On this long weekend in Lisbon at the end of October 2021 it was hard to believe that we’re still in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. The streets were heaving with youngsters. Average age? Say, 24? This was probably because they were amongst the 42,000 visitors attending the world’s most important tech conference, the Web Summit, which opened on the Monday.
The desert rose is not just a flower. It’s also a cluster of gypsum crystal arranged like rose petals, which form when water infiltrates the rock and then evaporates. These “petals” inspired architect Jean Nouvel for his design of the National Museum of Qatar, an architectural feat which, I have no doubt, will over time become as iconic a building as is the Sydney Opera House.
Rome in the middle of August is usually empty of Romans but teeming with tourists. However, in this very weird summer of 2020 it looked like a ghost town, inhabited by just a few Italians armed with maps and guides, discovering their capital city in peace without being jostled by tourists and their awful 'selfie-sticks'. Like them, I wanted to enjoy the relative solitude so I jumped on a last minute offer to swap our flat in the Alps with a flat in Trastevere. Having been to Rome many times, I decided this time to focus on the 20th Century
Located in a basin, surrounded by the high, rocky cliffs of the Gemmi pass, Leukerbad, or Loèche-les-Bains for the French-speaking Swiss, is the largest spa resort in Switzerland. It’s an extremely picturesque place for some, inauspicious for others. “Few people making plans for a holiday would elect to come here,” wrote James Baldwin in 1953, adding that “the landscape is absolutely forbidding, mountains towering on all four sides, ice and snow as far as the eye can reach.”
The first exhibition in Paris in over a century of Rosa Bonheur’s paintings and sculptures, currently on until Jan. 15, 2023, marks the bicentenary of the animal portraitist who was the most famous, highly paid artist of the XIXth century until she fell into complete oblivion in the XXth. Her resuscitation, and the Musée d’Orsay exhibition, are due to Katherine Brault and her family, single-handedly responsible for putting Bonheur firmly back in the limelight. As a complement to the exhibition I recommend that you take a 45-minute train and visit the Château de By, today the Rosa Bonheur museum, owned by the Brault family.
A family wedding this summer at a place called Bredenbury which is… well in the middle of nowhere really, in the west of central England, SW of Birmingham, was the occasion to discover a part of the British Isles I’d never been to before…
