“Genius loci” means the “spirit of a place”. The Romans routinely attributed local deities to rivers and woods, groves and springs. They called the spirit that inhabited a place the numen, and the protective, generative power that sustained it was its genius loci. Today, genius loci is a rather more abstract concept than a literal deity or spirit associated with a specific place. It includes both a location's real physical aspects, and also its idiosyncratic atmosphere or pervading spirit, the thing that gives it its character and makes it distinctive and unique. It can also refer to our awareness of and cultural responses to a place.

The genius loci expresses itself in thousands of ways. Not only travel writers and geographers, but also centuries of novelists, artists, poets, filmmakers, musicians, and others have used their concept of place in their work and lives, attempting to describe or capture a “sense of place” or a “spirit of place” in their form of communication.

At Panhistoria, many of us are following in this long and honoured tradition! One has only to look around the novels to see how genii loci create the context for many of our stories, and how we individually relate to and interact with the very different kinds of environments and spaces we place our characters into.

Something about a particular landscape or location draws us in and attaches us to those places. Whether the setting is a house, such as Souvenir de la Mal Maison, a town or a city, such as Tombstone or Bath in Vice and Virtues, or an entire world such as Scotia, these locations are as central to their stories as the time period in which they are set. Even when a place isn’t minutely detailed or described, its unique character can still be felt, defining the lives and actions of the characters that associate with it. More than simply a backdrop against which a story unfolds, a location may be almost like an extra character in the drama, invisible but still subconsciously felt.

Despite whatever elusive genius loci drew us to the places we locate our stories in, most of us have never been there in the flesh, and yet that doesn’t prevent us from seeing and experiencing places that are fictional or re-imagined from the past or at the other end of the world. Panhistoria is a venue where spirit of place can thrive in the imagination. A chosen location can touch off an entire flood of story-building and information. As writers, we can be simultaneously inspired by and redefine the distinctive, unique genii loci of special places such as Imperial Rome or Renaissance Venice or 19th century San Francisco.

And the wonderful thing is, if you ever get weary of the arid landscapes of Egypt or the constant rain of England, you can follow the beckoning of another genius loci and go somewhere completely different tomorrow!

• [This piece was originally written for and published in the November '08 edition of Pan Historia's quarterly community newsletter, The Pan Historian].