Art
THE RANT. Coin Operated Timers, or the Church in the Contactless Age
In the age of contactless payments, the Church still demands one-euro coins to light up its Caravaggios with its coin operated timers....
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Art
Travel
The Gulf of Orosei: The Coastline Italy Forgot to Ruin
Thirty kilometres of Jurassic limestone dropping straight into the sea, no roads, no buildings, and beaches reachable only by boat or on...
Travel
The La Maddalena Archipelago: Sixty Islands Between Sardinia and the End of the World
Sixty islands of three-hundred-million-year-old granite, water so clear it looks engineered, and a beach that a man from Modena spent thirty-two years...
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...
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,...