We set out from home on a rainy Saturday morning with our dorky matching backpacks and a thermos of bean soup bound for Bronzeville. Our first stop on Chicago Architecture Foundation’s’ Open House Chicago itinerary was Corpus Christi Catholic Church. Normally HOB and I tried to hold back on the gape-mouthed WOW! exclamations when travelling in […]
Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood is alive with art. Murals are everywhere; sophisticated and well-designed murals, political murals, naively-drawn murals, misspelled murals, and entire houses covered with murals. Pilsen smells fantastic—a combination of tortilla factory corn, fried dough, sugar and spicy street food. Houses are adorable and oddly sunk below street level. Spanish is spoken everywhere, guitarists […]
We walked around the corner onto S. Wabash, clutching a map from Chicago Architecture Foundation’s Open House Chicago, and OH HECK YESSSSSSSSS, there was this delightful architectural surprise: a Streamline Moderne church! With it’s twin towers of terra cotta and glass block, the First Church of Deliverance nods to traditional church structure, but don’t be deceived–there’s nothing traditional […]
My blogging name, The Wife of Bath, has become a kind of secret handshake with English lit nerds. One of my readers commented “I saw your WOB handle and I just had to follow. I am a huge fan of both Chaucer and the bawdy and bodacious Alison”. For you not so word-nerdy sorts, here’s […]
During a fascinating period of the Italian Renaissance, humanist scholars and architects set out to create the ideal city. Surprisingly, one of these urban planners was a pope–Pope Pious II. Pius II (formerly known as Enea Silvio Piccolomini) transformed his home town, Cosignano, into a miniature urban Renaissance Utopia. He hired the architect Rossellino to […]
As much as I love to travel, I always end up homesick for the sheer variety of people in Chicago, especially for the delightful urban melting pot of my own neighborhood. We live in multi-cultural splendor in Roger’s Park, on the North side of Chicago. This morning HOB and I set out for a walk to the […]
This could be a post about an ugly travel poncho. Or more likely, a tribute to the earnestly brooding Romantic landscapes of German painter Caspar David Friedrich. However, I’d prefer this to be be a story of how an undignified rain coat can transform the experience of traveling in crappy weather from dreary to hilarious. So, is it The […]
Figeac, a well-preserved medieval town in Southwest France, is a scenic stop on The Way of St. James (Jacques) Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage trail. Our personal pilgrimage was meant to pay homage to hometown hero Jean-François Champollion, though we unintentionally found ourselves in rather intimate proximity to a distant relative of St. Jacques (more on that later). Jean-François Champollion, […]
What saint could be more endearing than St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals? St. Francis (1182 – 1226) grew up as a rich, fashionable boy in Assisi, but a religious epiphany turned him from a dandy to a monk. He “married” poverty, founded the Franciscan order of friars, and was a hugely influential […]
Picnic at the Cathedral 