Travel
The Dunes of Piscinas: The Desert the Wind Keeps Rewriting
Sardinia's "little Sahara" is really a living coastal dune system, still reshaped by the mistral, fronting a seven-kilometre beach and backed by...
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Travel
Travel
The Magnalonga di Dorgali (Sardinia): Walking, Eating, and Reading a Landscape
A food-and-wine walk through the Supramonte: nine stops, centuries-old olive groves, prehistoric fairy houses carved into the rock, dozens of suckling pigs...
Travel
Gorropu Gorge (Sardinia): Italy’s Deepest Canyon, and How to Actually Tackle It
Walls over 500 metres high, a vanished seabed full of fossils, and a flower that grows almost nowhere else. Gorropu is one...
Travel
The Spanish Riding School: Vienna’s Lipizzaners, and the Question Underneath the Spectacle
Grown men in tailcoats persuade very expensive white horses to hop, and people have been paying to watch for four and a...
Travel
Asinara (Sardinia): The Island That Was a Prison, and So Stayed Intact
For over a century Asinara was a place of confinement: a leper hospital, a POW camp, the maximum-security prison that held Totò...
Food
Girotonno (Carloforte, Sardinia): a local tuna fair and a missed opportunity
A wasted opportunity dressed up as a festival. Carloforte sits on an extraordinary fish, a unique Ligurian-in-Sardinia history, and one of the...
Food
Aurea Osteria Contemporanea, Cagliari. I have never written a review this enthusiastic.
A Cagliari seafood omakase where poor fish becomes extraordinary, local ingredients are used with genuine passion and intelligence, and sixty euros buys...
Food
Breakfast in Bologna near the train station: Forno Brisa
Forno Brisa in Bologna, near the central train station: excellent viennoiserie, specialty coffee and a formidable marketing machine. An honest review between...
Art
Michelangelo Buonarroti, the total artist (and his real torments)
Not the schoolbook saint, not the fridge magnet logo. A long, honest guide to Michelangelo from Florence 1475 to Rome 1564: sculpture,...
Art
Visiting the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence: Beyond Michelangelo’s David
To most visitors the Accademia is the David museum, and they devote ninety percent of their time to a single statue. That...
Food
LUNA by Faro: specialty coffee, breakfast and brunch in Rome, between Piazza Barberini and the stratosphere
Breakfast at LUNA by Faro in Rome: outstanding specialty coffee, excellent croissants and brunch, wrapped in a cosmic manifesto of conscious dining.
Art
Michelangelo’s Prigioni at the Galleria dell’Accademia: The Unfinished Slaves of an Impossible Tomb
Most tourists walk past Michelangelo's Prigioni to photograph the David. They are walking past the proto-modern manifestos of Renaissance sculpture.