This week’s travel dream: Wandering my mother’s Casablanca

Forgive me if I tend to wax nostalgic about Casablanca, said Olivia Stren in National Geographic Traveler. “For as long as I can remember,” my mother and I talked about someday visiting the seaside Moroccan city where she was born in a taxicab a year before the release of the classic 1942 film set in that same romantic milieu. She fled Morocco more than 50 years ago for political and religious reasons but has passed along a vivid picture of her hometown, with “its slicing light, its Ajax-white buildings, and its temperamental, wind-tousled Atlantic shores.” As we arrived in Casablanca together for the first time, we both had high expectations.

From day one, the city doesn’t disappoint. “Standing on our hotel’s rooftop terrace, we see Casablanca spread before us.” Our panoramic view is pocked by “grime-veiled apartment blocks,” but we also glimpse 1930s-style town houses “crowned with tropical gardens” and “minarets pointing up to preposterously blue Moroc-can skies.” Casa—as the locals call it—wears its bygone splendor well. I urge my mother to visit the city’s art deco district, which we learn to our surprise is the very neighborhood where she grew up. Her old apartment house is run down, but the boulevard’s beauty hasn’t entirely faded. As we pass a picturesque café that was frequented by the French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, she says, “I thought the whole world looked like this.”

The “spectacular” Hassan II Mosque and its 689-foot minaret—the tallest in the world—date only to 1993, but my mother’s hometown pride increases as we examine the brilliant tile work. Dramatic buildings frequently surround us as we walk, though it’s the city’s endless ornamental detail that most impresses me. On our final night in town, we stumble into—“of all the gin joints in all the world”—Rick’s Café, which opened in 2004 in tribute to Hollywood’s Casablanca. As we sip pastis among the potted palms and listen to a four-piece band, I ask my mother if she’s happy we made the trip. “Yes,” she says. “Casa is more decrepit, sadder, but also more

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beautiful than I remember.”

At the Hôtel & Spa Le Doge (hotelledoge.com), doubles start at $281.