Culture
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…
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…
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.
The Cecil Beaton: Theatre of War exhibition is on at London’s Imperial War Museum until 1 January 2013. Once it finishes, the entire museum closes for six months while it is redeveloped. In the summer of 2014 – 90 years after the beginning of the First World War – the museum will reveal a new…
Venice hosts the oldest film festival in the world, La Biennale. She’s used to seeing stars. But the city itself has played a starring role in some of the world’s most famous films. Magnificent palazzi and churches rise up out of watery ‘streets’. Narrow alleyways echo with the city’s long history of plague, great art,…
Portugal’s second city offers endless possibilities. Here for a weekend break? Check out my top ten things to do in Porto. 1. Hostel or hotel? Budget usually dictates whether you choose a hotel or a hostel, but if you’d never considered ‘roughing it’, you might think about it in Porto. Some of the hostels here…
On 31 October 2013, Rimini celebrated the anniversary of the death of one of its most famous sons, Federico Fellini. Film director Fellini created such masterpieces as La Dolce Vita (winner of the Palme d’Or in 1960), and 8½ (listed by Sight & Sound as the 10th-greatest film of all time). In 2012 I visited Rimini…
August 2012 Gore Vidal died on Tuesday at the grand old age of 86. And what a life he lived. Author, screenwriter, and sometime actor, Vidal never shied away from a hot topic – homosexuality, mental illness, transgender politics, all made it into his books and plays – and he wasn’t short of a good…
In 2012 I visited Bologna as part of the Blogville Project. The idea, developed by the Tourist Board, was to give bloggers a base from which to explore Emilia Romagna. I visited the Ducati Museum, made pasta with the Casa Artusi mariette in Forlimpopoli. I even took part in the world-famous Mille Miglia vintage car race. My…