June 23rd, 2014 | Education, General, Travel, visual arts
Art lives in that kind of white, crystalline light. It doesn’t just come alive; it takes on a whole new existence. Those top galleries in the “new” Yale University Art Gallery? They were a mystical symphony hall and the art a choir of angels. The new structure unites...
May 7th, 2014 | General, Travel
One often feels in Rome like the city fella who, asking the Down-Easter (voiced by the late great Marshall Dodge) for directions to some locale, gets a convoluted reply ending with, “But you cahn’t get theah from heah.” The historic center of Rome center has, in fact,...
May 2nd, 2014 | General, Travel, visual arts
The Seven Hills of Rome (well, eight if you include the Pincian and ten if you cross the Tiber for the Vatican Hill and the Gianicolo) feature in legend and history. Sensible ancient Romans, Princes of the Church and the one-percenters of the 16th and 17th centuries...
April 25th, 2014 | General, Travel, visual arts
In 2005, Jake Morrissey published a book called The Genius in the Design: Bernini, Borromini, and the Rivalry that Transformed Rome. Haven’t read it? Do. It’s brief, fascinating, dense with information about the birth of the Baroque in Rome, and it makes you care...
April 24th, 2014 | Cooking, Kitchen and Table, General, Travel, visual arts
The Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-96) was commiserating with a tiny rodent whose world has been discombobulated by human activity in his poem To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough (1785) and left posterity with this wonderful verse that has...
April 22nd, 2014 | Cooking, Kitchen and Table, General, Shopping, Travel
When in Rome, we say, live in Trastevere. It is the quiet place—except perhaps around the fountain in the Piazza di Santa Maria in Trastevere when the young folk are socializing or perhaps along via della Lungaretta, the blocks between busy viale di Trastevere and the...
April 22nd, 2014 | General, Popular Culture, Travel
It’s not quite caveat emptor but the idea is similar. Tourism is primarily—the primary?—source of income in Rome. Spontaneity, a commendable trait, is likely to exacerbate that leak in your wallet. Rome seems just as problematic as when “Bear Leaders,” those...
April 17th, 2014 | Cooking, Kitchen and Table, General, Travel
Gelato and carciofi. These are the reasons to go to Rome. On day one, having failed to gain entrance to the Casino dell’Aurore (see a later post) we found ourselves descending from the Quirinale Palace toward the Trevi Fountain. This is familiar territory, the home...
March 19th, 2014 | Gardens and Gardening, General, Holidays, Memory, Pets, Time Passes
When I was about twelve or thirteen, I read Sterling North’s Rascal, a memoir of a year during World War One and the raising of a baby raccoon. North was much the youngest of four siblings; his sister Theodora was the practical member of the family and the one who...
March 15th, 2014 | Gardens and Gardening, General, the world and Mother Nature, Time Passes
The ground is soggy, the sun is bright and the wind whips up now and then. Although there are patches of snow and ice here and there, there is no sense of winter, only the certainty of spring. The garden is a wreck. There is so much dead foliage, not just the detritus...
