“The Etruscans, as everyone knows, were the people who occupied the middle of Italy in early Roman days and whom the Romans, in their usual neighbourly fashion, wiped out entirely to make room for Rome with a very big R.” This is the opening sentence of D.H. Lawrence’s Etruscan Places (1932). I’d decided to cite …
Nearly all Learn Italy trips to Venice have been in mid-winter. A special moment for me has always been a visit to the church of San Zaccaria, just inland from the Riva degli Schiavoni, a couple of hundred yards from the Doges’ Palace. In the afternoon it doesn’t open till after four, so we have …
In the dry spring of last year, like nearly everyone, we tried out new walks in our neighbourhood. On one such walk we came across a field completely and gorgeously yellow with buttercups. So this year we set off at the right kind of time to repeat the experience, and certainly we found the same …
I’m pleased to report that no potatoes have recently leapt inappropriately into breakfast-time exchanges, though sometimes the air is thick with whatsisname and thingummyjig as names drift in and out of availability while the brain-box starts to fire up. Someone ingeniously suggested that ‘potato’ was nearly an anagram of ‘teaspoon’, but perhaps that person spends …
17 March 2021 Breakfast time. I am battling with some under-set marmalade (made by me) that slurps everywhere; I am using a tea-spoon. Katie is having similar trouble with honey. When bought in Siena, it had looked non-runny, denso in Italian, but on opening months later it turned out to be sloppy. So I ask …
(December 2020) The Bird of Time has but a little way To fly — and lo! The Bird is on the Wing The colours of autumn were at first brilliant on the trees and then for a couple of days just as bright on the ground, till they turned dark brown and dry. Now those …
Newsletter 46: Can it really be Thursday already? Read More »
Newsletter 44 (14 June 2020) In our bathroom, at about 8:30 in the morning, the sun streams in the roof window, hits the bevelled edges of a mirror, and showers small rainbows over the white tiles and the bath. Not exactly rainbows, as they are all straight, but if there is a word for these …
Newsletter 41 (18 September 2019) Ekphrasis is a term for the vivid description of an object, often a work of art. Often it is a verbal representation of a visual representation. Images and objects, however powerfully they appear to express an idea, are mute and unknowable. Words can make them speak in many voices, attach …
Newsletter 31 (17 April 2016) Reading Katie’s travel notes about trips made years ago, I came across an entry on Bergamo. We were there in 1984 with two children (aged ten and eight). After reading about what we had seen in the Città Alta I was surprised to read the following final comments on paintings …
Commonplace Thoughts on the Remembrance of Things Past Read More »
