Sailing against the tide
There’s a lot of doom in the Internet, especially among the alternative news crowd. People can’t get enough of the “end of the world/end of the West” type of thing. While I do understand that we are living in highly worrying times, with war expanding everywhere, economic downturn, birth rate collapse, mass migration, and radical…Read more
Godi, Fiorenza, poi che se’ sì grande, che per mare e per terra batti l’ali, e per lo ’nferno tuo nome si spande! (Dante, Inferno, Canto XXVI) The Americans After Spain, I came to Florence, for a brief course. I’m staying in a monastery of benedictine nuns that rents rooms, located right at the edge…Read more
I don’t know if anyone noticed, but I haven’t written much here. I spent the past couple of weeks visiting family in Spain, reading Brothers Karamazov1 on the beach and trying to forget about the state of the world. I was staying on a smaller location, about 20 minutes by train from downtown Barcelona, in a coastal…Read more
For several weeks, protests against Israel’s campaign in Gaza have been ongoing at several American universities and a few European ones. It’s basically the same crowd of leftist students that protested for Black Lives Matters, for abortion or for other popular causes (but not against Covid lockdowns). But while those protests were accepted and even…Read more
As the world moves closer to WWIII for reasons no sane man can understand, I prefer for the moment to write about travel. I am still reading Vigée Le Brun’s memories about her travels in Italy, and finding them pretty interesting. But then again, I usually like to read diaries or travel journals, even by…Read more
Some people say I am too harsh on the modern world. That we have wonderful technology and people live in comfort and we have so many ways of amusing ourselves and we can find any ethnic restaurant we want in any town on Earth. Fair enough, I guess. But why is so difficult to make…Read more
We live in an age that, for the most part, doesn’t believe in miracles or in any form of transcendence from the material world. Some believe in the miracles of “science” — although I suppose that has also taken a hit in the recent “Covid” years — but, other than that, I think most people…Read more
I haven’t written so much about Germany, even though I have been living here for the past three years, for several reasons. The main one is that I never expected this country to be my permanent home, but just a place in which I accidentally and temporarily ended up for a while before moving to…Read more
I am currently reading the souvenirs of Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, or, rather, a part of it focusing on her travels in Italy after having escaped the French Revolution. Madame Le Brun was no Raphael or Rembrandt, but she was a talented painter, mostly famous for her portraits, in particular for the several portraits she…Read more
An investigation into Caravaggio’s earnings And now for something completely different. According to historical records, the painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio signed a contract in 1600 to create two paintings (which ended up being “The conversion of Saint Paul” and “The martyrdom of Saint Peter”) during a period of eight months, for 400 scudi —…Read more