10 Most romantic places on earth

I spent last August in Venice – or Venezia, in local Italian dialect. Alas! I was all on my own on a writing project, which is a dreadful pity because Venice is one of the most romantic cities on the planet. But what is it, exactly, that makes one city romantic as opposed to another? Nairobi, for example, maybe many good things – but no one will ever accuse it of being ‘romantic’.

The elements that make a city romantic, I have discovered on my travels, are architecture, the presence of water bodies – whether sea, lake, and ponds, or continuous canals à la Venice, which is really a city on water. A romantic city must have lots and lots of little places to get ‘lost’ in, and to wine and dine.