{"id":114,"date":"2015-07-27T13:12:26","date_gmt":"2015-07-27T17:12:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/christophertrapani.com\/wordpresssite\/?page_id=114"},"modified":"2026-07-27T13:10:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T17:10:14","slug":"cities-on-water","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/christophertrapani.com\/wordpresssite\/cities-on-water\/","title":{"rendered":"The Geography of Cities on Water"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"container\">\n<h2 style=\"padding-left: 30px; text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #ffffff;\"><strong>The Geography of Cities on Water (2009)<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h4 style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">for orchestra (3.2.3.2 \/ 4.2.2.1 \/ timp. \/ 3 perc. \/ harp \/ strings) [10:00]<\/h4>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/soundcloud%253Atracks%253A107148503&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true&amp;visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"240\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\n<div style=\"font-size: 10px; color: #cccccc; line-break: anywhere; word-break: normal; overflow: hidden; white-space: nowrap; text-overflow: ellipsis; font-family: Interstate,Lucida Grande,Lucida Sans Unicode,Lucida Sans,Garuda,Verdana,Tahoma,sans-serif; font-weight: 100;\"><a style=\"color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;\" title=\"Christopher Trapani\" href=\"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/christophertrapani\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Christopher Trapani<\/a> \u00b7 <a style=\"color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;\" title=\"The Geography of Cities on Water\" href=\"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/christophertrapani\/the-geography-of-cities-on\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Geography of Cities on Water<\/a><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"color: #ffffff;\">Shortly before my twenty-first birthday I stopped falling in love with people and started falling for cities instead. It wasn\u2019t a calculated conversion; one day I just stopped checking out smiles and thighs and found myself drawn to tramways and cobblestones, streetlamps and archways. I\u2019d just begun to lose patience with a string of bespectacled\u00a0brunettes\u2014and there was Valletta: sheer sandstone ramparts rising clear out of the sea&#8230; Venice, the city for forgetting, first glimpsed at dawn as the overnight train slid down that sliver of rail into Santa Lucia&#8230; then Paris: the sheer improbability of a cathedral, on an island, in a river, at the heart of a city&#8230; I used to imagine that one\u2019s sense of self-worth could be measured by how close one lived to the Seine, til I spent two years a stone\u2019s throw from the Ile-St.-Louis, where night after night of three-euro wine on the quais, the magic gradually wore thin&#8230;<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"color: #ffffff;\">At first you think every encounter is distinct, pure,\u00a0genuine. Later you begin to realize you have a type: wandering, poorly-marked streets, preferably leading downhill to a water view. Tilting and crumbling fa\u00e7ades, remnants of a decaying grandeur. Tangiers, Dubrovnik, Bonifacio, Istanbul&#8230; Could you ever be faithful? There\u2019s always some other worn-out seaside beauty (Marseilles? Valparaiso? Zanzibar? Cape Town?) a quick flight away&#8230;\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"color: #ffffff;\"><em>The Geography of Cities on Water<\/em> is a collection of overlapping snapshots, memories with blurred edges which sometimes spill over into one another\u2014the way you can stare at the Sultanahmet skyline and think about San Francisco: Pulling into the Grand Harbour after an hour of nothing but open water&#8230; Riding tramways over concentric canals in Amsterdam&#8230; Hearing the Gonzaga fanfare to open the Regatta on the grand canal, four days after Hurricane Katrina&#8230; A long chord of ships\u2019 horns floating from the Bosphorus to my balcony&#8230;<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ffffff;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ffffff;\"><!-- container --><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #ffffff;\"><!-- section --><\/span><\/p>\n<p><!-- section --><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Geography of Cities on Water (2009) &nbsp; for orchestra (3.2.3.2 \/ 4.2.2.1 \/ timp. \/ 3 perc. \/ harp \/ strings) [10:00] &nbsp; \ufeff Christopher Trapani \u00b7 The Geography<a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/christophertrapani.com\/wordpresssite\/cities-on-water\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8220;The Geography of Cities on Water&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-114","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","entry"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Geography of Cities on Water - CHRISTOPHER TRAPANI<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/christophertrapani.com\/wordpresssite\/cities-on-water\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Geography of Cities on Water - CHRISTOPHER TRAPANI\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Geography of Cities on Water (2009) &nbsp; 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