Robert Pinsky
Las Ramblas, Barcelona, Spain

Travel’s appeal for me is not in sights, monuments, museums, or tastes but in a renewed sense of time: history alive in the systems and quiddities of daily life. In Barcelona, the greatest of places to stroll, layers of sorrow and pleasure from the past remain palpable.

I first set foot on Las Ramblas when I was 19. The regime of Francisco Franco still held sway, but Cataluña was a European resort. The patent leather hats and carbines of the Guardia Civil, the families sitting in restaurants or cafés, beginning the evening meal at eleven o’clock, the smell of garlic, chocolate, and perfume, all told me that I was in the presence of History, not as a notion for schoolbooks or politicians, but as a living organism.

Robert Pinsky is a United States Poet Laureate.