So, the day began with Goretti Sanmartin, the Mayor of Compostela, encouraging us to get lost.  I thought: has she been reading my blog ?  It was precisely the sensation I had enjoyed of being able to explore the city without a map or any plan of what to see because it is so well preserved as a totality, an urban environment which the city cares about not building by building, but as a whole. 

And she described the purpose of the day’s conference so precisely: to think about provenance; the ways in which an understanding of a city’s history, the trajectory of urban change, can benefit its culture.  It’s hard to imagine the Mayor of London saying anything comparable.  But, then, our Mayor was not trained as a philologist:-