Meeting Benches World art in all forms

MIRROR, MIRROR EYE SEA It pains me when I look the mirror in Her eyes, I see a night robbed from its stars. A portrait dead inside, A Sol that lost its glee. Dreamt all dreams away. One thing remains too glow, the Razor came to play! The Silver beast carves a crevasse through the reddened sea. Gazed upon by …

This Herman Koch’s novel takes place in a well-known Amsterdam restaurant. It’s a summer’s evening in Amsterdam, and two brothers (and their wives), meet for dinner and some unsavoury truths emerge. Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. The two boys are united by their single act, an act that has triggered a police investigation. Highly controversial tale of two families …

UTOPIAN I see the world getting smaller and smaller, untill it finally fades the taste of red wine still in my mouth, soothing me knowing in the back of my mind this place isn’t been made for you and me’. My arm hanging out the window, my fingers playing with the wind, fantasizing how it would be, to live this …

The Tea Lords, the story of ambitious Rudolf Kerkhoven, who becomes a tea planter in the Dutch East Indies. Bitten by the East Indies adventure, in the early 1870s he takes ship for Java, and plunges into the uncleared jungle foothills of the mountains (west Java), to follow his father as a tea planter. Over the seasons, Rudolf’s diligence gradually …

DIGITS I am struggling with digits, digits juggle in my head. Digits tumble and they jumble on the paper I just read, every time I try to capture, such a bouncing numeral, it teases me by dissipating, becoming quite undoable. Give me a bucket filled with letters, I make sense of everything I arrange and rearrange, and I make the …

There are beautiful trails, steeped in spirituality and nature, they do discover unexpected places. Each latitude (geographical or mental), has its own set of colors, but the colors are not colors, but real places and emotions of the soul. You have in mind a inItaly trip? http://www.italia.it/en/home.html You’re thinking about something special? You can walk the Via degli Abati (an …

Go in search of the roots of Orthodox tradition? Simple, Russia. In Red Square, you can stay entranced seeing the incredible St. Basil’s Cathedral (colored domes and light that seem to speak to the sky). However, you will need to move to St. Petersburg, to find the Church of the Saviour and St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Between Moscow and St. Petersburg …

IPPOLITO CAFFI 1/3 – Him, the man who will study at the Academy of Venice, where will know the painters of the eighteenth-century Venice, he was born in Belluno in an autumn day. He moved to Rome, he improves his painting technique, deepening the kind of landscape views. In this city he lives the uplifting experience of a balloon trip, an …

Ippolito Coffi he was the most modern and original landscape artist of his time, and his paintings are so special in immortalising the soul of the places and peoples he encountered during his many trips. You can visit an special exhibition http://correr.visitmuve.it/en/mostre-en/mostre-in-corso-en/ippolito-caffi-exhib/2016/05/17836/between-venice-and-the-east/ (open daily Monday to Tuesday10 am / 7 pm).          Until November 20, 2016 coming at Venice, remember …

VENICE > There is a glorious City in the Sea. The Sea is in the broad, the narrow streets, ebbing and flowing; and the salt sea-weed clings to the marble of her palaces. No track of men, no footsteps to and fro, lead to her gates. The path lies o’er the Sea, invisible; and from the land we went, as …

ON THE EXTINCTION OF THE VENETIAN REPUBLIC > Once did She hold the gorgeous east in fee; and was the safeguard of the west: the worth of Venice did not fall below her birth, Venice, the eldest Child of Liberty. She was a maiden City, bright and free; no guile seduced, no force could violate; and, when she took unto …

Invisible Cities / by Italo Calvino > “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” When you open the book, you can discover that the writer changed the way we read, also discovering what is possible in the …

Venice, city of corruption, sickness and decay? Not Only. Venice has also played a crucial role in the development of opera (perhaps more than you might expect). That city has been home to countless opera premieres, and for some of Italian operatic composers (Claudio Monteverdi and Antonio Vivaldi, Gioacchino Rossini and Giuseppe Verdi). Rossini’s Otello is set entirely in Venice. …