The jewels of the maharajas radiate an opulence of almost mythical intensity. Strings of magnificent gemstones, fashioned with exquisite artistry, each piece a shimmering testament to the grandeur…
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Japan, a land of countless islands, has long been shaped by a culture of discipline, sensitivity, and refined aesthetic sensibility. From the earliest times, it was symbolically ruled by an emperor…
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Before 1949 ended, the British Consul in Madeira received a telegram from Winston Churchill. They were friends. The “Father of Victory”…
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When my friend made her suggestion over the phone, I tossed a few items into my travel bag and was ready for my next island getaway...
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Oinos (οίνος) in Greek means wine. Spirit is rendered as pneuma (πνεύμα). When combined — oinó-pneuma (οινόπνευμα) — they form the Greek word for “alcohol”. For the ancients…
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On my most recent visit, I was captivated by the restoration of the external frescoes in the Court of Honour and the Gallery of Hercules at the Palace. These treasures of the Italian Renaissance....
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When I thought of Tuscany, the Renaissance bloomed inside of me, without a past or a present. Tuscany does not live cut off from its past…
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It is a well-known fact that Jean Baptiste Colbert, the finance minister of Louis XIV, the Sun King, was a man of measure. He was the one who set the rules and regulations for the import and export…
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Discipline and undiscipline danced a duet in her heart and, when her soul lay captive, there was always escape, something in her which the Emperor found difficult to tame…
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Portugal, followed by Spain, was the great pioneer of the Age of Exploration in the 15th and 16th centuries. With this in mind, I arrived in Lisbon on a clear morning at the end of October…
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For Marguerite of Austria, travel was never a matter of choice. Her life unfolded along paths traced by her father, the Emperor Maximilian I of Habsburg. With striking composure…
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When I arrived in the first days of December, the wind was so fierce that the street lamps swayed, and the sea was swollen and wild. Valletta, the capital, seemed almost under siege by the storm…
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Indeed it was a meal at the Ducal Palace in Venice, where Maria Argyre had arrived as a newlywed, after her marriage to the Doge’s son had taken place in Constantinople in 1004…
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I spoke to him of Nûr Banû, the sultana whose name meant ‘lady of light’ and who was not a myth, but the daughter of the Venetian governor of Corfu. When Hayreddin Barbarossa invaded the island…
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I listened to Isabella carefully as she was telling me all this standing in front of Pauline’s Bonaparte, Princess Borghese, famous statue in the Borghese Gallery. She was depicted as Venus…
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Our being there was a happy conjuncture because we were not there to see the stones, dirt and scaffolding assembled by the archaeologists but Augustus himself, walking through...
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A volcanic explosion from the water's depths - and Delos was born into the heart of the Aegean. Or maybe it was that the waters subsided as one of the last geological phenomena of the area…
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I suppose that Hydra suffered much from the pirate raids in the past, but the time finally arrived when the island evolved into a great nautical power, especially towards the end of the 18th century...
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And there, too, was Ulysses, weary from all the trials and tribulations he’d endured. Poseidon’s fury washed him up on a sandy beach of the very civilized Phaeacians, and Nausicaa sees him…
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“The ruins were found after just a few weeks' digging. He was lucky,” my Scotsman companion said, and I immediately thought he probably knew Evans' story better than that of the English kings…
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