Category: Italy

Travel by colour

20/6/2014

While I was writing our Rajasthan itinerary, it occurred to me that many places we have visited are tourist attractions based on their colour.

Many people would probably bypass Jodhpur, in Rajasthan, were it not for a rather spectacular fort and for the citizens of one of the city's districts painting their houses a distinctive shade of blue. Other main tourist cities of Rajasthan are similarly colour-coded. It may seem like a marketing tool to some, but it takes only a tiny imagination to see why they call Jaipur is the pink city, Jaisalmer the golden and Udaipur the white.

In the cases of Jaipur, Jaisalmer and Udaipur - it is the raw building materials that give these cities their distinctive hues. Not the case with Jodhpur, where citizens themselves follow the long tradition of painting their homes blue.

Similarly colour revolutions have been quietly waged by communities elsewhere. The clever and evidently artistic people of Burano, and island near Venice in Italy, attract a sizeable chunk of Venice's hefty tourist population to their little island with nought more than the colours of their houses as the main attraction.

Of course the famous La Boca area of Buenos Aires is a tourist magnet for its bright colours. And while looking for other colourful cities I discovered the brightly painted houses of Bo Kaap, in Cape Town - both places are on the to-do list...

And although I haven't been to Tirana in Albania, it warms the cockles to see that a lick of colourful paint has brightened many of its Soviet era buildings.

While all these places no doubt make for pretty photos, maybe we are also drawn to these places as it might also say something about the communities that are prepared to colour their environment so deliberately and vividly - whether it be about tradition, about starting something new, or just to brighten things up.

I might start a movement to get my suburb painted orange, but people seem to be so attached to grey at the moment, I'm not sure how successful it's going to be!