Leave it to the Dutch. In Maastricht one finds the Selexyz Dominicanen bookshop, housed in a 13th century Dominican church repurposed by architects Merkx + Girod. Featuring 14th century ceiling frescoes, and a café situated in the former choir (with a cheeky cruciform reading table), this shop is designed essentially as a giant, walk-in bookcase [...]
When I was a kid my mom, Karen, made cupcakes to bring to my class on my birthday. She also sewed many gifts, requiring she stay up until into the wee hours to complete them after the work day at her theater. Easter baskets and Christmas stockings often had dolls tucked inside–a hand-painted Punch (of [...]
Here are a few views from the Early Gothic Collégiale Church, that is both the focal point of town and the primary view from our apartment. It’s bells create the rhythm of time here–y favorite is the fifteen minutes they ring at 6pm (aka 18:00) Saturday, which to me marks the weeks true end. Shops [...]
The comparison was already floating through my mind, of Amsterdam with San Francisco. The cafes, the bohos, the acceptance of people as they are–and a certain air of self-acceptance that comes from living in a Mecca of so-called tolerance.
And, so I had read, Amsterdam even has it’s own refurbished Deco movie house, Pathé Tuschinski.
Then [...]
He was a man so cranky he seemed a character in a story by Dickens. This man–let’s call him Ebenezer–spit a response to my innocent inquiry, “Please sir, where is the real cricket playing tiny violin?”
No matter, we found said cricket–and the flea in golden horseshoes, and the whole herd of camels in the [...]
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The story goes that the German-born physicist Albert Einstein worked out his theory of relativity while employed as a clerk at the Berne patent office. We visited this Medieval town–the capital of Switzerland–this weekend with Alfonso’s cousin Antonio (of terrifying Angel fame) and his girlfriend Mimi.
The town’s best known icon [...]
It was heaven. A hangout of the original Bloomsbury Group: Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Keynes, E.M. Forster, and also Piaget, D.H. Lawrence, and Winston Churchill. It is believed that English botanist (and special friend of Woolf) Vita Sackville-West planned the garden. It was the setting for the legendary elopement of actress Greta Garbo and Leopold [...]
The colors! The cars! Surprisingly little has changed on the Amalfi Coast in the fifty years since this photo was taken for a tourist book in Rosa and Franco’s collection.
We spent the following four gorgeous, smoldering days on the Amalfi Coast, without a moments rest from the thought “If someone would pour a bucket of [...]
I have been reading several travel and food writers lately, for pleasure, but also with a secret fantasy of being one I think. A. J. Liebling’s Between Meals, Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste, M.F.K. Fisher’s Two Towns in Provence, and Sybille Bedford’s Pleasures and Landscapes are all on my night table at the moment.
we stayed [...]
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. ~Franz Kafka
At first impression Vienna is [...]