Each city has one unique light, and light is much more than an atmospheric device propelling our perception, mood, and aesthetic sensitivities. It influences art, culture, and perhaps thought. With light, darkness helps reveal form, focus, and meaning.

In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein had some interesting comments on the parallelism between the subjective perception of light by American and Spanish artists, which was something I had thought sometimes before reading that reference when contrasting some paintings by John Singer Sargent (say, El Jaleo or Capri Girl) with those of Joaquín Sorolla (Beach at Valencia), a Spanish painter beloved by many in the American Sunbelt.

“The Spanish painters had a great influence on the French painters. They brought a new intensity of color and a new intensity of form. The Spanish light is a very intense light and it makes everything very clear and very sharp.”

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, 1933

Light and darkness in painting

To Gertrude Stein, many American artists were drawn to the same vibrant colors and bold innovation. John Singer Sargent liked the old masters Velázquez and Goya; Mary Cassatt spent time in Madrid, where she continuously visited the Prado Museum; Robert Henri studied the Spanish version of Italian chiaroscuro; etc.

There’s a reason for this, it turns out. Stein observed that Spanish painters, like young Pablo Picasso, painted an intense, clear light that contributed to boldness and directness. This unembellished, “hard and dry” clarity was also very American, according to her. This is why she favored Picasso before he was known, buying many of his paintings. The intense, vibrant light of the Iberian Peninsula, with the bright whites, blues, or bloody reds, could also be observed in similar latitudes across the United States.

Stein was an American writer and art collector based in Paris in the early 20th century who supported painters and writers before they were known, often making their early careers viable when many were one unpaid rent away from being evicted. He bought works by young Picasso, Henri Matisse, Juan Gris, and Joan Miró, recognizing the potential of writers like Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, as Hemingway explains in a few colorful lines in A Moveable Feast.

Hemingway heard Gertrude Stein refer to the group of young American writers disillusioned by World War I and living cheaply in Europe during the 1920s, thanks to the advantageous currency exchange, as the Lost Generation, which Hemingway popularized when he used it as an epigraph for his novel The Sun Also Rises.

Autumn mood

If you think light isn’t essential, ask people who had to navigate the urban darkness during mega-fires from San Francisco to New York City or the thick air pollution from burning coal that complicated navigation during London’s 1952 Great Smog.

Chinese cities suffered from a lack of light due to pollution early in the century, and many urban areas in today’s India still deal with thick smog when electric blackouts prompt buildings to turn on their gas-powered generators, adding to the particulates from heavy traffic and coal-powered energy plants.

Today, thanks to clean air regulations, most urban centers in developed cities have reduced air pollution and improved visibility, and it’s hard to picture how, a mere few decades ago, visibility in places like Los Angeles could drop below 3,000 feet (1,000 meters).

Located at approximately 37.77°N latitude, the San Francisco Bay Area isn’t mainly to the north, though as November advances, one can notice the days getting shorter; it doesn’t only get dark fast, but we begin to look for the sun’s warmth instead of eluding it, even in an area with mild, stable temperatures year-round.

Get engaged in work or any time-demanding activity, and by the time you’re more flexible in the late afternoon, you may ask where the day went. Though saying this from a latitude roughly equivalent to that of Washington DC, Madrid, or Istanbul may sound provocative to those living much further to the north, accustomed to longer days in summer and much darker ones as we get closer to the winter solstice.

Scottish Enlightenment

My sister-in-law is Scottish and grew up in Inverurie, near Aberdeen (believe it or not, I have two siblings, and both my older brother and my younger sister are married to English-speaking people, my brother to a Scotswoman, and my sister to an Oxford Englishman, so it’s quite funny when we get at the table and you can hear English in 3 different accents, as well as our Iberian languages and accents).

Scotland, so crucial to kickstart the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment in general, from David Hume to Adam Smith, to advances in textile manufacturing and James Watt’s machine engineering, has a dim light quality this time of the year, and the sun, when it does appear, tends to stay low on the horizon, which creates a diffuse glow that could attract J. M. W. Turner (see, for example, Margate (?), from the Sea, an oil painting from 1835-1840). However, Margate is in Kent, Southern England, at a mere latitude of 51.3813° N, like Calgary, Alberta, in North American terms, whereas daylight variations like the ones experienced by Aberdeen, Scotland (57.1497° N), are similar to the shortened winter days of Juneau, Alaska (at 58.3° N).

Our kids’ cousins live outside Barcelona near the pleasant town of Alella, not far from a place chosen by Johann Cruyff to play golf and concentrate his players when he was the Barça coach: Vallromanes. The place has fresher, slightly foggier, and rainy weather than Barcelona, being a mere half an hour away, so in that sense, the Mediterranean weather also has many microclimates where I come from. The light in Catalonia is, of course, bright, and when windy, any particulates suspended in the air disperse. Things look crisp, very defined, as they look on one of those windy, cold days in the Bay Area, with no sign of clouds or fog; on such days, you can see Alcatraz, the Golden Gate, the Bay Bridge, or the skyline around the Coit Tower so defined against a phenomenal sky.

By contrast, when my kids’ cousins spend their Christmas holidays in Scotland, they experience light, weather, and darkness unknown to us European meridionals. Wake up a little late—my brother tells me—and you’ll be having a late afternoon brunch when the sun is already going down, and your circadian rhythm is struggling to signal that your hormones should be producing all the components you need to spend many hours awake. They love to visit Aberdeen, but when asked whether they’d consider moving there, they look at you menacingly. Barcelona is okay for them, thank you very much, they say.

English weather

It makes sense if you know the Bay Area and have been to the Mediterranean at different times of the year and seasons, and you find parallelisms. San Francisco’s latitude is like Seville, Athens, and Lisbon, sharing weather patterns (with caveats). The Austral equivalent also makes sense, for Adelaide and Sydney can feel seasonally very similar to the Bay Area. All these places share a Mediterranean weather pattern, though factors like proximity to the sea, elevation, and regional weather patterns make places milder or more extreme.

I lived until my thirties in Barcelona (41.38°N latitude, similar to Rome, Chicago, New York, or Wellington, New Zealand), and I have little to complain about the Bay Area’s mild climate and a very particular type of light that makes me feel at home; it’s soft, often diffused due to the fog army attacking the shore in the morning, and very dynamic: in the morning, if I go to the hills I’ll notice three or four types of light and sometimes climatic conditions in a few miles and elevation difference of a mere few hundred feet—I may leave our place in the fog, go through a patch of forest where it seems to be raining as the mildew hits the trees’ branches, and pop out atop a hill where it’s bright and sunny.

In the beginning, I’d try to photograph the light changes but get frustrated as I had to keep stopping, getting the phone out of the running pouch, and trying to make the phone work like a camera (I have nothing against the incredible image algorithms that power smartphones such as the latest iPhones, though all one wants sometimes is to capture a place in the light were perceiving with our eyes, there’s no need of edulcorated pseudo-improvements upon the perceived reality).

I, of course, would end up not doing one thing or the other, so in such outings to visit proximity vistas, I’ve ended up taking most of the “pictures” I mentally frame as I go up or down a hill and experience three climates in 25 minutes.

My sister and brother-in-law live near Oxford, England (latitude 51.7520° N). The sun is currently setting around 4:18 PM in Oxford as of now, November 14, though the twilight window lasts until 4:55 PM, so it’s pitch dark at around 6 PM. When, years ago, they lived in London (latitude 51.51°N) near the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, I took the Eurostar fast train from Paris (48.86°N), walking from our home then in the 9th Arrondissement to Gare du Nord and arriving a little after two hours in St. Pancras International Station.

City of Light

Despite both cities sharing almost the same latitude, as does Oxford, their light isn’t as similar as one would think. The little difference doesn’t account for the different luminous experiences but rather local climate patterns. There are many reasons why Paris was called the “City of Light,” a nickname that dates back to the 18th century when reason and scientific thought fostered the Age of Enlightenment; however, London was the other big center of the modern industrial and intellectual revolution: Paris was literally the “City of Light” because it installed public street lighting early on to improve safety; Louis XIV installed oil lamps as early as the 1660s, which were upgraded to electric street lighting at the end of the 19th century.

The term is also associated with the subjective way people have perceived Paris’ light and changing weather. Unlike the light of, say, southerly cities such as Rome, Barcelona, or San Francisco (when it’s not foggy), light in Paris is also bright and clear, adding a soft Mediterranean-like clarity to it that bounces from the light grey city buildings along the rectilinear boulevards that went up during the Haussmannian renovation of the city.

Walk one fall or early spring day extensively along Paris intra-muros, and you’ll realize why many writers and painters thought the nickname “city of light” carried a literal meaning: as the wide boulevards reflect and amplify the light, there’s a warm, glow effect that brings out clear outlines and warmer tones.

Once one lives somewhere, it takes little time for experience to make us feel so accustomed that we soon forget this perception; this is what happened to us in Fontainebleau and then in Paris, once our “fresh regard” vanished. This is why I’ve always liked to go for a walk with somebody visiting: as your visiting interlocutor experiences reality (the fabric of reality, from people to urbanism, greenery, etc.), one is immersed into a world of perception that is “fresh” again.

If I were to define this phenomenon, which has happened to me many times, I’d describe it as if we (used to a place so much that we can’t “see,” only wander in a known environment) borrow the eyes and perception of the visitor, enjoying for a moment as the first day.

Coffee table books from a Parisian public library

And the other way around: Kirsten and I have visited many, many people in their context. When we arrive, everything is usually new to us, and we experience a sensory experience that may vary depending on the visit, as there are beautiful rainy days or beautiful experiences amid terrible weather. When we interview people in their places, we can see how our awe, surprise, gestures, and comments feed their perception as they “borrow” our fresh look, and they, too (I believe), can see their places with an aired-out crispy perception.

I wouldn’t describe London’s (or Oxford’s) light as less beautiful or so-and-so than Paris’ light. It feels definitely more precise and dramatic, in part due to the city’s character, rectilinear but charming architecture, and buildings in light colors, bringing the playful, dynamic shadows that painters like Claude Monet and Édouard Manet cherished, as well as legendary photographers experimenting with the shadows and soft, golden glow of the city, very suited for black and white: Eugène Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassaï, Robert Doisneau, and many others really changed the meaning of “City of Light,” whether capturing the city at dawn, sunset, or under street lamps.

Our first apartment in Paris was in Cité de Trévise, a cobble-stoned impasse with an antique circular fountain inside a closeted garden with old deciduous trees on it, so Parissian that Patrick Modiano mentions it at least once that I know of and the 2019 movie An Officer and a Spy (French: J’accuse), directed by controversial Roman Polanski, literally used it to recreate Paris in the 1890s. Some days, when going for an errand or coming back home, we had to put up with horse manure or people telling us to wait until the ongoing scene finished.

This came to my mind as I recalled one of my favorite moments of free time every other week, which consisted of going to work at the Médiathèque Françoise Sagan, a modern public library where it was very comfortable to work, especially at one long table in the mezzanine on top of a huge room with massive glass windows; behind the long desk, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of coffee-table books about photography, art, design, etc. I was working then on the translation from French into Spanish of one book by Swiss Italian political essayist and novelist Giuliano da Empoli, a book, by the way, that many people should read nowadays, called The Engineers of Chaos, reviewed by Simon Kuper for the Financial Times (March 13, 2019).

Translating Giuliano da Empoli’s “Les ingénieurs du chaos”

People reading the book in Spanish will get my translation of it. I enjoyed the dark late afternoons on the library’s mezzanine at the end of every week. I liked to set little challenges (say, translate a couple of pages), then rest a bit by looking at big format books with exquisite photographs. Many were dedicated to photographers who had worked extensively trying to portray the city’s particular light.

I remember Da Empoli’s book’s beginning: he makes us travel to Goethe’s perception of Venice during the city’s carnival, where everything is in suspension as long as the dance of masks, the great equalizer, lasts. Then, he goes on to set his case: how the Italian republic’s political system, of legendary instability, had become “the Silicon Valley of populism” thanks to the exploits of a family of public relations, father and son, who understood the power of the internet as a tool of mobilization of the unaffected. I left my copy in Spain but wouldn’t mind re-reading it to see how Da Empoli’s thesis sits with the current political situation post-Covid worldwide.

When I was translating the book, I read that Giuliano da Empoli first had moved years before his residence from Rome, Italy’s political capital (he’d been assistant of Francesco Rutelli and Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, both of them abruptly interrupted political promises) to Milan, the country’s economic center, and finally to Paris.

Da Empoli speaks French with a distinguishable Italian accent, even though he was born in Paris and returned to the city as a college student. Still, the French capital is a place he can comfortably navigate: I heard about him via interviews on the radio and press articles, where he was portrayed more as a Parisian resident than a foreign author. When translating the book, I emailed him back and forth, an effortless and straightforward task. We finally met on a stormy day in October 2020 at the upstairs of the almost-empty legendary Café de Flore.

It’s easy to look at the email record from October 2020. My message to him reads:

Hi,

It seems we’ll face a rainy day, so it could be hard to take a nice walk around the 6ème. It shouldn’t be a problem to get a coffee somewhere nearby.

What about at Café de Flore at 9:30 or at 16:00? Do people still go there, or is it considered just a relic for (now Covid-absent) tourists? I’ll let you pick if the offer doesn’t fit.

Looking forward to meeting you tomorrow,

A coffee with Giuliano da Empoli at Café de Flore

The Café de Flore was a gathering place for intellectuals from the 1930s to the 1960s, when many of them struggled to heat their places from November to February and it was more convenient to have a sit there and work, have a coffee, eat something, and receive people, all at once, with no need to pay for wood or coal. The place is there in its entirety, a testimony of the days when Sartre and Beauvoir had it as de facto headquarters.

Da Empoli confirmed the appointment at 4. He showed up on time in a somewhat classy, professor-like attire and a narrow face with small eyes under combed, wavy black hair that was beginning to grey. Of mid stature, small-constructed, and lean, he acted reserved and observant, narrowing his witty, small eyes and smiling when I talked.

We ordered a couple of coffees, and the conversation was relaxed. After discussing our respective days and endeavors in Paris, he felt curious about social media content. Da Empoli explained his somewhat loose connection with Spain, for her wife had a place in Málaga, where she’d partly grown up.

We didn’t talk much about our origins. Da Empoli is Italian, but his mother is Swiss. I had read (the book I had translated didn’t mention it) that his grandfather, Attilio da Empoli (a brilliant early-twentieth-century economist educated in Italy, the London School of Economics, Columbia, Chicago, and Berkeley), was a rank of Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party (PNF) from 1934 to 1943. Giuliano’s father, also an economist who worked in Brussels for the European Commission, moved the family to Rome to work for Bettino Craxi’s government. In 1986, the Red Brigades tried to kill him, and he had to put up with having a police escort, which he kept until his death in a car accident in 1996.

In a way, The Engineers of Chaos, where Da Empoli explains an early interview in Rome with Steve Bannon, among many other surprising encounters and reflections, can be read as a very insightful and engaging account of a moment with many resemblances to the interwar period in Europe and the United States.

Understanding the mobilization of discontent

Da Empoli paid much attention to my responses when he asked about using algorithms in places like, say, a YouTube channel with a big following. It was clear to him that, from now on, concepts such as “public opinion” can’t be the same anymore, and those who mobilize data analytics and know how to connect with the discontent of the self-perceived losers of globalization will have a political advantage. His comments then are truer than ever today, I believe.

We talked about the fact that Europeans use digital tools built and controlled by the US, so what were the odds of having an unfriendly US government, aligned with some digital corporations holding de facto monopolies, undermining the European construction by amplifying the existing (and growing) dissent and nationalist opposition? What were the odds? It’s been four years since that conversation, and I can’t believe I had the chance to chat with somebody who saw it possible so early on. Of course, he wouldn’t have guessed how many things turned out, but his sixth sense is excellent —so developed that he could have been a fine politician.

Outside, I remember, it was dark and quite desolate. I didn’t take notes, although I remember the day. The first stringent lockdowns had finished, but the city lacked tourists, and many people had left Paris in search of open space but were also unable to work or pay the rent. Buses and cars had the lights on, illuminating the rain as they crossed the Boulevard St. Germain.

Fascinated with the role of publicist Gianroberto Casaleggio and his son Davide in Italian politics, as they assisted Breppe Grillo to become a political figure and then coerced him, propelling the popularity of the Five Star Movement and testing the potential of data analytics as an effective and affordable tool of political propaganda, Giuliano da Empoli seemed uneasy about the social and political consequences of the COVID lockdowns.

I asked what he was working on. He was teaching, or at least that’s how I vaguely recall our conversation. He was also collaborating with friends to launch some publication about pan-European politics and cultural collaboration. I hadn’t only read his book The Engineers of Chaos but translated it, so I knew he was aware of one paradox that still holds in Europe: the only truly pan-European political expression with organic reach online and popularity in all European countries was that of eurosceptic populists, who seamlessly collaborated to undermine a reality that their mere existence probably proved.

The world outside

Da Empoli also mentioned that he was working on a book, this time fiction. Though, he added, it was “reality fiction.” One year and a half after our rendezvous at Café de Flore, the way he read the tensions of our time proved, once again, prescient —and crazily fine-tuned. We had moved from the ninth to a mansard apartment by the fifth Arrondissement with views to the Seine and Notre Dame, just when the wave of tourism coming back to the City of Light roared through the area.

We rented the apartment to an accomplished French photographer, Guillaume Binet, a founder of Agence MYOP. In early 2022, there were rumors of an eminent Russian invasion of Ukraine, but the press wasn’t yet on top of it. That didn’t deter Binet, who lived in our same building facing the Pont St Michel and the Île de la Cité, from going to Ukraine and taking photos on an extended field trip. I remember asking him why he was going there, and he told me nonchalantly: “Something might happen.” I asked whether it was safe, and he looked at me funny. Being a field photographer attracts a type of creative risk-taker.

So, when in late February 2022, Russia invaded eastern Ukraine, Binet, who had returned not long before, could sell his pictures to many publications, mainly because he had already landed one of them on the cover of Time Magazine on February 2, 2022.

What’s unbelievable is that, not long after, I found out in the French press about the “reality fiction” novel that Giuliano da Empoli had been working on. Rumors first, and then Da Empoli himself, confirmed that the book Le mage du Kremlin (translated as The Wizard of the Kremlin), published by Gallimard, is the account of one imagined meeting, one night in Moscow, with an enigmatic figure in the shadow of Vladimir Putin, a reality TV producer nicknamed “the Tsar,” Vadim Baranov. Baranov shares many traits with Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s man in the shadows.

Da Empoli had stumbled upon Surkov when doing research for The Engineers of Chaos. The book arrived in a timely manner in France and soon was at the forefront of all bookstores near me. I shared this reality with him in a congratulatory email, which he kindly answered.

Soft power, low bars, and experiments

Soon after, amid the war in Ukraine, the new book by Da Empoli won the 2022 Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française and, in the coming fall, became a finalist for the Prix Goncourt, the most prestigious prize in French literature.

But that late afternoon of October 2020 at the Café de Flore in Paris, all I could see was the rain outside, with the awnings outside filtering the little natural light of the day before darkness. Inside, the place was too empty to be cozy or to have something we could call an atmosphere.

Time passed, and I read Giuliano again in January 2024, in an extended interview by, again, the Financial Times’ person in Paris, Simon Kuper. They met at Jack’s Brasserie in Bern, founded in 1911. Da Empoli goes on to explain to Kuper why he lives in Paris and not, say, in Switzerland or Italy.

Right now, he says, given all the weirdness going on, it’s hard to keep any convictions. Of Europe in the last decades, he keeps one thing of the political ideals: the fact that Western European powers haven’t tried to kill each other for so long.

It’s a pretty low bar, but there’s that.

Will writers like Giuliano da Empoli end up being writers of a world that has vanished, like the Austro-Hungarian writers Stefan Zweig, Robert Musil, and Joseph Roth?

“Whatever happens, there’s a part of innocence in the European project that is lost forever: this idea we had that the world was going to become like us, about gentle treaties and soft power. This European exceptionalism, which was much stronger than American exceptionalism, is what we’ve lost.”