We all know that you should never judge a book by its cover. Judging a city based on how many times its been mentioned within those books, however? Absolutely fine. Especially when it’s London that has, yet again, reigned supreme. That’s right, folks – I come bearing yet another shiny award for us to attempt to precariously squeeze into London‘s full-to-bursting trophy cabinet. And today’s accolade comes courtesy of Aura Print, who have recently crowned the most written-about cities in Europe.
Having curated a list of 31 prominent European cities, the printing company scoured the pages of over 25 million novels written between 1920 and 2020 to uncover which of those cities featured the most heavily. Well, they didn’t flick through each book by hand, they used the Google Books database. But regardless, they were able to identify not only the cities that are the most adored by authors, but also the decade in which each city was most popular.
Once all the numbers were thoroughly crunched, Aura Print were able to collate their findings into a handy list. And perched at the very top of that list of the most written-about cities in Europe was, rather unsurprisingly, London.
London made a rather staggering 286,675,500 literary appearances throughout the century (most commonly in the 1960s), with three times as many references as the second-place city. London has been the bookish-backdrop to many a story over the years, sparking the imaginations and piquing the interest of many iconic authors. And from Sherlock Holmes to Bridget Jones; our capital city is the place that hundreds of legendary literary characters call home.
Paris nabbed the second spot on the list, boasting 95,290,475 literary references. And Rome came in third place with 48,840,949 appearances throughout the century.
