The Gorges du Loup are one of the outstanding nature reserves in the southeast of France. Unfortunately, they are also far away from the coast and difficult to reach. Which is why we have long ago placed them on the list of Things We Intend To Do One Day In The Future, somewhere between visiting…
Why Walk from Menton to Monaco? 1. You see a lot of stuff you don’t see from the bus From the bus, all you see is a blur. You get the general idea of the French Riviera: the sea, the sun (if there is any), the palm trees, but are you bound to miss all…
When I tell you that we visited a park last weekend to get away from midwinter blues, you will still have no idea of the type of thing that we saw and the type of experience that we had. Whether we had a pleasant but essentially low-octane stroll between flowerbeds, well-tendered lawns and playgrounds for…
Christmas cheers are fading, Christmas dinners have been cleared away, and most Christmas trees will soon be demobbed. But as soon as one annual ritual is over, it is already time for another one: we are entering the season of New Year resolutions. If you are still looking for a cheering splash of coulour, here…
You have some time to kill over the Christmas holidays? You feel you should go out for a walk – but cannot bring yourself to step into the cold rain, sleet or snow? Then here is a suggestion: just wander with your eyes over this page, stop here or there for a while if you…
The key difference between small cities and large cities resembles the difference between a single song and an album collection. Nice in the south of France is an excellent example for the single: attractive and catchy, but essentially a play on one motive or melody. Paris, conversely, unites a wide range of different themes: luxurious…
Did they meet? That is always the question when we read about two famous people who were sharing some sort of geographical proximity at one time or another. Adolf Hitler and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (“the limits of my language are the limits of my world”) went to the same school in Linz. Anton Czekhov…
When we first visited Siena, as part of a sponsored organized tour, we were taken for a walk down the high street straight into a museum, came out 2 hours later and went, more or less, directly back to the bus. No disrespect to our hosts (one branch of the large and sprawling tree of…
The Romans never much liked the Riviera. They found its stony slopes too tiresome for agriculture, its small settlements too poor to plunder, and its mountainous interior too difficult to protect against the troublesome natives. Which is why the Romans did not settle in great numbers here and only ever built a few garrisons in…
William Shakespeare is arguably the world’s greatest writer, but he is also literature’s great man of mystery. We know almost all of his plays and poems, but little of the man himself. Unusually for a man of letters, we do not know his “philosophy” and where he stood on the great issues of the day…