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 [...]
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 [...]
These days I have been pondering the way one gets hooked into certain responses, particularly in the face of discomfort (a flat writing day, a lover’s spat, uncertainty about seeming pipe dreams, or just plain getting wait-listed for Yaddo–again!).
One could simply not tell oneself the same story, could make a choice to experiment with a [...]
perhaps all a person could say about Milano can be seen from the roof of Il Duomo…
We flew over the Italian Alps in the wee small Kia in the wee small hours of Friday night. All highways are dark here, even this Swiss autobahn with its speed limit of 130 km/81 mph. The liquid black [...]
“Look! It’s the Alps!” Ali said as we began our descent to Italy. I was photographing the clouds through the tiny airplane window. They looked like this:
The Alps looked like this:
Ali said, “Next time we come to Europe I’m going to take you there. You’ll love it.” Thirteen weeks to the day we touchdown in [...]