IN PERPETUAL SPRING Gardens are also good places to sulk. You pass beds of spiky voodoo lilies and trip over the roots of a sweet gum tree, in search of medieval plants whose leaves, when they drop off turn into birds if they fall on land, and colored carp if they plop into water. Suddenly the archetypal human desire for …
Read More »A COLD SPRING – Poetry, by Elizabeth Bishop
A COLD SPRING A cold spring: the violet was flawed on the lawn. For two weeks or more the trees hesitated; the little leaves waited, carefully indicating their characteristics. Finally a grave green dust settled over your big and aimless hills. One day, in a chill white blast of sunshine, on the side of one a calf was born. The …
Read More »SPRING IN CENTRAL ITALY – Gubbio, Narni and Sezze: passion and precision, including ladies and minstrels
In the Italy Central, the year is marked by memories connected to the land, where planting and harvesting, harvesting and pressing olives perpetuate rites and peasant parties. To all this, for you are added pageants that have roots in the individual municipal reality, also gastronomically. Every hill is a microcosm waiting for you, with spring events that attract visitors from …
Read More »SPRING – Poetry, by Gerard Manley Hopkins
SPRING Nothing is so beautiful as Spring, when weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush. Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring the ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing. The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush the descending blue. That blue is all in …
Read More »FLORENCE, WAITING FOR THE DINNER- San Miniato al Monte and della Robbia ceramics, waiting for your romantic dinner at Cinghiale Bianco
San Miniato al Monte, you can recognize it from a distance, because a copper eagle (with a bale of fabric), stands on the church gable. With its polychrome facade in white and green marble – in the typical Tuscan Romanesque decor – this church, built in 1018, it continued for centuries to attract a huge amount of visitors. Upon entering, …
Read More »JEAN BAPTISTE SIMEON CHARDIN (1699/1779), FRENCH PAINTER – The man who painted with feeling, using colors
COLLECT FLOWERS, A PASTEL PAINTING – Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin: his infirmities have moved away from oil painting, but he continued to paint reality, with crayons
JEAN BAPTISTE SIMEON CHARDIN 1/4 – He – the painter who was born and died in the fall, the son of a cabinet maker manufacturer of billiard tables – he has always lived in Paris, without ever traveling abroad, even in Italy, as was customary at the time. The subjects of his paintings were less hardworking than those of his …
Read More »PRAYER – Poetry, by Paola Loreto
PRAYER Make me quiet, if you can. It is not so much anxiety that I hide, and even the rush, but I will not try. I do not want to have, what you know will not give me pleasure, and can therefore hurt. You give me: the memory that you’re there, that I want you, that you fill me and …
Read More »THOUSANDS OF LAKES AND 818 ISLANDS – Tartu, Estonia: classical and baroque style, combined with delicious food
When your geographical horizon extends – for business or pleasure – you have the wonderful opportunity to hear you inside. A perfectly proportioned man (created by Leonardo da Vinci), correlating the symmetry of human anatomy to the symmetry of the universe. What you see, hear, eat and feel, it’s all inside Meeting Benches way: the Vitruvian approach to life. 47,599 …
Read More »BLUEPRINTS – Romance, by Barbara Delinsky
BLUEPRINTS Caroline and Jamie McAfee are close. Not only do they enjoy their relationship as mother and daughter, they’re in business together as the team that fronts the popular home renovation show Gut It! All is well with these two strong women, but when the network tells Caroline that Jamie is to replace her as host, Caroline feels betrayed by …
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