Isaac Newton came from here, bringing huge ideas and the keenest insights to the city from the countryside. There are yuppies and punks and distressed busboys and sewer men, but it's hard to find any big ideas here now.

The Mediterranean is not the birthplace of hom sapiens or any of its ancestors, but it is where civilization started. I was born in Nice, in a hospital by the sea on the French Riviera, and left when I was three when my family moved to Beirut. We lived in a building called the Makarem a few blocks from the Corniche and the Med. We fled there when i was 10, and settled in the Costa del Sol in an apartment overlooking the shimmering Spanish playground of drunk tourists and sunburned holiday-goers. I saw Lawrence Durrell in a weighty BBC interview swimming nude off his island home near Mikonos, and will never forget him declaring "art is for arting as fart is for farting," and I'll have to find a way to die on the shores of the same piece of water which gave me my intial purchase to this planet spinning so dependably around sunshine.

On the highway in Norway, near the Swedish border, is a footbridge built according to a design of Da Vinci. When this picture was taken by Ananda, the bridge was the only item of Leonardo's copious architectural notes which had been actually brought to life, exactly according to design. The bridge is barely noticeable to anyone driving under it. Photo of Blue on bridge is by Ananda Shields.