Madrid has many nicknames but at this time of year it is the city of Las Meninas, whether all the locals like it or not. Every Fall since 2018, the city is home to 50 or more Las Meninas sculptures around town. Though broadly popular, the statues have also offended

I went daily to the cathedral of Milan, that singular mountain which was torn out of the rocks of Carrara. I saw the church for the first time in the clear moonlight; dazzlingly white stood the upper part of it in the infinitely blue ether. Round about, wherever I looked,

Bread is the king of the table and all else is merely the court that surrounds the king. ... With bread all sorrows are less. – a wise philosopher known as Sancho Panza I enjoy cozy, welcoming cafes, with the aroma of brewing coffee, but the aroma in bakeries is even better.

Miniature towns, villages and gardens... The appeal, I suppose, is to the kid in all of us. I especially enjoy seeing model trains in action and wondering what on earth I will stumble upon next. Wonder is more important than wander. The inherent problem miniature model towns have is: how

I worked in the film industry for 27 years and now I cannot watch a movie. My favorite movie is a movie I cannot watch. Movies now seem too literal, too linear, too authoritarian in their plot lines. It's not that time is an arrow (plots can still

Better to be a broken piece of jade than an intact piece of pottery. 宁为玉碎，不为瓦全 Is it better to restore once-destroyed ruins to their former glory or leave them as a reminder of what happened? The Chinese proverb above is about integrity: how do we respect the past? Or

The Tauentzienstrasse beyond was like an avenue of shattered monuments. Through wide gaps between formless mounds of rubble, you got views over the great central desert of destruction, and saw the Sieges Saeule rising forlornly from the treeless, snow-covered plain of the Tiergarten, which was dotted with bizarre remnants of

Marco Polo enters a city: he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man's place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one

What had seemed the day before the dingiest of cities now took on a strange beauty, the beauty of unexpected horizons and tongues of grey water winding below cypress-studded shores. A man's temper has a lot to do with his appreciation of scenery. John Buchan Greenmantle (1916) For

Childe Harold: "In Venice Tasso's echoes are no more, And silent rows the songless gondolier; Her palaces are crumbling to the shore, And music meets not always now the ear: Those days are gone – but Beauty still is here." Lord Byron's Childe Harold'

This melancholy London - I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air. Y.B. Yeats Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so

"And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its Boulevard Exelmans and the ceaseless Alpine gurgle of desolate latrines), is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast

As with all magic symbols, the power of the Tarot lies in the unexpected meanings we generate when we encounter them. Divination is not about what is in the cards but what is inherent in us. Click on a card... The Juggler (Magician), the female Pope, the Empress, the Emperor,

I enjoy Western, Indian and Chinese astrology. I am not interested in what the Sun or the Moon were doing at the moment of our birth, or what was ascendant, or what the planets were doing in our houses. But, I do think astrology captures human DNA quite well. I

The Library is home to many banned books. Well, maybe not all banned. Some of them... In some places but not others. But definitely all controversial. As The Guardian reports: These demands to remove and restrict books and other library materials are not the result of any grassroots or popular

What is it with bathhouses? After the medieval era, they are almost completely absent from Western literature and art, other than in Russian literature and art perhaps, like the image above. Vladimir Mayakovsky's satirical play The Bathhouse (1930) only uses the bathhouse as a metaphor, but there is

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Are you a Flat Thinker or a Linear Thinker? Is this a world of incurious technophiles who can't read a book or a newspaper article, let alone pick their way through this website? Is this website way too hard to read anyway? Yes I think it has to