Johannesburg - From the seductive charms of Paris to the vivacious streets of Rome, bustling cities make the perfect backdrop for novels. And for many, books can act as literary passports, whisking readers across the globe from the comfort of their own living space.
But which cities in Europe are the most written about in literature?
The experts at Aura Print combed through the vast expanse of the Google Books corpus, which is a repository boasting 25 million books, to identify the cumulative mentions of 31 prominent European cities across books spanning from 1920 to 2019.
And beating all its European counterparts by a landslide, London snagged the top spot on the list to be crowned Europe’s most popular city in literature.
Being featured an astonishing 286,675,501 times, this is nearly three times more than all other cities analysed.
“Dubbed by Charles Dickens as the ‘magic lantern’ that fired his creativity, the British capital has played host to a multitude of novels over the last century,” the researchers explained.
Trailing behind is Britain’s age-old cross-Channel rival, the beguiling French capital, Paris. “Clocking in at a mind blowing 95,290,475 literary mentions, the romantic and intriguing City of Lights has charmed and inspired a plethora of romance and fiction authors,” the researchers said.
The Eternal City, Rome claimed the third spot with 48,840,949 mentions, triumphing over its fellow Italian cities with an impressive 74% greater share of literary attention than Florence (6th), Venice (12th) and Milan (17th), on average.
“From its glorious imperial past to the vibrant present, the Italian capital makes a captivating backdrop for books of all genres,” the researchers said.
Whipping up fourth place with a significant 37,079,709 mentions in books is Berlin.
“Steeped in history with a turbulent past, the partially destroyed German capital offers a striking cityscape, serving as a wellspring of inspiration for historical fiction and thriller writers,” Aura Print explained.
Rounding off the top five most written about cities is Moscow. “A city of enigmatic paradoxes and captivating cultural histories, the Russian capital has entranced novelists for decades, accumulating a significant 31,405,361 literary references,” the researchers said.
In order to compile the research, Aura Print compiled a list of the most prominent European cities, establishing a seed list comprising 31 cities. They then utilised Google Ngram Viewer to scour a large corpus to find the percentage of mentions for each city during every decade for the past 100 years (1920 - 2019).
To ensure relevancy, each search term was appended with the “_NOUN” suffix, indicative of instances where the term was used within a noun-related context. Subsequently, the experts obtained the total number of word count spanning the last century from Ngram and calculated the number of mentions accrued by each city. To do this, the total word count was multiplied by the corresponding percentage of mentions.
Finally, the total occurrences from 1920 to 2019 were ranked descendingly to reveal the most popular European cities named in literature.
Here are some European book recommendations from the experts at Aura Print:
London:
-A Tale of Two Cities, Sherlock Holmes, The House by the Thames
Paris:
Paris Is Always A Good Idea, The Little Paris Bookshop, The Paris Wife
Rome:
Eat, Pray, Love, Conclave, Four Seasons in Rome
Berlin:
Goodbye to Berlin, Alone in Berlin, The Artificial Silk Girl
Moscow:
A Gentleman in Moscow, Gorky Park, In the First Circle