Salerno — The Sense in the Nonsense

The first sign that something strange was going on hit me in a Salerno alleyway, right when I realized I’d walked under the same bedsheet three times. Who designs a city as if they were never in a hurry to get anywhere?

I had just come from Rome, where I’d thought the same thing: How could these people, the same ones who built aqueducts that still work, columns that still hold, not have bothered to design streets with a bit more logic?

It doesn’t make sense. It’s like someone drew a perfect labyrinth and then lost the map. How is it possible that these people, who were literally and brutally brilliant, decided to make cities where getting lost isn’t a mistake?

And then, at a corner where the smell of wood-fired pizza made you forget where you were going, it hit me. The city doesn’t want you to arrive. It wants you to stop. To sit down. To get lost right there, between one bite and the next.

In Salerno, getting lost isn’t a mistake. It’s a mandate. Every curve, every dead-end alley, every staircase that climbs without promising you anything – they’re all there to disorient you.

The streets aren’t streets. Or at least that’s what I started to think after hours of wandering through the historic center. Maybe my brain is just too used to infinite feeds, those digital alleyways that Google and Facebook design to trap you and not let you go. Because somewhere between those curves that lead nowhere and those staircases that seem to erase your sense of direction, I started to see a parallel.

What if Salerno is an interface? What if those streets are an algorithm hand-coded by a drunk monk in the 11th century? What if the historic center is a primitive webpage, created to guide you to certain places and make you think you decided to go there on your own?

But no. You didn’t decide anything. In Salerno, the city pushes you.

And it wasn’t a coincidence. After hours of wandering around lost, I started reading. Trying to understand why Salerno was like this. When I got back to the apartment, instead of sleeping, I obsessively read about medieval urban planning. And that’s when I found out that Salerno had long ago abandoned the Roman radial layout, replacing the forum with multiple nodes: churches, convents, and chapels. A decentralized strategy, a medieval Silicon Valley where the monks were Zuckerberg and Musk, and the churches were their platforms. ^[1]

I had no idea, but apparently, they call it polycentric design ^[2]. A plan where power didn’t stay put in one spot but spread out across nodes. The churches were the hotspots of the map, the expansion hubs of the 11th century.

You didn’t just go there to pray. You went there to find out who was alive, who had died, who had married whom. The churches were the centers of gravity. The monks, the administrators of foot traffic, the keepers of information.

If you wanted to know what was going on, you didn’t go to the market. You went to the convent. You didn’t go to the main square. You went to the chapel. That was the real center of the city – the new interface where users connected.

And the plazas. Those spaces where old men sit unhurried, hands resting on their knees, while the facades whisper secrets from other eras. The first scrollers, staring at nothing with the patience of someone who’s already seen it all.

The churches, on the other hand, were the verified profiles of the city. Want reliable information? Look at the bell tower. Want rumors and medieval memes? Head to the market, where the old men shout at each other, arguing without actually fighting.

In a paranoid flash of clarity, I thought: What if these cobblestones are a primitive blockchain? Every step, every dead-end alley, a transaction logged forever in a decentralized chain of urban memory. A ledger that records centuries of human patterns – invisible but persistent.

Step by step, stone by stone, Salerno is a medieval Big Data. Every step, every decision, every wrong turn gets logged in the memory of the streets. And if you think about it, Salerno is a Big Data archive in stone. Cobblestone by cobblestone, the city preserves the steps of generations, creating patterns and flows that we follow without even realizing.

So I kept walking, but now without rushing. In Salerno, getting lost is the point. And if you want to make sense of it, first you have to lose it.

In Salerno, the streets push you, even though they swear you’re walking of your own free will.

And that’s when I got it.

Salerno is designed to lead you to these places. The plazas are the hubs, the neural centers. And the churches, of course – those are the endpoints ^[3]. Places where the city drops you and says, “Look. This is what matters. Not the pharmacy, not the supermarket. This.”

And then you see it. You see the old men talking. You see the dog sleeping in the sun. You see a woman sweeping her doorstep as if she were dusting off the memory of the street.

The city made you pass through three impossible alleys – where the laundry hanging from balconies almost slapped you in the face, where the smell of fried eggplant and oregano poured out of every window, where an old woman watched you from a closed shutter – just to get you to that plaza.

Because the plazas of Salerno aren’t there for you to find them. They’re there to find you. They’re the meeting points for the lost.

And what is that if not an app for running into strangers? Like when you open Instagram not to look for anything specific, but just to see who else is out there, scrolling aimlessly, wandering through stories they weren’t looking for, caught in digital alleyways that, just like Salerno, lead you right where they want you.

And in that moment, while the old men kept talking about everything and nothing and the sun started to slip behind the rooftops, I thought:

This isn’t a mistake. It’s a design. A user experience. But one built in stone and centuries.

The plazas are the feeds. The churches, the verified endpoints. The streets, the cables that connect. And the steps, the data. And the convents, the expansion hubs, the points where the city stops being a center and becomes a network.

And we, the ones who arrive without knowing where we were going, are the users the city moves around without us even noticing.

The paradox is this: once you realize Salerno tricked you – that you were never walking freely but being led by an invisible hand – that’s when you really start to enjoy the trick. Because in the end, in this city of stone, algorithms, and saints, the important thing wasn’t to arrive but to discover yourself lost exactly where you were meant to be. Because there, in that plaza you never meant to go to, you’re exactly where the city wanted you all along.

And you stay. Because suddenly, you’re in no hurry to go anywhere.