Sometimes I wonder why some cities are just achingly beautiful, and others aren’t? In the last 12 months we’ve been to Varazdin, Lisbon, Ljubljana, and Lowood. Three of the cities named are stunningly beautiful – surprisingly I am going to leave Lowood off that list. Varazdin, Lisbon and Ljubljana are amazing, and they also have one thing in common – they were almost entirely wiped out by a disaster, then rebuilt. Tonight we are once again in Ljubljana – possibly the most beautiful of all.

Ljubljana was almost completely destroyed by an earthquake on Easter Sunday 1895. Enter Jože Plečnik. He was a Slovene who had trained in Vienna and Prague, then he was given the job of rebuilding Ljubljana. He belonged to the ‘Incredibly Beautiful City Winding Along Both Banks of a River’ school of architecture and he was given a blank cheque, and a recently cleared (but quite rubbley) space to work on. And work he did.

The city centre today is almost all his. There is a statue of him in the centre of town. He’s not even looking at the river or the town he designed, rather he’s staring at the window of a woman he had the hots for, but did nothing about, for the best part of 40 years! It is said he designed the city for her. She ended up marrying someone else, he kept designing beautiful buildings and staring at her window. In hindsight perhaps someone should have told Jože Plečnik that his Roxanne might have been just a tad creeped out by being stalked by an obsessive architect with enormous civil power, but an almost complete lack of social skills as far as the opposite sex goes…

I love Ljubljana. The train journey from Zagreb follows the Sava river most of the way and this trip alone reason enough to visit this part of the world. I love the way Slovenes seem to view the world – there is plenty of evidence of a deep civic pride and a real sense of social justice being enacted. And I love just wandering Jože Plečnik’s beautiful city. Then this got me thinking.

Maybe if Rosewood had a natural disaster- an earthquake like Ljubljana and Lisbon, or a fire like Varazdin? It might not be all bad. We could get a worldly Rosewood citizen with immaculate taste (even me perhaps?) to redesign the town – I would put some sort of walkway along Western Creek where it joins the Seven Mile Crossing near the pumping station…..

It mightn’t turn out better than Ljubljana, or Lisbon, or Varazdin, but I reckon it’d still put Lowood and Withcott to shame. Just saying.

F C-S