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scenes from geneva! thank you so much to Sophia for sharing her home with me.

old town / jete d’eau / Cathédrale Saint-Pierre / Maison Tavel
While I was pretty burned out of churches and cathedrals by this point, this one ended up being super fascinating to me as a symbol of the Protestant Reformation. It was built around 1160 as a Roman Catholic cathedral, and became a Protestant church during the Reformation in the mid-1500s—not just any church, but the home church of John Calvin and therefore the birthplace of Calvinism. In fact, the reason Geneva is part of Switzerland could be traced this religious transformation: the city had been under the rule of the Catholic Duke of Savoy (now the French region of Savoie), but with the rise of Protestantism, Geneva fought to establish itself as an independent republic before ultimately joining the Swiss Confederacy in 1814.

my ideal summer evening: outdoor concert + picnic dinner. This one felt especially wonderful, because the performer was all-female Boston bluegrass group Della Mae.

hiking up to La Dôle in the Jura Mountains, overlooking Lac de Genève and the Alps, accompanied by a huge herd of cows