The Death in Venice cocktail crafted by the Hotel Excelsior’s Tony Micelotta and Robin Saikia, author of the Venice Lido: A Blue Guide Travel Monograph, proves to be a hit, the hotel’s best-selling cocktail in 2012. See the recipe here » An extract from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, whose hero dies of eating an over-ripe strawberry…
If you had to choose an English family you could call “gentry”, you might well go back to the early seventeenth century and seek out the Oglanders of Nunwell on the Isle of Wight, whose meticulous account-books for the years 1620 to 1648 still exist and remain within the family.…
As I write this, it is the anniversary of the birth of one of early America’s great engineers, John A. Roebling (born on June 12th 1806), designer of the Brooklyn Bridge. When it was opened, in May 1883, Brooklyn Bridge was the longest suspension bridge in the world and an…
by Charles Freeman My wife, Lydia, and I were recently in and around Venice, coming in and out one day by bus from Dolo on the Brenta canal and staying two nights in the city itself. Since March Ist there has been a new ticketing system, IMOB, run by ACTV.…
In April, around the perimeter walls of the star-shaped fortress-city of Palmanova in northern Italy, you can expect to see people out in force, armed with plastic bags, some even with scissors, searching the grassy banks for a certain plant. What is it? The answer is “sclupit”, as it is…
The ruins of the Roman colony of Aquileia, once the fourth largest Roman city in Italy, lie under and around the peaceful modern town and its splendid Early Christian basilica church. Where the amphitheatre once stood, citizens now hoe their vegetable patches and tend their sweet peas. It is all…
The well-known nonsense poet and artist Edward Lear paid a short visit to Crete in 1864. He was coming from Corfu, where he had lived for nine years; when the British government returned the Ionian islands to the Greek state, the British community dispersed. At that point in his life…
I began this quirky, genre-defying book one sunny May morning and by the time I had got halfway through it, I was really enjoying myself. I had had no idea what to expect but was prepared for either a fatuous trawl through Rome’s “eateries” or for rapturous gushing about dining all’italiana…
“Lucca is one of the most beautiful small towns in Italy.” So begins the description of the town in Blue Guide Tuscany. And it is true. Lucca, in my opinion, is as good as Tuscany gets. It was a Roman town, and the shape of its amphitheatre is atmospherically preserved in…
Santa Maria Antiqua, the oldest church in the Forum, is at last due to reopen after extensive repairs and restorations. It houses some exceptional wall-paintings. See the following review in the New York Times.
Tucked away in a sidestreet close to the church of the Frari is Palazzetto Bru Zane, originally a small palace or ‘casino’ where the Zane family would receive guests and host entertainments. Its stairway and first-floor rooms are richly decorated with woodwork by Andrea Brustolon and stuccoes by Abbondio Stazio,…
The Delhi launch of Blue Guide India by Sam Miller took place on Thursday 12th January in the grounds of the Lodi restaurant, close to the magnificent medieval tombs of the Lodi Gardens. More than a hundred guests gathered on a bitterly cold Delhi evening for cocktails, and to watch…
I am not quite sure how my 1961 edition of Pevsner’s Suffolk has survived long enough still to be found among the debris in the boot of my car. It surfaces and resurfaces as if carrying the persistence of its author with it. It is a paperback edition and I…
Visitors to the Camposanto, the sacred burial ground of Pisa, so sadly damaged by Allied bombers in the Second World War, find all manner of monuments lining the walls, from Roman sarcophagi to statues of the illustrious citizens of later centuries. One of these, recently cleaned up and restored, dates…
All new first edition, all India in one volume. The result of four years’ work by Delhi-based Sam Miller, head of the BBC Trust in India. See the contents, index and sample pages, and buy online direct from the publisher. Available in print and as an e-book by chapter.
‘Archaeology often brings to light relics—mysterious foundations, tumbled blocks, a charred sacrificial pit, the decaying stumps of dead houses—fascinating to the scholar but a stunning bore to the simple visitor.’ So wrote Dilys Powell in The Villa Ariadne. Archaeologists can be monomaniacs and their interests are often distressingly narrow. So it…
I first arrived in Rome in January 1966 when I was eighteen. I had had a long journey by train from London but I have never forgotten the emotional impact as my taxi sped by the Forum. All the hours I had spent trying to construe the speeches of Cicero…
Edirne, which stands on the Turkish border with Greece and Bulgaria, has seen extraordinary highs and lows during its history. As the Roman Adrianople, it stood close to the site of one of the most disastrous battles in history, when the Roman emperor Valens and most of his army was…
The struggle by the city-states of Italy to dominate the medieval Mediterranean trade routes was a ruthless one and Venice was the key player. The famous account of Venetian merchants stealing the body of St Mark from Alexandria in 828, whether the stuff of legend or not, shows that Venetian…
Some suggestions from Blue Guides’ historical consultant Charles Freeman I haven’t been to Istanbul for some years, so it is good to be going back at last, to set up a tour I shall be leading in October. Of course, I shall be keen to put the new Blue Guide to…
