Tag Archives: UNESCO
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 […]
The dress code is linen at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple
HOB and I used to take a staycation every spring. We’d run around Chicago, visiting far away neighborhoods, going to concerts and plays, and walking around with an architecture book doing self-guided tours. On several of these vacations we took the train out to Oak Park, our visits always seeming to coincide with an event […]
“Full Fart Forover” in Røros, Norway
Oh hey, we’re in Norway. I know, I know, why would cheapskates like us be traveling in one of the world’s most expensive countries? What happened was, I was looking at airfares online and I saw flights to Norway for $333 round-trip from Chicago. How could I resist? So I bought two tickets to Oslo with […]
The Unfinished Chapels of Batalha: architecture shocks sky
There’s a monastery in the town of Batalha that looks as it is carved from crystalized honey. One of my finer life choices was to spend an entire day looking at it. (Okay, full disclosure, I probably would have crammed in at least one other monastery in our itinerary that day had the bus schedules […]
Picnic at the Cathedral 