Author Archives: The Wife of Bath
Picnic With the (Occasionally Drooling) Cats of Athens
I’m in Athens where I’m having a hard time following my sight-seeing agenda because I just want to walk around and see things like this precious Byzantine church which is between an H&M, a TGI Fridays and a dude pimping energy drinks. What Athens also has is cats. So obviously I have to stop and […]
Dublin’s Georgian Architecture as Social History
Let’s just get the doors over with. Alrighty, here are some Georgian doors in Dublin. Everybody happy? If you’re like me and interested in architectural heritage and planning a trip to Dublin you’re going to encounter a lot of references to these doors, which are nice I guess but being honest I found them sort […]
On the winter solstice, you can touch the light at Newgrange
At dawn on the winter solstice, when the light breaks over the horizon, a beam of light channels through a box above the entry to the prehistoric tomb of Newgrange. Moving inward little by little down a narrow passageway, it reaches the heart of the chamber. This 17 minute-long yearly event is a distillation of so […]
The charisma of Dublin’s pubs (from the outside)
Lots of folks travel to Ireland. Whenever I’ve asked them what they enjoyed the most, they invariably say “the pubs”. Now don’t get in my face about this, because I don’t think there’s anything wrong with going to pubs, but they just don’t appeal to me. When I was planning my trip, HOB said “If […]
Dublin: Run to the Theatre, Run Away from the Stewed Prunes
Take some advice from a legit theatre nerd: go see theatre in Dublin. I chose my hotel because it is next to Abbey Theatre, a company I saw in Chicago years ago and was determined to see again. The first play I went to in Abbey Theatre was in the smaller space. I came back […]
Upstaged by a Seagull in Dublin
I’m in Dublin and I guess you could say I’m getting the full Irish: From my hotel breakfast to the weather. The upside of the rainy weather is the rainbows. Yesterday I visited Trinity College. On the right is the schools chapel, known to the students as Heaven. On the left is where they take […]
Picnic at the Cathedral of Modena
When we arrived off our flight from Chicago, we planned to take a short train ride and spend the night in nearby Modena. We bought train tickets from a machine in the Bologna station but we couldn’t find the right departure track because it wasn’t posted on the electronic board, so I asked a station […]
Venice is not ideal for picnics or Parkinson’s
When I booked our trip to Italy, I had a choice to fly out of either Milan or Venice for the same amount of frequent flyer miles. As a smaller and car-free city, Venice seemed like the best option for HOB, who has Parkinson’s Disease. We had visited Venice one other time, and that was […]
Teatro all’Antica, Sabbioneta: ideal city as theater
Vespasiano I Gonzaga had a lot going on for him; he was a duke, he had an awesome name, and if this statue of him is realistic, he was a total hottie. But was he satisfied? Nuh uh—Duke Hottie Gonzaga wanted his very own ideal city, so in the mid 1500’s he commissioned Sabbioneta. Sabbioneta […]
Empress Theodora in the Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna deserves her halo
If there was Venn diagram of things I can’t get enough of: Byzantine architecture, Western art history and Sears catalogs from the 1980’s, The Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna would be right in that sweet spot where they come together. It was built 540 in a double octagonal Byzantine-stye design that was all the […]
Picnic at the Cathedral 