by VT | Aug 28, 2017 | General interest, history, Italy, travel
Beppino’s family have lived in this Tuscan valley for centuries. He was standing on the terrace above us surveying the valley. I thought, ‘Leonardo da Vinci once stood here to draw his map of the then malarial valley, now in the collection of Queen Elizabeth. He...
by Valerie | Jul 19, 2017 | General interest, history, people, travel, Uncategorized
When driving through the patchwork of green fields and grazing sheep in North Yorkshire this weekend, I marvelled at the hard simplicity of the stone walls. Once these hillsides and valleys crossed by fast-flowing rivers must have been as strewn with stones as the...
by Valerie | Jul 14, 2017 | art, Fashion, General interest, history, people, travel
‘Is Iran a police state?’ I asked Ali, our excellent guide. He hesitated. The organisers of our tour of Iran asked us not to name anyone we would like to meet there as we are requested to do on our visa application. Any meetings should be arranged through our guide....
by Valerie | Jul 4, 2017 | art, Fashion, Fifties, General interest, history, museums, people, travel
Tehran, we were warned, would be characterless. It was. There was no heart to the town which seemed like a lot of villages which had spread and amalgamated into an amorphous mass. I remember endless streets that all looked the same as we went from one museum to...
by Valerie | Jun 27, 2017 | General interest, history, people, travel, Uncategorized
Whenever one wonders where the idea of a garden started, one finds that the Garden of Eden was first realised in Persia and travelled the world woven into prized carpets. That must explain why the gardens in India, from Kashmir to Agra, were created by Muslim...
by Valerie | May 1, 2017 | travel
I am writing this before going to a most beautiful garden in the hotel which is a huge former caravanserai to listen, in English, to those of famous Persian poets. We flew to Shiriaz, a rather nondescript town with single storey buildings hidden behind shops...
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