Songlines and Timebleeds

Fiume Retrone and the Basilica, Vicenza, Italy

I wonder how memory is encoded in place. What makes some places so powerful that they drive human memory and imagination? What about certain places provokes humans to reinscribe their stories over and over?

I think about Bruce Chatwin’s book Songlines, which described the way Australia’s aboriginals sang the stories of important landscapes, urging them into existence, or perhaps voicing their stories to reinforce these places’ importance across generations. I imagine these landscapes—significant because of imageable mountainous profiles, or perhaps because they contained water or attracted wildlife—as energized characters in a slow-moving narrative, paced to coincide with geologic time.

Through my life I have led many architectural “walking tours” for students and for the general public. While the places have varied, from Rome to Barcelona to Los Angeles to Gainesville’s Fifth Avenue/Pleasant Street neighborhood, the format is similar. As guide, I have prepared in advance to provide a brief summary of the area’s importance and its history. I have researched specific buildings, landscapes, or urban circumstances that help tell the place’s story. I balance practicalities—length and difficulty of walk, time of day, day of week—with a route that tells a compelling story. With our feet we reinforce each place’s unique story, as I understand it. Naturally, another guide would share a different story.

I am always aware of the many, many lives that contributed to the story I share, often across millennia. I have a special fascination with these deeply layered places. What about the place, itself, calls humans back generation after generation, across time? In Vicenza, Italy, humans inhabited the environs of the Bacchiglione and Retrone Rivers from at least the 3rd century BC, long before the Romans arrived. Early Christians built a church south of the Retrone River a thousand years ago. Palladio built his major works in the 16th century, with the patronage of the region’s most powerful families. What role do the Earth’s prompts play in enlivening this place, while quieting another?

I think of these thick, layered places, telegraphing their story to us across time, as Timebleeds.