain

 
Left: Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo 01 - Seville, Spain
Right: Centro Cerámica Triana - Seville, Spain

  

Left: Centro Cerámica Triana - Seville, Spain.

Center: Centro Cerámica Triana - Exhibit PERFILES

Right: Centro Cerámica Triana  - Exhibit Fernando Malo VIAJE MUDÉJAR

  

Left: East Crema Coffee Santa María (Specialty Coffee Sevilla)

Center: Kioscoffee Seville, Spain
Right: Selva Coffee - Seville, Spain

  

Left: Food at Alma Mater Terraza Restaurante - Ajo blanco

Center: Food at Bar Manolo León - JUAN PABLOS - Ajo blanco

Right: Food at Bar Manolo León - JUAN PABLOS - Salmorejo Cordobés

  
Left: Food at Bar Sal Gorda - Ceviche

Center: Food at conTenedor - arroz crujiente

Right: Food at La Sede - Tapas Bar -Tuna

  

Left: Food at conTenedor - eggplant

Center: Menu at conTenedor - Seville, Spain
Right: Inside of conTenedor - Seville, Spain

  

Left: Jardines del Guadalquivir - Seville, Spain

Center: Laberinto of the Jardines del Guadalquivir - Seville, Spain
Right: Laberinto of the Jardines del Guadalquivir - Seville, Spain

  
Left: Jardines de Murillo - Seville, Spain

Center and right: Parque de María Luisa - Seville, Spain


   

Setas de Sevilla

  

Left: Statue of Francisco Palacios 'El Pali' - Seville, Spain

Center: Statue of Pastora Imperio - Seville, Spain

Right: Statue by Pietro Torrigiano - San Jerónimo penitente (c. 1525) - Seville, Spain

  
Left: Statue - Gustavo Adolfo Becquer Monument - Seville, Spain
Center: Statue - Monumento a Bartolomé Esteban Murillo - Seville, Spain

Right: Statue - Monumento a la Infanta Maria Luisa - Seville, Spain

Travelmarx Winter 2025 Playlist – Black Sheep Boy

A composite image of 36 albums used in this playlist.

“I’m the family’s unowned boy”...We like that phrase from Okkervil River song "Back Sheep Boy" and decided on that for the secondary title for this season’s playlist. Being a “black sheep” is a badge of honor. A badge that means independence, creativity, or in the least, the courage to defy expectations. We don’t need our wool dyed so black is fine. The playlist is here on Spotify.

Beirut – album “Gallipoli”, track “Corfu”
Nev Cottee – album “Broken Flowers”, track “Open Eyes”
Okkervil River – album “Black Sheep Boy", track “Black Sheep Boy”
Hannah Miette, Rozi Plain – album “Hanna Miette”, track “Let Me Know”
Habe – album “Far From Everywhere”, track “Not Anywhere”
Grayson Hamm – single “Whiskey River”

Jonathan Jeremiah – album “We Come Alive”, track “How Can I Shake You Out of My Mind?”
John Stammers – album “Waiting Around”, track “Waiting Around”
Fink – album “Sort of a Revolution”, track “Walkin’ in the Sun”
The Saxophones – album “No Time of Poetry”, track “Wayward Men – feat. Indigo Street”
FC Atlaska – album “Rhythms from the Schelde Valley”, track “Two Moons Away”
Later. - album “The Daydream (EP)”, track “All the Time”

Toro y Moi – album “What For?”, track “Lilly”
Steve Gunn – album “Daylight Daylight”, track “A Walk”
MEZERG – album “Extended Play”, track “Sitting on a Log”
Clara Rockmore – album “Music In and On the Air”, track “The Swan”
Luce – album “Blue Star Soft Eyes”, track “Shadows and Shells”
Pharaoh – album “The Heat Warps”, track “Pharoah”

Alan Sparhawk, Trampled by Turtles – album “Alan Sparhawk with Trampled by Turtles”, track “Get Still”
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith – album “Gush”, track “Gush”
Velvet Meadow – album “Saturday Morning Meadowlies”, track “The Velvet Showdown”
Flavor Crystals – album “The Shive of the Flavor Crystals”, track “Antenna House”
Aunt Cynthia’s Cabin – album “Misty Woman”, track “Misty Woman”
Bahamas – album “Pink Strat”, track “Whole, Wide, World”

Marty O’Reilly & The Old Soul Orchestra – album “Pray for Rain”, track “Cinnamon Tree”
Ask Carol – album “AC II: Desert Sky”, track “Cold July”
Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp – album “We’re OK. But We’re Lost Anyway”, track “Blabber”
Monde UFO – album “7171”, track “Lowered Shelf”
Saya Gray – single “ANNIE, PICK A FLOWER..(MY HOUSE)”
Chinless Wonder – album “Moon Phaser”, track “Ynda”

Alex Maas – album “Luca”, track “Shines Like the Sun (Madeline’s Melody)”
CCFX – album “CCFX”, track “The One to Wait”
Jerkclub – album “Night Fishing On a Calm Lake”, track “Night Fishing On a Calm Lake”
Vinnie Who – single “Blue Blue Sky”, track “Velvet Sleep”
Kyle Scott Wilson – album “Journey to the Center of the Egress’ dream”, track “Traveling High”
NIGHTIES – single “saying hi”

Transplants, Time, and the Stranger Within

When we first wrote about living abroad, we described the experience as a kind of transplanting: uprooting from familiar soil and learning to grow in a new cultural ground. We also noted similarities between transplanting and aging. Both migration and aging confront us with the loss of taken-for-granted fluency. In a new country, even ordering coffee or catching a joke requires conscious effort. With aging, the body and social roles we once inhabited without thought begin to demand renegotiation.

Alfred Schutz, in his essay The Stranger, discusses how outsiders must explicitly learn what insiders assume. Later theorists of sociocultural models (TSCM) describe this as the accumulation of cultural “recipes” — scripts for how to act, speak, and belong. Massie and Staude, in their phenomenology of ageing, show that growing old is also an accumulation: of biological rhythms, personal narratives, and historical time. Both processes force us to confront our own strangeness in the world. We wrote Transplants: Notes on Aging and Living Abroad before discovering these references and were delighted to find our observations mapped onto a much larger conversation.

Living abroad, we find ourselves caught between languages and identities, neither fully at home nor fully foreign. Aging, too, places us in a liminal space: still ourselves, but transformed, negotiating continuity and change. To be a transplant is to be a stranger; to age is to become a stranger to oneself. In both cases, the task is not to erase difference but to learn how to live meaningfully within that strangeness.

Learning to Laugh Again

One of the first signs of being a stranger abroad is missing the punchline. Humor depends on shared references, rhythms, and cultural cues. In Italy, we’ve often found ourselves smiling politely while others laugh, only later realizing the joke hinged on a pun or gesture we hadn’t yet absorbed. Schutz would say that insiders rely on “recipes,” while the stranger must consciously accumulate them. Each missed joke becomes a tiny research project, a reminder that belonging requires deliberate learning.

Aging works in a similar way. Massie and Staude describe aging as the intertwining of biological, narrative, and historical time. Just as the migrant must relearn cultural cues, the aging person must relearn bodily ones. A staircase once climbed without thought now requires calculation. A word once recalled instantly now hovers just out of reach. The fluency of youth — cultural or physical — gives way to slower, more deliberate accumulation.

Visibility and Invisibility

Living abroad, our accent marks us as visible. Even when we blend in with clothing or gestures, a single phrase betrays us. At the same time, there are moments of invisibility: when locals dismiss us as not quite part of the conversation, or when our cultural references simply don’t register. Schutz’s stranger is caught in this paradox, both hyper-visible and overlooked.

Aging carries a similar paradox. Wrinkles, slower movement, and retirement make one visible as “old,” yet at the same time older people are rendered invisible in social life. Massie and Staude call this a form of “social death,” where retirement or frailty shifts identity from agent to dependent. In both migration and aging, visibility and invisibility are intertwined experiences of being marked as other.

Negotiating Identity

In our earlier blog we wrote of being “neither fish nor fowl,” caught between American and Italian identities. Aging, too, produces hybrid identities. We remain ourselves, but transformed. Looking at an old photograph, we see someone who is both us and not us. We are looking at stranger we once were. Schutz’s phenomenology of the stranger and Massie and Staude’s analysis of aging converge here: identity is not a fixed essence but a negotiation across time and culture.

The Strange Shape of Time

Living abroad has made us aware of all sorts of unfamiliar rhythms — how people speak, joke, gesture, or structure conversations. But aging brings its own unexpected rhythm, one that doesn’t have much to do with culture and everything to do with time itself.

We came across a study from Yorkshire (Degnen) that stayed with us. The older adults in it didn’t tell stories in neat, chronological order. Their conversations wandered comfortably between decades, past and present sitting side by side as if they had always belonged together. Details that younger listeners might dismiss as “irrelevant” carried their own meaning — a kind of shorthand built from a lifetime of associations. And sometimes the pace of these stories drifted free of what others expected, unfolding in their own logic.

It struck us because it felt familiar. Living abroad has its own version of nonlinear time — moments when the past intrudes unexpectedly, when old habits collide with new contexts, when identity refuses to stay in sequence. Aging just makes this temporal looseness more visible. Perhaps both experiences reveal that time is less of a straight line and more of a shape we grow into. We are invited to embrace nonlinearity.

When Time Stops

We were thinking about this recently as we finished Book Three of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume. Its protagonist, Tara, becomes a stranger not because she relocates, but because time itself stops for her. She wakes each day into the same date while the world continues around her in ways she can sense but not join. Tara must relearn the “recipes” of this new condition — how to navigate relationships, routines, memory, and meaning when chronology refuses to cooperate.

Reading her while thinking about migration and aging, we realized that strangeness is not only spatial or bodily. It can also be temporal: a sudden shift in the rules by which life proceeds. Tara’s halted time echoed something we were already feeling — that belonging, at any age, is partly the work of adapting to a world that will not stay still, or in her case, will not move forward.

Toward a Philosophy of Transplants

To live abroad is to transplant oneself into new soil. To age is to discover that the soil itself shifts beneath us. Both experiences demand humility, patience, and creativity. They remind us that cultural or bodily fluency is never permanent. We are always accumulating, relearning, renegotiating. Migration and aging, then, are variations on a theme: becoming a stranger and learning how to inhabit that strangeness.

Living Meaningfully Within Strangeness

To migrate is to discover that the familiar world has become foreign. To age is to discover that the familiar self has become foreign. In both cases, we are transplants — uprooted from the soil of fluency and asked to grow again in uncertain ground. Schutz’s stranger reminds us that belonging requires conscious accumulation of models. Massie and Staude remind us that aging reshapes time itself, expanding the past and narrowing the future. Our own experience abroad reminds us that these processes are not failures but invitations: to relearn, to renegotiate, to live deliberately.

A line from that Yorkshire study keeps echoing for us: older adults aren’t “lost in the past” at all — the past simply moves more freely through their stories, another thread in the weave of lived experience. What can look nonlinear or “irrelevant” from the outside is often just a different way of stitching moments together. That image stays with us. It suggests that strangeness, whether cultural or temporal, isn’t a deficit but another kind of knowing, a rhythm shaped by the layers a person has lived through.

Perhaps this is the gift hidden in strangeness. Migration and aging strip away the illusion of permanence. They reveal identity as a rhythm of continuity and change. To be a transplant is to accept that roots can grow in new soil. To age is to accept that roots deepen even as branches bend. In both, the task is not to recover lost fluency but to cultivate meaning in the midst of difference.

The Noise on the Walls: Urban Static

64 images of graffiti and murals captured by 

Travelmarx over the years.

Walking around Bergamo, we often pass the same walls over and over: stone, stucco, concrete, each carrying the palimpsest of tags, scrawls, throw-ups, and the occasional ambitious mural. Most of it we don’t like. Some of it is clever. Much of it feels like a form of urban abrasion. But whether we admire it, tolerate it, or quietly curse it, we can’t not see it.

Graffiti is visual noise. It fills the eye the way unwanted sound fills the ear—insistent, uninvited, and undeniably present. And like noise, graffiti has a way of revealing a city’s and a culture's restlessness.

Noise is a theme we’ve returned to before, in posts as different as our musing on Schopenhauer’s irritation with clatter (Schopenhauer, On Noise), our exploration of disruption across centuries (Noise and Nuisance; Bronzino to Babbage), and a more personal reflection on how sound becomes a kind of knowing (You Know It When You Hear It). Graffiti simply completes the metaphor. If noise is the soundtrack of a city that refuses to be orderly, graffiti is the handwriting of that refusal.

The Clean Surface Myth

Cities like the idea of cleanliness—clean streets, clean façades, clean narratives about who belongs and who gets to speak. You see this in the small brigade of city workers who occasionally repaint a tagged wall. The smooth, monochrome patch lasts days, maybe hours, until someone adds their mark. The next repaint will come when it comes. Meanwhile, the cycle—paint, tag, paint, tag—becomes its own quiet commentary.

Public space isn’t neutral, no matter how clean it looks. Corporate logos, government messages, shop signage, and advertising already occupy most of what we see. Graffiti just breaks the illusion that these sanctioned voices are the natural state of things. It interrupts, inserts, and insists.

The Easy Explanation We Don’t Fully Buy

There’s a standard explanation for graffiti: it’s the voice of the marginalized, the unsanctioned speech of those without access to the official channels. And yes, sometimes that is true. But walking around Bergamo, this neat narrative never quite matches what’s on the walls.

Most of what we see doesn’t feel like political expression or a plea to be acknowledged. It feels more like a motorbike revving under your window at midnight—an assertion of presence, not a manifesto.

And anyway, if feeling unheard automatically produced graffiti, wouldn’t we all be out tagging? We’re not. When we feel frustrated or overlooked—or simply full of opinions—we take the official routes: voting, emailing the comune, participating in neighborhood committees, or writing blog posts that attempt (sometimes unsuccessfully) to make sense of it all. These are our sanctioned modes of expression. Slow, structured, polite.

No one is spray-painting È vietato ignorare questo blog post on a retaining wall.

So maybe the graffiti–oppression narrative is too tidy. Perhaps graffiti isn’t always a voice from the margins, but a voice that simply refuses to wait. Graffiti collapses time: it speaks now. Civic channels take their time: they speak eventually, after stamps and signatures and agenda items.

The discomfort we feel may not be moral at all—it may be temporal. Graffiti is impatient; we are happy to be patient.

Disorder as Ritual

Graffiti fits neatly into the anthropological idea of ritual inversion—those moments when rules are gleefully broken to reveal how fragile the rules really are. Carnival does this with masks and parody; graffiti does it with paint.

The mess is not a side effect. It is the gesture.

A tagged wall today may be a neat monochrome surface tomorrow, and then a clean canvas again by the end of the week. The city is always smoothing things over; writers are always filling them back up. Impermanence becomes the rhythm.

Texture Over Cleanliness

One idea we keep circling back to is how differently we respond to images of people on walls. We realize we’re more susceptible to graffiti that depicts human forms, especially faces—whether part of a formal mural or something more spontaneous, a piece of graffiti that has drifted into mural territory. The line between the two is often blurry anyway.

So before we get too far, it’s worth admitting that not all wall markings land the same way. Murals—commissioned or not—tend to feel intentional, composed, legible. Faces, in particular, can stop us in our tracks: eyes gazing down, features rendered with surprising tenderness or defiance. These images show up in our photos far more often than scribbles or territorial tagging. They evoke something: recognition, curiosity, maybe even connection.

But are they really different? Or are we just more comfortable with certain forms of visual interruption than others?

Even the most beautiful mural is still an intervention on a wall that wasn’t blank by accident. It claims space just as tagging does. The difference may lie less in the act than in our willingness to decode the result. A portrait offers us an entry point—a face is a language we understand instinctively—while a tag demands fluency in a code we don’t speak.

Perhaps murals and graffiti are not opposing categories but points on the same continuum of urban expression, one simply easier for us to welcome. Beauty can be a softening agent. It can make us forget that the gesture underneath—the insistence on being seen—belongs to the same family as the scribbles we tend to dismiss.

One of the quiet surprises of travel is realizing how much a city’s character comes from the things you didn’t go there to see. London’s layers, Lisbon’s flourishes, and Reykjavík’s bursts of color and whimsy all become part of a place’s mental map.

When we visited Reykjavík years ago, the street art was impossible to ignore—clever, bold, often beautiful, and woven into the city’s fabric. It didn’t feel like vandalism or rebellion; it felt like the city making itself visible in its own energetic way. Not unlike noise, which you never plan for but remember anyway.

Clean walls can make a place feel eerily blank, as if life had been pressed flat. Graffiti—even when messy—adds texture. Yes, some texture is good, right?

What Graffiti May Actually Be Saying

Walking past tagged walls the other day on our way to the hospital, we wondered: what exactly is the message here? Are we meant to decode it? Is there anything to decode? Maybe the message is simply the mark itself—a claim, a moment of visibility, a quick refusal to be quiet.

Or maybe the message is aimed at other writers, not at us at all. The city becomes, in effect, someone else’s chat thread—one we’re reading without fully understanding the references.

Closing Reflection

Graffiti isn’t easy to like, and it’s probably not meant to be. It unsettles the visual field the way noise unsettles silence. But both remind us that cities are not curated exhibits; they are lived-in, contested, slightly unruly things.

Some people speak through walls; we speak through notes, photos, and posts. All of it is a kind of noise—some sprayed, some typed—each insisting on being noticed in its own way.

Maybe what troubles us most is not that graffiti is there, but that we’re not always sure what it’s asking us to notice. And maybe that uncertainty is part of what makes a city feel alive.

Living the Dream (Beta)

 

Living the Dream™ app inputs (left) and output (right). The app can never be built.

A friend said to us once, "You two are living the dream!" when she found out we were going to live in Italy. It was meant kindly, and we took it that way. Still, the phrase gave us pause. Whose dream exactly? And what did we do to enable this consciously or unconsciously? 

It’s a curious statement, because it tells us as much about the person who says it as it does about our lives here. Their imagined Italy streams in (olive trees, late-afternoon glow, maybe a nonna with an apron and wooden spoon), while our actual Italy bustles around us: conversations, waiting in line at the post office, a walk to a Sunday dinner at a trattoria, and the day-to-day texture that never shows up on postcards.

None of this is bad. It’s just more complicated than the dream phrase suggests. And so, to understand this dreamy projection, we imagined building an app.

The App

We would call it Living the Dream™. The idea is that you open the app and dial in your ideal life in Italy as if tuning an old stereo: financial comfort, preferred location, weather, community, and expectations. A few simple questions, press “Generate Dream”, and eccola!

But what comes out of the app may surprise you.

Dream Inputs

Financial Situation
Settings:

• Comfortable enough to buy an aperitivo once a week.
• Rent is manageable.
• Own a crumbling-yet-charming palazzo.
• Able to renovate a medieval tower.

Impact: 3%. Turns out money helps, but only to a certain point.

Locale Selector
Settings:

• Hilltop village (but not the one with 1-euro houses).
• Periphery of a city with bars on lower windows.
• Urban palazzo with questionable plumbing.
• Near a strong Wi-Fi signal.
• Anywhere but where I am now.

Impact: 7%. After three weeks, any place reveals its traffic, noise, or neighbor who drills at 7 a.m.


Bureaucracy Tolerance
Settings:

• Scared of paper cuts.
• Forms induce hives.
• You queue with impatience.
• Zen monk of the queue.

Impact: highly erratic. Occasionally transcendental.


Community & Belonging
Settings:

• You know where the grocery store is.
• You know the name and birthday of the barista in the café you frequent.
• People beep and wave at you when you are walking on the street.
• You are invited to family functions.
• You find yourself showing up to funerals with hesitation.

Impact: 22%. A fact we’ve rediscovered many times and is often underestimated.


Expectations Knob
Settings:

• Instagram Dream
• Aspirational Mood Board
• Average Tuesday Realism

Impact: Unknown. Expectations are a setting that never stays put.


Weather Sentiment
Settings:

• You need to wear sunglasses every day.
• You want winter only long enough to justify a new coat.
• You function best with moody, overcast skies.
• You prefer weather that is not actively trying to prove a point.

Impact: 5%. Meteorology resists optimization. The weather doesn’t care about your settings.


Hidden Setting: Presence

Invisible to the user. Adjusted by sleep, good walks, friendships, and noticing small joys.

Impact: Consistently the greatest.

The Unexpected Output

After dialing your settings and pressing “Generate Dream”, you might anticipate a score of feasibility for your dream, the name of a town to start your dream, or something to get you going. But instead, the app – stubbornly or wisely – pauses for a moment and gives it output.

If you are not living in Italy: the output is the moment that convinced you the dream was worth pursuing in the first place. A small, ordinary scene that didn’t look like much at the time, but lodged itself somewhere deeper and quietly refused to let go. A reminder.

If you are already living in Italy: the output is something like this: "You were living the dream last Sunday at 1:14 p.m.”

No score. No city recommendation. Just a moment.

The app has decided that the dream is not settings. It’s an instance. A flash. Something lived but rarely labeled. A moment lived whether you are. A moment that is one of many on your path to achieving the dream.

Whose Dream Is It, Really?

When someone says, "You’re living the dream," we hear it differently now. It’s not about perfection or escape. It’s about the very human instinct to imagine that somewhere else—or someone else—has cracked the code.

But our fictional app insists otherwise: There is no code to crack. Your dream isn’t built from optimized parameters. It’s assembled from moments you noticed. It's created in real time, without settings, and often without realizing you have created it until much later.

And that friend who first told us we were living the dream? We hear her differently now. She’s someone who has gone after and realized many of her own dreams—raising a family, buying houses with potential and turning them into beautiful homes, even moving to Palm Springs for a while before returning to Seattle. Maybe her words weren’t a projection at all, but encouragement from someone who recognizes a familiar arc in someone else’s story.

At the same time, Italians sometimes look at us with disbelief. Why would you choose to live here they ask. Their dreams often point westward, toward the United States; ours pointed eastward, toward Italy. It’s a reminder that dreams are always relative, shaped by circumstances, culture, history, and whatever context we happen to be standing in.

An app could never truly measure or output a dream. Our app won’t ever have an official release version.

Becoming a Little Less Grinchy: Rethinking Ritual Inversions

I’ve always been a little allergic to Christmas cheer. The carols, the shopping frenzy, the forced smiles—they all felt hollow. But reading The Dawn of Everything (Graeber and Wengrow) nudged me into seeing things a little differently. What if the goodwill we show in December is not just sentimentality, but a faint echo of older, wilder traditions—moments when societies deliberately flipped their norms, from Saturnalia in Rome to the May Queen in medieval Europe? Suddenly, even the rituals that are easily dismissed look like fragments of something deeper. The past moments were when hierarchies inverted, roles reversed, generosity flowed freely. These weren’t just parties; they were experimenting in living otherwise.

We also used to look at events like Burning Man, Pride parades, or Carnival with a skeptical eye. They seemed indulgent, chaotic, or simply frivolous. The The Dawn of Everything shifted our perspective, again. Seen in this light, maybe modern festivals are not trivial distractions. They are cultural descendants of those inversion rituals. Pride reclaims stigma as a celebration. Burning Man suspends the logic of money in favor of gifting. Carnival masks dissolve everyday boundaries. Each creates a temporary world where norms are questioned, and alternatives are enacted.

We realized that our own negative view was blocking us from seeing another way to understand these events. These events are not just spectacles; they are reminders that society is not fixed, that we can imagine and embody different arrangements, even if only for a few days.

Perhaps the real lesson is that inversion festivals, ancient or modern, are less about escape than about memory: they keep alive the possibility that things could be otherwise. 

Color me a little less green this Christmas.

Lanzarote: Notes from a Brief Botanical Infatuation

Two Worlds, Two Climates ~ Group 1: Plants Seen Out and About ~ 

Group 2: Patterns from the Jardín de Cactus ~ Why These Plants Stayed with Us

Left: Plants we saw out and about on Lanzarote.

Right: Plants we saw in the Jardín de Cactus.

We can’t help it. Plants call to us to have their photos taken. You could call it travel-induced plant euphoria. I guess changing your biome wakes up one’s senses. And Lanzarote certainly counts as a biome change. A big one.

The last time we felt this moved by plants was in Japan in May 2025. We wrote about those in Temples and Shrines, Gardens and Connection to Nature in Japan.

A few days on this volcanic island and suddenly we had enough plant photos to justify at least one composite image of plants. But then we stepped foot in the beautiful Jardín de Cactus | CACT Lanzarote where we proceeded to snap hundreds of more photos. The best of the cactus garden photos are in the second composite image.

Two Worlds, Two Climates

For the climate nerds (we see you, because we are you):

• Lanzarote → BWh hot desert climate + dry Macaronesian ecoregion
• Bergamo → Cfa humid subtropical climate + temperate mixed forest ecoregion

We had to look up Macaronesia. Didn’t even know the term. The Canary Islands, Madeira, Azores, and Cape Verde are all part of this biogeographical region. Naturally, our first reaction seeing the word Macaronesian was to confuse it with the country Micronesia. How ignorant we are in geography! But now we’re obsessed, because this little chain of islands out in the Atlantic is home to plants you simply don’t see elsewhere.

While standing on Lanzarote, you can almost feel the ecological isolation. The island is small — only about 50 km by 20 km — and dry. Very dry. Depending on where you are, annual rainfall averages somewhere around 100–200 mm a year. Bergamo gets five to six times that without even trying. No wonder Lanzarote plants have attitude.

The island of Lanzarote doesn’t have the kind of tall peaks—think 1500 meters and above—that force moist trade-wind air upward to form clouds and rain. Without that orographic lift, most of the moisture simply passes by, leaving Lanzarote in its famously dry state while neighboring Canary Islands with higher mountains capture far more precipitation. For more about Lanzarote, see Lanzarote - In the Layers.

Group 1: Plants Seen Out and About

In this category, we include plants you can easily see in gardens, along roadsides, and even on beaches.

Phoenix canariensis

The Canary Island date palm. Native, iconic, and everywhere — and if you’re from a place where palms are landscaping luxuries, seeing them casually lining roads feels like cheating.

Euphorbiaceae Running the Show

By far, the family we saw the most — both in the wild and later in the cactus garden — was Euphorbiaceae. Lanzarote seems determined to make sure you notice this. Two members of this family:

• Tabaiba dulce (Euphorbia balsamifera) The official plant symbol of Lanzarote. It’s an endemic shrub perfectly suited to the island’s dry slopes and lava fields. Knobby looking, architectural, and somehow both tough and delicate. A sort of botanical embodiment of the island itself.
• Poinsettias (Euphorbia pulcherrima) It amazes us to see these grown outside while I struggle to keep ours alive through January. Some people vacation to relax; we vacation to be humbled by horticulture.

When "Weeds" Go International

Some plants we saw are not native at all — but show up so often that you start thinking they belong there.

• Rumex lunaria (family Polygonaceae) A known invasive on Lanzarote — though the story is more complicated. Recent genetic work shows that most individuals on the island descend from plants originating on El Hierro, suggesting a human‑mediated introduction rather than natural dispersion (2023 phylogeographic study). Local oral history claims it was brought to northern Lanzarote in the early 20th century, possibly the 1930s, as a drought‑tolerant forage plant (Bernardos et al.). Botanists didn’t formally record the species on Lanzarote until 1970 (Per Sunding) (research summary), but by the 1980s it was already spreading across disturbed volcanic slopes, including inside Timanfaya. Today it is often treated as a “translocated native” — a plant native to the Canary Islands but introduced to this particular island by people, now behaving invasively in fragile terrain.
• Nicotiana glauca (family Solanaceae) Tree tobacco — a plant we spotted in abandoned lots, roadside edges, and dry ravines. It isn’t native to the Canary Islands; N. glauca originates from South America. It was introduced globally in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, often as an ornamental shrub, and quickly naturalized in warm, arid climates where it thrives on disturbance. In the Canary Islands it is considered an alien, naturalized species, spreading easily through volcanic soils and human-altered landscapes (GBIF). Fast-growing and drought-tolerant, it has become a familiar presence on roadsides and in the forgotten corners of Lanzarote.

Lichens in a Desert?

Yep. Lanzarote has surprising lichen diversity. In Timanfaya we were especially struck by pale crusts and branching gray forms. One of the species associated with volcanic substrates in Macaronesian islands is Stereocaulon vesuvianum, a lichen well adapted to harsh, mineral-rich lava fields. It looks ghostly and delicate, yet survives where most plants never would.

The lichens are pioneers. They begin the long, slow process of turning rock into something resembling soil. By breaking down volcanic surfaces through chemical weathering, trapping dust, and building up tiny bits of organic matter, they quietly prepare the ground for whatever comes next.

They’re the first hint of what might someday become something lush. Not soon, not quickly, not on any human schedule — but lichens are the patient opening act that makes future plant life possible.

Names of plants in the composite image:

• Row 1
• Foliose form of lichen on lava perhaps Ramalina.
• [Amaranthaceae] Suadea vera
• [Anacardiaceae] Schinus molle
• [Apocynaceae] Stephanotis floribunda
• [Araucariaceae] Araucaria heterophylla
• Row 2
• [Arecaceae] Phoenix canariensis
• [Asparagaceae] Agave americana
• [Asparagaceae] Dracaena drago
• [Asteraceae] Launaea arborescens
• [Boraginaceae] Cordia sebestena
• Row 3
• [Crassulaceae] Sedum morganianum
• [Euphorbiaceae] Codiaeum variegatum
• [Euphorbiaceae] Euphorbia balsamifera
• [Euphorbiaceae] Euphorbia pulcherrima
• [Moraceae] Ficus macrophylla
• Row 4
• [Myrtaceae] Psidium sp.
• [Polygonaceae] Rumex lunaria
• [Solanaceae] Nicotiana glauca
• [Vitaceae] Vitis vinifera - Malvasia volcanica
• [Zygophyllaceae] Zygophyllum fontanessii

Group 2: Patterns from the Jardín de Cactus

The cactus garden is a lesson in geometry. It’s also a lesson in humility: you think you’re photographing a plant, but what you’re actually photographing is the pattern it creates. Spirals, ribs, shadows, and repeating forms. Barrel cacti arranged like green dominos. Opuntia pads making accidental abstract art. 
And everywhere, that stark contrast: bright green against black volcanic lapilli.

The garden is curated, sure, but still very much in conversation with the wild landscape around it. Stand in the right spot and you see a cactus rib echoing a terraced volcanic slope behind it. Or vice versa.

Why These Plants Stayed with Us

Lanzarote overwhelmed us with its scenery. After the initial wow moment(s), you start to slow pick out plants and understand their niche. Each plant showing you how life adapts to dryness, wind, and volcanic dust. And once you start noticing, you can’t stop. The layers of Lanzarote are discussed in the post, Lanzarote – In they Layers.

It’s a kind of travel shift: suddenly, we’re comparing our own region’s plants to those here, thinking about ecoregions and rainfall, and remembering that the planet arranges itself in patterns we barely pay attention to.

And maybe that’s the joy of travel: you leave home for a few days, you come back with too many plant photos and a renewed respect for humidity and horticulture.

If we ever get our poinsettia to survive winter in Bergamo, we’ll consider it a victory. But Lanzarote? Lanzarote doesn’t even break a sweat.

For more plant-related wanderings, see:

• Temples and Shrines, Gardens and Connection to Nature in Japan
• Sintra in Three Days - Plants and Patterns
• Selected Plants from Our Iceland Trip