It was sometime after midnight that the train I’d taken up from Rome stuttered to a stop in the dark as I tried to sleep sitting up, slowly releasing all its passengers onto a concrete walkway. Guards with machine guns directed us into a tunnel of high fencing lit in pools by spotlights. The year […]
My journey to Prague began as a postcard, truth be told: one of those faded, crumpled cards in a flea market long ago – I don’t remember where or when. The city in that vintage black-and-white photograph seemed filled with castles, with shuttered windows and cobblestones and statues and balconies, and drifts of white snow, […]
The word arancini in Italian means “little oranges.” But in the Sicily that named them, going back to the Arab occupation in the 12th century, they are actually no such thing. They were named so, as you might expect, because of a physical resemblance. Some – a deep-fried form of risotto – are round like […]
Art lovers witnessing the birth of the fringe festival in 1947 Edinburgh may have felt an intriguing twinge of familiarity. After all, the creation of a rebellious exhibit to protest the stodgy Paris Salon was something their art form had seen 84 years earlier. In the role of the (actually wonderful) Edinburgh International Festival, there […]
In the exhausted aftermath of World War II, when even the victors faced visible and emotional devastation, a group of arts visionaries in Edinburgh, Scotland, figured out what their city truly needed. And maybe the world needed it too. Someone had to celebrate centuries of pan-European culture and the classical music, dance and theater it […]