Picture if a cat among the ruins of Ephesus

See the lives of street cats around the world

A new book of photography chronicles the ‘grand odyssey’ of street cats, from Morocco to Japan.

A cat relaxes against one of the ruins of the 2,000-year-old archaeological site of Ephesus, an ancient Roman port city in modern-day Turkey.
Photograph by Tuul and Bruno Morandi

For 18 years, Tuul and Bruno Morandi photographed the people, cities, and landscapes of the world. As they traveled, they accidentally started to accumulate extra photos of another, nonhuman subject: the furry, friendly faces of street cats.

In Tuul and Bruno’s book, La Grand Odysée des Chats (“The Grand Odyssey of Cats”), feline subjects relax against the bright blue buildings of Chefchaouen in Morocco, jump across ruins in Greece, and watch fishermen curiously in Japan, awaiting their opportunity to steal away with discarded fish scraps.

The Morandis themselves are cat lovers. They actually dedicated the book to their own cat of 10 years, Mujra, who Tuul describes as “beautiful and kind.”

The pair were drawn to the charismatic felines while

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