Many of us enjoy getting stuck into a captivating novel on our travels. Whether we’re perusing the shelves of the airport bookshop for the latest bestseller or squeezing a collection of charity shop finds into our luggage for longer escapes, the concept of the holiday read has been around as long as the holiday itself.
However, in recent years, social media has developed our love of escapism through novels into actual adventures. ‘BookTok’ is among the most popular movements, a trend where users share short videos about books and trigger discussions. At the time of writing, there are just over 63 million videos branded #BookTok on TikTok.
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With books influencing our adventures more than ever before, UK-based printing company Aura Print determined the most popular European cities within the realm of literature. To do so, the team compiled a list of the 30 most populous European cities and then used Google Ngram Viewer, an online tool that allows for the exploration of language usage trends over time.
The research then picked out the number of mentions each city received between 1920 and 2019, across more than 25 million books.
So, which metropolis proved the most popular among the past century’s storytellers?
It’s London, the beating heart of the UK, that appears to have got the creative juices flowing, with an incredible 286,675,501 mentions. The revelation comes as little surprise to those of us who call the Big Smoke home, of course; some of the world’s most iconic literary characters have navigated the city’s streets on their quests. While Aura Print’s research covers books published from 1920 onwards, Dickens’ tales of misty East London alleyways and Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of Sherlock Holmes continue to influence travellers’ destinations of choice.
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The City of Light came second, with 95,290,475 mentions. The most popular decade for literary mentions of Paris was the 1920s, although more contemporary reads suggested a range from The Little Paris Bookshop to Paris is Always a Good Idea.
Rome follows in third place with 48,840,949 mentions, while Berlin claims fourth place with 37,079,709 – Florence narrowly sits in fifth place with 19,414,470.
Will the fictional tales of history’s creatives influence your next city break? Which characters will you follow in the footsteps of?