Tag Archives: Baroque

Bernini’s Saint Teresa: ecstasy made of marble

November 12, 2014 · by · in Italy · 11 Comments

We’re all bombarded daily with urgent demands: buy now! renew now! click now! save the environment!  save your soul!  I too have a demand for you and while it won’t whiten your teeth, update the virus protection on your computer, or reward you with salacious celebrity gossip, it’s truly urgent: get yourself to Rome.  Walk rapidly, dodging Vespas with a […]

Lecce, Italy: all the putti

July 21, 2014 · by · in Italy, Street food · 6 Comments

Putti wrapped around columns, garlands of putti, putti with pigeons on their heads, gilded putti holding up ceilings, putti coyly offering bunches of grapes, flying heads-with-no-bodies-putti, actual children that strongly resemble putti…. Arrive in Italy and keep going South, all the way down, right there to the tip of the boot.  Did you find a […]

Campy corbels in Ragusa

March 5, 2014 · by · in Italy, UNESCO World Heritage Sites · Leave a comment

I generally have a hard time appreciating Baroque, which I associate with frosting covered architecture encrusted with obese putti and over-inflated grandeur.  Ragusa, a UNSECO protected Baroque town in Southern Sicily, just may have converted me into a Baroque lover.  The town, largely destroyed in a massive earthquake in 1693, was rebuilt by its wealthy […]