Posts
A day in Rimini, with Federico Fellini 15 October 2013 With over 15 kilometres of sandy beach, it’s little wonder that Rimini is one of the most popular resorts in Europe. From June to September much of the beach is covered by serried ranks of coloured umbrellas…
Look beyond the package tours (and there are plenty of them), and Sorrento really has something to offer the modern traveller. You just need to know where to find it… Grand (hotel) tourism Once the leaping off point for every 19th-century traveller’s Grand Tour, Sorrento was as glamorous a destination as any along the Amalfi…
8 August 2013 My sister Marian, who has lived in Italy for over 30 years, has adopted many Italian ways, not least the dedication to preparing and cooking exquisite food. She thinks nothing of spending an afternoon shredding basil leaves and pounding them, with a pestle and mortar, together with pine nuts, Parmesan and Pecorino…
18 July 2013 As I walked up the road to Leila’s Café in Shoreditch – a familiar place where I’ve had many a delicious breakfast, almost sharing a table with Keira Knightley once, but I digress – I mused on the fact that very soon I was going to have dinner with a bunch of…
The exquisite UNESCO World Heritage site, once home to the d’Este family, is rich with Renaissance art and architecture. Ferrara is also very easy to walk/cycle around, and there’s plenty more to capture the imagination: ‘In Italy in the 16th century, food was considered as much an art form as music or theatre’. So writes…
This is my first hive and it’s been a real roller-coaster of a year. On the first decent day we’ve had in months, the bees came out to collect pollen. Following a terrible winter, then a cold and wet spring, I wasn’t sure they’d survived. I’ve had a few bee ‘anxiety’ dreams since I got…
Passersby might be intrigued by the gilded weather vane of Columbus’s caravel, the Santa Maria, that sits atop this beautiful building – I was one of them – but opportunities to discover more about it are limited as, for most of the year, Two Temple Place is closed to the public. So it’s worth keeping…
18 March 2013 This wonderful material, in all its guises, is celebrated at ‘Wool House’ until 24 March. The curator of Campaign for Wool, Arabella McNie, invited some of the world’s finest designers to the West Wing of Somerset House to create a series of rooms that reveal the beauty and versatility of this timeless material,…
The German army marched into Kraków on 6 September 1939. By November, all Jews over the age of 12 were commanded to wear armbands. This was the beginning of the occupier’s segregation of the population.
24 January 2013 The craft of etching ‘What you can do with a line…’ I overheard one visitor comment to her friend. That’s quite an understatement. Morandi’s s exquisite attention to detail gives ordinary subjects a visual importance and value. Simple household items – bottles, jars and vases – seem to reverberate with life, even…