We visited (what remains of) the splendid 18th Century Cabinet of Curiosities of Bonnier de la Mosson, at the Bibliotèque of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle. Considered by many the richest and most imaginative French cabinet of the early eighteenth century, this curiosity cabinet was housed in the hôtel particulier, as the city residences of aristocrats […]
My day began in the company of three kids, two grown-ups, a dog, and a curious kitty who would have been quite interested in a certain exhibit at the Museum of Jurrasic Technology… Also on display were the Micromosaics of Henry Dalton. This image is through a microscope, and made of bits of butterfly wings. We also […]
“(Swinburne is) a braggart in matters of vice, who has done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestializer.” Damn, Oscar Wilde, throw down the decadent gauntlet! Nevermind Wilde himself was derided by Edmond de Goncourt as lifting his […]
Lost a day and night to food poisoning, both of us, presumably via the dreaded shellfish! Discover a passion for oysters and the price of such passion in one go… We did manage to drag ourselves through the Louvre, where Alfonso had never been. It was a sea of humans and alleged “masterpieces.” When the […]
Le pâle squelette/De mes amourettes/Joue des castagnettes… (The pale skeleton/Of my little loves/Plays castanets…) ~Serge Gainsbourg, Les Oubliettes Charlotte Gainsbourg has kept her father’s apartment at 5 bis Rue de Verneuil, Paris exactly as he left it when he died seventeen years ago. I now have an idea what it would be like to be […]
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 […]
“Can I ask you a terribly rude question?” the woman with the kind smile, beaming eyes and slight limp said. She had pretended to be looking for the “ladies,” to broach this I later realized, and so I had a moment to decide I liked her, so I said yes. “The man you are with—are […]
It is perched in a blown glass egg, the base of which reads Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza. The right middle finger of Galileo–this heretic’s reliquary–is tucked in a case among telescopes, celestial globes, solar orbs, and tellurium. Or it would be, if the museum’s wonderous objects were not mostly hidden away while […]
Three of my favorite parts of this journey were found when righteously lost, and I’m feeling that is something worth noting. It is also ironic as the adventure included a visit to Alfonso’s cousin Antonio, who designs software for Fiat, most particularly GPS, or Global Positioning Systems. We began by driving to Torino–Turin–by way of […]
In the museum of Mr. John Tradescant are the following things: the hand of a mermaid…a number of things changed into stone…a picture wrought in feathers…a cup of an east indian Alcedo, which is a kind of unicorn…the passion of Christ carved very daintily on a plumstone…a hat band of snake bones.~ Georg Christoph Stirn, […]