The virtue of pushiness When D suggested we had time to visit a "small nearby museum on the history of steam power" I nearly spit out my beer on the boatdeck. Yes, yes, yes, and please yes. But I sensed immediately some disinterest among certain shipmates. There was a bit of inexplicable lollygagging on board, wasting time ...
Holland is a mass of contradictions. It is a straightforward-complicated, innovative-traditional, conformist-iconoclastic, supple-rigid, and altogether miraculous culture, a place of tolerated extremes, ancient trade, great learning, and surprising architecture. The oversized, perpetually open, and unadorned windows with a perfect view of everyone's private life within seem in opposition to the high and massive (and one hopes ...
One of the more marvelous parts of a summer full of marvels was spending a few days on a sailboat with old friends in the Netherlands during the last week of August.
In no particular order, because I am on mobile phone only these days and have not kept all the files in one place. The camera broke our first day in Naples! Dommage. But beauty requires no dateline. Enjoy.
Paris never appealed to me. It struck me as sprawling, expensive, pretentious, hard to enter, and even harder to leave. I don't even appreciate Beaux-Arts! (or so I thought) But this summer I must have been ready for the magic. I finally clicked with Paris. Some highlights from five days in the City of Lights: A palatial ...
A city so alluring - so filthy and pious and rude and storied and coastal and sweaty and ancient and delicious - that I don't want to share it. I just want to go back!
Images from the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli To our modern sensibility, what makes one stone rubbish and the next stone precious art is supposed to be a subjective judgment, inherent in the story of the viewer, not in the stone itself. But in the case of Pompeii, the Bourbons and Victorians could not mistake what they ...
The Seed of Envy The monument occupies the singular place of honor in Malta, a massive table overlooking the bay on the highest point of the tip end of the promontory of the entire peninsula of Valleta. It is a King's bier if ever there was one. On it reposes a noble bronze body many times ...
The virtue of pushiness When D suggested we had time to visit a "small nearby museum ...
Holland is a mass of contradictions. It is a straightforward-complicated, innovative-traditional, conformist-iconoclastic, supple-rigid, and altogether ...
One of the more marvelous parts of a summer full of marvels was spending a ...