by Valerie | Jan 9, 2019 | art, childhood, General interest, history, people, reading groups, travel
These fragments I have stored against my ruins’ – T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (near the end) Still clear in my memory is the sense of freedom I felt as an eight-year-old when, in a class spelling bee, I went to the top of the line for remembering ‘Mississippi’...
by Valerie | Dec 20, 2018 | art, General interest, history, people, travel, Uncategorized
I thought a lot about seasons during a November visit to Ecuador ago during the spring bulb and rose season a few years ago. Close to the equator, the sun rises and sets at about six in the morning and evening all year round. While driving through a nondescript town...
by Valerie | Dec 5, 2018 | art, Fashion, General interest, history, Italy, museums, people, travel
Fingers poised, I am about to type out a lecture on the period of art styled Mannerism, but am uncertain where to start. Yes, Florence again, not in the workshops that forged the talent of young Michelangelo and Raphael in the late 1400s, but in the Florentine court...
by Valerie | Nov 21, 2018 | 1950s, art, childhood, Fifties, General interest, horse riding, horses, people
It may be the approach of winter but now, instead of looking up at a stone retaining walls beside the rutted track in Tuscany where I imagine I’m walking in the footsteps of Leonardo da Vinci, I’m looking down at what is underneath my shoes, travelling from ruts to...
by Valerie | Nov 7, 2018 | 1950s, art, Fifties, General interest, history, Italy, people, travel
If you crossed the mountains to the east of the once malarial, now drained Tuscan valley of the Val di Chiana into the Tiber valley in search of the enigmatic painter Piero della Francesca, you used to pass woodland clearings with the huts of charcoal burners, their...
by Valerie | Oct 3, 2018 | art, General interest, history, museums, people, travel, Uncategorized
Not many years ago a young couple in our family received a present from Iran. It came in two special postal deliveries and created quite a stir in the small flat where they were living at the time. The wife is a British Iranian, so it was no surprise that her Iranian...
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