For Marguerite of Austria it was not her own choice to travel. Her constant movements were her father’s decision, the Emperor Maximilian I of Habsburg. Showing great equanimity, the princess obeyed her father’s…
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When I arrived in the first days of December, the wind was so strong that the street lamps swayed and the sea was swollen and wild. Valletta, the capital, seemed to be threatened by this storm, so violent…
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The truth is, I want to resemble Augustus, to have something of his character; to succeed, like him, in whatever goal I set myself, while simultaneously maintaining, also like him, a low profile, which I find more difficult…
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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, reclining on …
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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…
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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…
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I wished the Venetians had been like this, and not closed themselves off in their castle-states on the islands and on the capes of the Aegean, with the winged lion of the Serenissima dominating the battlements…
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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, and the island…
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And there 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 and is not repulsed by his nakedness and filth, as her friends…
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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. “He marvelled at…
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Why did Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinopole, not touch the Parthenon, and Morosini, the Venetian admiral, destroy it? The answer is that the Sultan had had…
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