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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Here’s how they did things in Italy for around 1400 years; popes, baby Jesus, really fancy places to put the popes and all the church people in, saints, more baby Jesus, everyone dies from the plague, more baby Jesus, oh hey, look— some ancient stuff—maybe we should rediscover it, let’s make some art and buildings […]
It’s springtime in Padua, a university town, and that means graduation parties. So many wholesome scenes. Extended families presenting flowers to the proud graduate, who is decked out in a Dante-style wreath of laurels. Grampa, grandma, parents—everyone raising their spritzes in a toast which I was easily able to interpret having learned Italian as a […]
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 […]
I live with three dudes. Only one of them has intact testicles. There’s the dude I married. (More on him later.) And then there’s Shinto. When we lost our cat Janacek, a sweet old boy remarkable only for his shedding, we went to the shelter looking for a similar cat. We asked the attendant to […]
You may recall from my last post that when HOB and I were in the marvelous Rookery building, he spied a glasses shop. Soon after he made an appointment with an optometrist there, because, as he told me “I think I have a hole in my eye”. And damn it if he didn’t—for real—have a […]
Picnic at the Cathedral 