Nafplio

Nafplio is a coastal city whose monumental square becomes one of the book’s most important meeting places between image and experience. Ellie Thomas first knows it through a postcard, then arrives with her suitcase and recognizes the square at once. Later, it becomes a place she returns to willingly, while another traveller encounters its beauty alongside local memories of violence and blood feuds. The city’s significance lies in this double character: it is at once an inviting landscape, a lived social space, and a setting marked by history.

Setting and the Square

The square is presented as Nafplio’s beating heart: an immense open space into which people flow to talk, play, watch, and drink. Its smooth, gleaming marble paving and buildings on all four sides give it the intimacy of a vast ballroom open to the sky. Even on a cool autumn evening, those buildings shelter the square from the breeze. The surrounding architecture makes the city’s history visible in a single view, bringing together a sixteenth-century former mosque, a Venetian arsenal, neoclassical buildings, and twentieth-century architecture.

The city’s setting extends beyond the square. Nafplio lies by the sea, has three castles, and reaches back into ancient history. It served as the first capital of the modern Greek state from 1829 to 1834. These features give the square more than scenic appeal: it belongs to a city whose importance is announced by its setting and accumulated past. The square, however, is not presented as a static monument. Cafés line its perimeter, and its everyday life continually fills the historic frame.

From Postcard to Place

Before Ellie visits, Nafplio is one of many musical, unfamiliar place-names on the postcards she pins to a corkboard. Their blue-and-white images form a mosaic of skies, sea, boats, and whitewashed buildings; the cards awaken her desire to see Greece for herself. The images offer only a glimpse, and the writer acknowledges that they cannot transmit the country’s scents or sounds. Still, their partial view gives Ellie a place to imagine beyond her dim London routine.

When Ellie reaches Nafplio, she leaves the bus station on foot, wheeling her small suitcase toward the old town before continuing to her hotel in Tolon. The signposted route brings her to the main square she has seen on a postcard. Recognition produces a smile: the pictured place is no longer only an image but a location she can enter. At a café she orders a cappuccino and receives iced water and two warm walnut biscuits. The welcome makes concrete the Greek hospitality she had previously encountered through the cards’ descriptions.

The square’s lived texture also exceeds the postcard. On a Friday evening in mid-September, it is crowded with people of every age: families with buggies, cyclists, rollerbladers, strolling couples, and older people using sticks. The cafés are full, and the evening is balmy. The contrast is not that the postcard is simply false; rather, its fixed, colourful view cannot contain the movement and social life Ellie finds there. On her final morning, after her stay in Tolon, she returns to Nafplio for one last coffee before travelling to Athens. That return makes the city part of her own remembered holiday, not merely the landscape that first prompted it.

History and Local Memory

Another traveller’s account gives the city a different emphasis. In October 2015, after arriving from Methoni, he spends many hours in Nafplio’s square, whose beauty captivates him even as grief makes the surrounding abundance painful to bear. The open, elegant setting does not relieve his sorrow; its fullness sharpens his sense of loss. The city’s beauty is therefore not a cure in itself, but a setting against which private suffering becomes more visible.

Conversation in a café draws the traveller into local memories. A couple remarks on the Adamakos affair and on a man who sat alone in the square for twenty-five years, explaining that people in Nafplio had become wary of solitary men. The man was from the Mani, a region associated in the conversation with honour and vendettas. The discussion connects contemporary unease to a longer history of retaliatory violence: the traveller recalls the assassination of Ioannis Kapodistrias and learns that a bullet is embedded in the nearby Church of St Spyridon, Nafplio. The square’s historical atmosphere is thus not only architectural. Stories told within it make the past feel close to the ordinary act of sitting at a café.

A Repeated Point of Return

The city’s narrative role comes from the way different journeys converge on the same public space. Ellie encounters Nafplio as a destination made desirable by postcards, and her return for a final coffee confirms that the actual place has held her attention. The grieving traveller, by contrast, finds beauty that cannot settle his pain and hears a local story that leads him toward another history. The square accommodates both experiences without making them identical: for one, it turns an imagined journey into a lived one; for the other, it frames the tension between outward loveliness and inward grief.

Nafplio also appears as a place of repeated, ordinary rhythms. Couples of different ages file along its narrow, car-free Venetian streets, and one elderly couple has walked around the square each evening for five decades, keeping the same pace even after the man began relying on a stick. Such details place the city beyond the single moment of a tourist’s arrival. Its postcard image may invite the traveller in, but the square’s crowds, conversations, long habits, and historical memories make Nafplio a social world that continues before and after any visitor passes through.