Savannah is amazing with the town squares and the hanging moss

Hear the words of David Morrissey, who gazed upon an ancient Southern city and declared: “Savannah is amazing with the town squares and the hanging moss and the French Colonial houses. It’s brutally romantic.” In this vision, he speaks not only of a place, but of the way beauty and history entwine, weaving together majesty and sorrow, grace and shadow. For Savannah, like all cities steeped in time, is not merely picturesque; it is layered with memory, with the weight of lives lived and lost, with an atmosphere that wounds as much as it enchants.

To call something romantic is to recognize in it a power that moves the heart beyond reason—beauty tinged with longing, grandeur shot through with melancholy. And Morrissey, with the phrase “brutally romantic,” unveils the paradox of Savannah’s allure. The city’s squares, framed by oak trees and veiled in moss, whisper of timeless serenity. Its colonial houses, with balconies and shutters, evoke elegance and grace. Yet beneath this loveliness lies a history written in blood and bondage, in wars fought, in tragedies endured. The romance is not gentle, but fierce, because it carries the scars of time.

Such paradox has long been the soul of the South. Beauty and brutality stand together like twin shadows. The architecture enchants, yet it speaks of eras where elegance rested upon injustice. The moss draping the trees stirs the imagination with gothic mystery, as though time itself had slowed. And yet, this same moss hangs over graveyards, over memories of loss. Morrissey names this paradox well: the romance is real, but it is brutal, for it reminds us that beauty is often entwined with sorrow.

History offers us many such cities. Consider Venice, rising from the waters with domes and palaces that gleam like a dream. To the visitor it is endlessly romantic, but behind its marble splendor lies centuries of plague, conquest, and decline. Or think of Prague, whose towers and bridges inspire awe, yet which has endured invasions, fires, and oppression. These cities, like Savannah, are not merely beautiful—they are brutally romantic, for their splendor has been shaped and sharpened by suffering.

This is why Savannah lingers in the imagination. It is not simply the loveliness of its squares or the grace of its houses, but the way the city carries the weight of memory. Every step through its streets feels haunted by voices of the past—soldiers, enslaved men and women, lovers, dreamers, and wanderers. In such places, romance is not an escape from reality but a confrontation with it. The beauty forces us to remember that life itself is woven from both joy and sorrow.

The lesson here is profound: do not seek romance only in the soft and easy. True romance, the kind that pierces the soul, is often brutal—found in places and people marked by time, by loss, by endurance. To love such beauty is to love not only the surface, but the depth: the scars, the shadows, the history that shaped it. The brutally romantic teaches us that love and pain, beauty and tragedy, cannot be torn apart; they are threads of the same tapestry.

Therefore, children of tomorrow, when you walk through a place like Savannah—or through the landscapes of your own life—see not only the sunlight, but the shadow it casts. Allow yourself to be moved by the brutally romantic, for it will teach you that life’s greatest beauty is not in perfection, but in endurance, in memory, in the haunting music of the past echoing through the present.

Thus Morrissey’s words resound as timeless counsel: the romance that endures is not gentle, but fierce, not fragile, but scarred. To see the brutally romantic is to see life as it truly is—wounded, resilient, and achingly beautiful.