Study Ranks European Cities Based on Popular Literature

Before television and social media took center stage as travel inspiration, books were one of the most popular travel muses.

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Even in modern times, tomes like Eat, Pray, Love and Where the Crawdads Sing have the power to shape our travel dreams.

In fact, you can actually rank travel destinations based on how often they appear in popular media like books. That’s what the data-crunchers at Aura Print, a UK-based printing company, decided to do in order to rank European cities based on their popularity in books.

To do so, the company dug deep into the Google Books archive to study around 25 million literary works (fiction) from between 1920 and 2019. Their goal: to rank European cities based on how often they were mentioned in popular books published during the last century.

The top five placements might not surprise you—but the last five might.

Think you can name popular European cities, as per one hundred years of book publishing? Let’s find out.

10 most popular European cities based on book mentions

Here’s the list for the most popular European cities based on literary fiction, along with the number of book mentions, and which decade the most stories are set in. (As in, books that are set in London most often take place in the 1960s—not that they were written in the 1960s.)

1. London: 286,765,501 mentions, with a peak in popularity during the 1960s
2. Paris: 95,290,475 mentions, with a peak in popularity during the 1920s
3. Rome: 48,840,949 mentions, with a peak in popularity during the 1920s
4. Berlin: 37,079,709mentions, with a peak in popularity during the 1940s
5. Florence: 19,414,470 mentions, with a peak in popularity during the 1920s
6. Vienna: 18,995,437 mentions, with a peak in popularity during the 1980s
7. Athens: 15,118,606 mentions, with a peak in popularity during the 1960s
8. Dublin: 15,021,998 mentions, with a peak in popularity during the 1920s
9. Amsterdam: 12,868,807 mentions, with a peak in popularity during the 1990s
10. Brussels: 10,949,717 mentions, with a peak in popularity during the 1990s