No theme this time. I pulled five images at random from the media library behind this site, years and continents mixed together, and decided to just write about whatever came up. The draw doubled up on one island without me choosing that. I left it as it landed. Two frames from the same afternoon on Murano, shot close enough together that they’re practically the same walk. That’s what happens when you let a random number generator pick your travel photos instead of your memory. Murano gets treated as a day trip from Venice, the vaporetto out, an hour among the glass shops, the vaporetto back. It deserves longer than that. The island runs on furnaces that have been lit for centuries, and the canals are quieter than anything in Venice proper because most of the crowd never gets past the showroom nearest the dock. Walk two streets back from the water and you lose the tour groups almost entirely.

Burg Square in Bruges, one street over from the postcard version of the city.

Everyone photographs the Markt, the belfry, the gabled rooftops on the main square. Burg is smaller and did the actual governing: the old town hall, the basilica, the former courthouse, all facing each other across a space that feels more like a room than a square. It’s the kind of spot you find by accident when you’re looking for somewhere quieter to sit down, and then you realize you’re standing in front of the building where Bruges ran itself for eight hundred years.

A market hall in Italy, packed, steaks coming out of an open kitchen faster than the tables can turn over. The bistecca here is the kind that shows up rare because that’s the only way it’s served, thick cut, seared hard on the outside and left alone in the middle. Market-hall dining has become its own kind of destination in Italian cities over the last decade, stalls and counters instead of a single kitchen, and the good ones fill up on a weeknight the way a proper restaurant used to only on a Saturday.

And then the draw jumps an ocean. The Charging Bull, wedged into its little triangle of pavement near Bowling Green, permanently surrounded by people waiting for a gap in the crowd to get their photo with it. It’s a strange piece of public art to end up loving: guerrilla-installed in the middle of the night in 1989, hauled away by police within hours, reinstalled a few blocks south after enough people complained. Now it’s one of the most photographed objects in New York, standing for something the artist never intended and that nobody who visits particularly cares about. They just want the photo.

Five places, no connecting thread except that they all happened to be in the same folder. That’s the honest version of how a lot of travel photography actually gets used.

• Largo do Chiado at Night: A Brasileira, the Bronze Poet and a Floor Made of Waves
• Sintra at Noon, Venice at Midnight: Six European Cities and the Hour That Suits Them
• Porto’s Chestnut Season Is the Shoulder Season Worth Booking
• Venice at Night Is the Version No Access Fee Covers
• The 18th-Century Fountain Hidden Inside Bordeaux’s Customs Museum Courtyard
• The Bilbao Effect, 500 Years Early: Jerónimos Monastery And The Guggenheim
• Bilbao’s Quiet Renaissance: From Industrial Port to Design Destination
• Lisbon’s Seven Hills: A Walking Guide That Tells You the Truth
• New Orleans: An American City That Plays by Different Rules
• Ha Long Bay Without the Cruise Brochure

• Travel
• Italy
• Belgium
• New York
• Venice