Which European city appears the most often in literature?
August 22, 2023, 10:51am
If you guessed London, you’re right—London is mentioned at least three times more often than any other European city. (Wonder why?)
As Travel Daily reports, a digital printing company called Aura Print has apparently processed the entire Google Books database to “identify the cumulative mentions of 31 prominent European cities across books spanning from 1920 to 2019,” as well as the decades in which they were the most popular. Here are the results:
| Rank | European City | Most popular decade | Total occurrences in books (1920-2019) |
| 1 | London | 1960s | 286,675,501 |
| 2 | Paris | 1920s | 95,290,475 |
| 3 | Rome | 1920s | 48,840,949 |
| 4 | Berlin | 1940s | 37,079,709 |
| 5 | Moscow | 1980s | 31,405,361 |
| 6 | Florence | 1920s | 19,414,470 |
| 7 | Vienna | 1980s | 18,995,437 |
| 8 | Athens | 1960s | 15,118,606 |
| 9 | Dublin | 1920s | 15,021,998 |
| 10 | Amsterdam | 1990s | 12,868,807 |
| 11 | Brussels | 1990s | 10,949,717 |
| 12 | Venice | 1920s | 10,237,695 |
| 13 | Madrid | 1990s | 9,883,636 |
| 14 | Stockholm | 1980s | 8,813,100 |
| 15 | Warsaw | 1980s | 8,054,316 |
| 16 | Munich | 1990s | 8,025,343 |
| 17 | Milan | 1960s | 7,917,978 |
| 18 | Copenhagen | 1950s | 7,317,785 |
| 19 | Prague | 1960s | 6,702,244 |
| 20 | Porto | 1920s | 6,604,087 |
If you’re looking for some London-centric books to read (and don’t want to just throw a dart at your bookshelf), here are a few suggestions. Prefer Paris? Try a book from this outsider reading list. Or perhaps you’d like to explore literary Dublin. Have fun out there.
