Category UNESCO World Heritage Sites
Well, of course I went to Hamlet’s castle!
Shakespeare called it Elsinore, but he never actually visited the real life Kronberg Castle in Helsingør. Some actors from his company performed there, then must have told him about it, and he used that for the setting of Hamlet. The dude is King Frederick II and here is is with his bride (and first cousin—eww!) […]
Hot Liver and Honey Cake Picnic at the Moravian Church of Christiansfeld, Denmark
Two parallel streets with a church in the center: that’s plan of Christiansfeld. This is the planned city of the Moravian religion in Southern Denmark. Moravianism is an early form of Protestantism out of Bohemia. You know these Protestants aren’t going for fancy—what you get here in Christiansfeld is symmetry, order and pruned trees. And […]
The Bendy Pillars of Perfection at the Acropolis
There was a guy who would occasionally drop into my reading group. He was smart but seemingly unfamiliar with the Western canon. We’d read a Shakespeare play and he’d be like “Oh, actually this was quite good—that Shakespeare fellow, I think he was on to something!” It was refreshing and in a way I was […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Mantua, Italy: once more, with trip hazards
I’m not a do over person, but I’ve never been able to get Mantua out of my mind. We were last here in spring 2009, after the economy crashed and flights got super cheap for a while. It was the first time we didn’t travel in winter and I remember stumbling out from looking at […]
Ryōan-ji Zen garden: 15 rocks and a 15 year marriage
As a young woman I thought a typical marriage was this: the wife thanklessly plows through endless chores while her husband, planted in front of a television, yells at a sports game as piles of empty beer cans rise up around him. I never wanted to be married. HOB and I met at a bookstore […]
Borrowed scenery: Kyoto’s Golden Pavilion and Beijing’s Summer Palace
My standard travel practice involves avoiding anything that smacks of shiny; palaces, treasuries, and—most dreaded of all—collections of silver tableware. Nevertheless, I wanted to see the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto. HOB and I had both read Yukio Mishima’s novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and were curious about this temple which had been rebuilt […]
Picnic at the Cathedral 