Marrakech is the city gardens: beautiful, lined with pink walls, with birds chirping in orange trees, small lakes, and kiosks scattered gracefully here and there. In the background, emerge the snow-capped peaks…
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On a beautiful spring afternoon, the painter Mina Kordalis invited her friend, author Barbara Athanassiadis, to her atelier to present with images and words her book "My Venice"…
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A look at them from the path consumes you with their beauty. They are so densely and consistently constructed that the yard of one…
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Α visit to Sotheby’s in London
It all started with a lecture that I attended two years ago. In my attempts to discover the history of Chinese porcelain I entered a labyrinth of dynasties…
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Have you ever wondered how, at the beginning of the 19th century, so many wonderful works of art reached the United States and became part of the wealthiest collections…
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It was the most beautiful capital in Europe. According to Goethe, Naples was a kind of paradise where everyone lived in a sort of dream-like intoxication. Some twenty years later, Stendhal wrote that Toledo street…
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Within this idyllic place, a second was created, not by nature, but by the hand of man. It is the Villa d’ Este, whose gardens are considered the most beautiful in Europe…
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Looking at the Basilica of San Marco, I think of the expression that defines it: the Fable of the East. When I close my eyes, I see in my mind the same words: The East begins in Venice. These words are not spoken lightly…
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Natalia didn’t let the small binoculars leave her eyes for a moment. Now the ballerina rested on one leg. Her partner lightly touched the fingertips of her hand to rotate her in a full circle. They looked into each…
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Rome in the 17th century would attract, apart from the expected pilgrims of Saint Peter’ s, artists, priests and the princes of Europe, an entire society of people living on the fringe elements who Caravaggio…
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This was Isabella Gardner, whose home-museum I was now entering in Boston. It was not just her eccentricity, but also a healthy dose of madness, which turned her into the choreographer of her own fantasies…
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It is true that walking through the forty museums of Florence, we often forget that what we are seeing once belonged to the private collection of the Medici family and we don’t even ask ourselves how is it…
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We had to walk quite a while to get to the Medici Chapel. Fortunately, the rain had stopped. The chapel was located on the first floor of the Medici Palace, on the via Larga. It was small and so alive in its colours…
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Everything that was fine and exquisite about Indian jewellery laid out before my eyes. It was an entire symphony of luminous diamonds, sapphires of the deepest blue, rubies the colour of pigeon’s blood, pink pearls and sea-green emeralds, most of which were set in gold…
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Once, on one of my trips to Egypt, I caught myself observing one of the huge columns of Karnak in Luxor with great interest. There was not an unoccupied space on the whole surface. Immediately my thoughts went to the Trajan’s column in Rome, so richly decorated with sculpted…
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Yes, even paintings travel and the path of their journey is interesting, especially if they arrive where they are now without any damage. Some have survived wars, disasters, lootings, jealousies and and the indifference of the people that have inherited them…
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Hagia Sophia absorbs me even without seeing its mosaics, now lost. I imagine the enormity of its roundness covered with thousands of tiny gilded pieces of glass that shine under the reflection of thousands of flames of the candles…
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