About

Hi, I'm Giulio Romano — like the architect, but with worse frescoes and a better travel itinerary.

I travel with my head tilted back and my eyes up.

While everyone else is looking at the map, I'm looking at the cornice above the third-floor window. While the tour group moves on, I'm still in the alley, trying to figure out why that doorway is three centimetres off-centre — and what it says about the person who built it.

I've spent most of my life reading buildings the way other people read faces. Looking for what they're trying to hide. What they gave away by accident. What they were quietly proud of. That habit doesn't switch off when I travel. It makes every city a different kind of puzzle.

I used to travel alone. Now I travel with my wife and our daughter — two people who somehow share this obsession, or at least love me enough to stand in the rain outside a Baroque church while I take notes. They've eaten lunch at eleven because I lost track of time in a cloister. They are very patient. I am very lucky.

The Slow Architect is what happens when you stop following the crowd and start following the buildings. The routes here are not the obvious ones. The stops are not always the famous ones. But they are the real ones — the places that follow you home, the details that change how you see everything else.

Come in. Look up.

— Giulio Romano