According to Cicero, the greatest of Greek cities wasn’t in Greece itself but in Sicily. He described Ortigia, the original heart of modern-day Syracuse, as ‘the greatest Greek city and the most beautiful of all’. Situated on a small island, the city was founded by the Greek settlers from Corinth in 743 B.C.
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The Romans built the city of Netum on the slopes of Mount Alveria in south-east Sicily. Legend tells that Daedalus stayed in this city after his flight over the Ionian Sea, as did Hercules after his seventh task. Over the following centuries it flourished, until in 1693 disaster struck, in the form of an earthquake. Most of the buildings were razed to the ground and over half the population perished.
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In planning any trip most of us will have a list of must-sees, the sights that drove us to want to visit in the first place. For us, in the case of the Philippines, those sights included the rice terraces, hanging coffins and the tarsiers of Bohol. Our trip was built around these, but that left plenty of room to see much more.
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Today London is a huge metropolis, but it wasn’t always so, of course. It started as a small Roman settlement on the north bank of the River Thames, Londinium. In 200 AD a wall was built, surrounding and protecting the city. Over the centuries it grew and grew, but that Roman town remained at its heart, the original City of London.
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The colonial city of Vigan is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, for good reason. It is one of the few Spanish colonial towns in the Philippines to remain relatively intact. Its unique architecture fuses native Filipino and Oriental building styles with more typical colonial Spanish features.
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It must be museums week at Travel with Me, because after taking you to Manila’s Ayala Museum a few days ago, today I want to introduce you to a couple of museums we visited in Vigan. Although my usual preference when travelling is to be out and about absorbing local colour, time spent in a smaller museum in particular can be a very rewarding complement to this.
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It has to be said that Manila is not the most appealing of cities. While the largely reconstructed old city of Intramuros has its charms, much of the rest of the city is a sprawl of modern skyscrapers, older housing, near-slums, and very congested traffic. It is the world’s fourth largest city and one of its most densely populated. However, there are gems to be found half-hidden in the sprawl.
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There is something about a ruin that speaks to me as a photographer. The stories the old structures could tell of people and events from the past sometimes seem more vivid than those of a better-preserved or reconstructed old building. And where better to explore some ruins than among the temples of Angkor in Cambodia?
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You can live in a city all your life and never uncover all its secrets nor learn all its history. There are always new places to discover and explore. A very recent outing of discovery took me from my home in Ealing, west London, to a park in Abbey Wood on the city’s eastern fringes.
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Much of Manila is modern, manic and frenetic. While there are sights to be explored these are scattered and separated by long drives in slow-moving traffic. But Intramuros is different. The name means ‘within the walls' or 'inside the walls’, for this is the small historic walled area where the city began.
