By Patrick Hunt – One of the most beautiful and rightly famous distinctively-designed theme hotels in the world is the Alfonso III of Seville, expressly built for the Iberoamerican Exposition of 1929 under the direct sponsorship of Spain’s King Alfonso XIII in Neo-Mudéjar Style of Moorish Revival in the late […]
By Patrick Hunt – Introduction Significant prior studies have summarized and at times specifically delineated the ways Vermeer employed music in his carefully-wrought and subtly staged mise-en-scène genre paintings. One of the most recent and fairly comprehensive is Marjorie Wieseman’s excellent Vermeer and Music: The Art of Love and Leisure, […]
By Patrick Hunt – One of the more intriguing passages of the Hebrew Bible, Joshua 7: 10-23 & ff. describes the sin of Achan and his “accursed” secret purloined material spoliation after the taking of Jericho by the Israelites, a narrative with controversial historicity. Regardless of when it can be […]
By Patrick Hunt – Olaf Tryggvason Olaf I Tryggvason (ca. 960-1000 CE) was the Viking king who forcibly began to Christianize the people of Norway at the end of the 10th century, a change suggested at times by his detractors as conversion forced at swordpoint. If depicted as a bloody […]
By Patrick Hunt – Vikings continue to be a magnetic topic, especially in light of new discoveries of ships, burials and sites that enable us to concentrate more on their far-flung commercial savvy and technology than the weary and skewed caricature of merely violent rapacity. Anyone who has been to […]
By Patrick Hunt – In the Engadine Valley of Switzerland’s Graubunden Canton below the Alps, the town of St. Moritz and villages like Sils alongside Lake Silvaplana and Lake Sils are justifiably renowned since Celtic and Roman times for Roman stone roads sloping down the mountains to mineral springs, and […]
By Patrick Hunt – One of the oldest and respected domaines in Alsace, already known for some of the oldest continuing wineries in the world, is Domaine Albert Seltz in Mittelbergheim from 1576, with fourteen generations of wine production for highly sought-after wines. The current patriarch Albert took over from […]
By Patrick Hunt – Annette Giesecke has recently added a wonderful and indispensable book to the corpus of mythology: Classical Mythology A to Z: An Encyclopedia of Gods, Goddesses, Heroes, Heroines, Nymphs, Spirits, Monsters and Places (Black Dog & Leventhal / Hachette Group, 2020). While “beautiful” isn’t the most important […]
By Patrizia Passerini – History of Fattoria de Celle Fattoria di Celle is an estate dating back to the 15th century, located in Santomato (near Pistoia) about thirty kilometres from Florence, in the heart of Tuscany. It represents a unique reality, where art, history and nature meet in an amazing venue […]
By Patrick Hunt – Everyone knows Veuve Cliquot Champagne – now in the prestigious LVMH Group – and most know the story of Nicole Barbe Ponsardin, daughter of Baron Nicholas Ponsardin, who founded this grand maison champagne in the 19th century as both a visionary pioneer who helped put champagne […]