Masovia

Covered in endless forests inhabited by buffaloes, moose, wild boars and bears, cut across by rare paths where travellers encountered suffocating dust storms or mud sinkholes according to the whims of the weather, dotted with built-up areas of huts that dared call themselves cities, and with majestic castles belonging to the tycoons who could ride for thousands of kilometres in any direction without leaving their own lands. Inhabited by the most enslaved farmers and the most opulent aristocrats in all Europe, Poland only became the destination of well-educated and curious travellers in the second half of the 18th century, when Warsaw – hidden among the forests of Masovia – became a sort of rustic Paris on the Vistula River.