Genius: what is it? Is it super intellect or a bizarre mental anomaly? Or is it just living in the right place at the right time? I’m going to go with the third one, and hope that this mud hut I’m sitting in will come good soon. Here are a few places where geniuses seem to pop up like rabbits.
Vienna, Austria
The capital of Austria has always been a hotbed for great thinkers. Perhaps its most famous son was sex-obsessed Sigmund Freud, but there are other less controversial Viennese geniuses. Take for example, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher who expanded our understanding of language, or Karl Popper, one of the most influential figures in political thought.
Some big names in quantum physics are also Viennese: Wolfgang Pauli, whose exclusion principle helped us understand matter itself (or perhaps confuse us further), and Erwin Schrodinger, the man whose cat everybody is always in two minds about.
To top it off, composer Franz Schubert and economist Friedrich Hayek also lent their big brains to Vienna’s reputation for clever types.
Dublin, Ireland
Despite being the home of Guinness, a lot of coherent thinking takes place in Dublin. The Irish capital is above all where several huge literary geniuses hailed from. James Joyce’s head-twisting novels Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake are so dense, one could take decades reading either one and still find new ideas, while Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels was one of the first satirical bestsellers.
Polymaths George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett were also Dubliners, their plays, novels and political essays still bringing the city pride. Oscar Wilde, a fellow child of Dublin and master of the pithy sound bite, said of creative people: “Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.”
Tuscany, Italy
One region of Italy was the place to be during the Renaissance – all the artistic big hitters from the period were from in and around Tuscany. Florence was home to exulted interior decorator Michelangelo and writer Dante, he of Inferno and Divine Comedy fame.
Botticelli, the painter of The Birth of Venus was also a Florentine. Other titans from the region of Tuscany include astronomer Galileo, sculptor Donatello, composer Puccini, and the big man himself Leonardo Da Vinci, who was from the town of, erm, Vinci.
(Featured image by osamukaneko)
