Molto Bene

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Well ragazzi (guys),

That’s a wrap on Europe. At the Leonardo Da Vinci airport in Roma, heading home shortly 😌

It’s been a big three weeks! We spent our last full day in Rome yesterday braving the heat and doing heap of touristy museums and things.

I’ll aim to do a proper epilogue post when I’m home from my bed.

For now, here are a few pics. Thanks for following me on my little trip blog! 💖

The Colosseum.

Awesome old stuff everywhere at the Forum.

Raphael’s School of Athens. Excellent.

Ciao xx

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Part two of our day in Florence.

There was so much beautiful history at the Museo Bargello, I was gobsmacked.

Gorgeous old ceilings, stone bits outside, and rooms housing everything anyone’s ever made.

Then there was gelato, a blobbè, and some lovely spots for dinner.

We enjoyed vino and the best plate of cheese ever.

Perfetto!

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Buono sera famiglia,

So, yesterday we did a bunch of stuff in Florence and I will try to summarise here.

We did the Galleria dell’Accademia, which is a wonderful gallery where Michelangelo’s David lives, and then the Museo del Bargello which was way less busy and has heaps of cool old stuff.

Here are some highlights:

Beautiful Italian renaissance painting details. A skull, weird little cherub heads, some beautiful beads.

Here’s David, front and back. He was great. Outside, the queues to get in were intense we’ve though we already booked tickets, but once inside it was kind of fine, and people generally weren’t dickheads.

David was magnificent.

A whole room of plaster casts of neoclassical figures and busts, and some eyes on a platter.

Then over to the Bargello museum which had a fraction of the crowds, and had heaps of cool old stuff.

Here’s David again but this one is earlier, from the 1400s and is bronze cast, by a different ninja turtle, Donatello.

Or as I like to call it, David the twink. Very young, very camp. Donatello was an openly gay man in renaissance Italy and had great patrons who looked after him.

The Bargello is a medieval building, and has awesome old bits everywhere you look.

So yummy!

Part two to come!

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Ciao babes!

There is much to report and I’m a few days behind. Today we got the train from Florence to Rome.

A travel mode I highly recommend, is go to your next place in the middle of the day; check in early afternoon to your accommodation, have a shower, freshen up and blob, and then go out and do something before dinner.

Today after we checked in, steamed, blobbed, we walked to the Capuchin museum and crypt. The capuchins were Italian monks (who, like the coffee, wore brown robes with cream hoods). The museum was excellent and the crypt…

It’s literally wall decorations with bones from the bodies of over 3,000 capuchin monks from the last few centuries. It was wild.

They had a Caravaggio painting, I think it was called St Francis in Meditation, where he’s holding a skull near a cross and contemplating Jesus:

And some other weird stuff like this baby Jesus:

Naturally, after this we had to stop for cream buns and beer:

And then onwards to the Trevi Fountain:

It was very beautiful.

We got a bus to another area and had some lovely pasta for dinner, then the bus back and now we blob and await the England vs Argentina soccer match.

Ciao! X

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La famiglia,

I wrote a great little blog today on the train but it didn’t post properly, it simply disappeared into the aether. So I will try and capture its essence again!

This morning, we had coffee and pastry in a little square near our accom and to my delight there was a wee market.

I bought the cutest little Nonna-y hankies from a nonna and nonno stall! They had nonna aprons and everything.

I love hankies, I got the habit of using them from my grandma and I love to collect them from fancy shops and vintage markets.

It was the most thrilling retail purchase since the Jesus Greggs t shirt. Look at them!

The lady didn’t speak much English (most people in Europe speak English as a common second language) so I showed her the hanky in my pocket, she said something and then whipped out her hanky from her bra and we agreed in our own way that hankies are great.

This one reminds me of a Josef Albers square painting:

The market vibes:

On the train we sped past acres of sunflowers, which I imagine are used for sunflower oil production. A bit of a blur at 270kmph.

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Buon giorno from Florence riends,

Yesterday we left our nice place in Venice, for a long meandering vaporetto (water bus) up the grand canal which was scenic and lovely. A snack and then a 2 hour fast train to Florence. Very warm.

Lewis chose a really lovely apartment for us to stay in, with good air con. After a quick freshen up we walked over the bridge and visited the Galileo Museum.

It’s named after him but mostly houses lots of wonderful old scientific instruments. Like, lots of them, all wood and polished brass. They also have one of Galileo’s fingers in a jar - they were trying to create a scientific relic.

Here are some pics:

Cool old stuff.

A proto-period table and a portable pharmacy.

Here’s the jar with Galileo’s right middle finger, lol. It looks fossilised.

And here are some more stone lions and other cool statues around Florence.

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Ciao!

I forgot to say, when we were leaving Notting Hill in London last week, we walked past Hester Chambers, the guitarist from Wet Leg. It was exciting.

Here are some more Venice pics:

Some snaps of drinks in Florence:

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Buon giorno dear readers,

Here’s an update from Sunday in Venice. We visited the Peggy Guggenheim Collection gallery, which features her collection of European modern art, mostly from the 1930s. It was excellent.

There was a whole room of Kandinsky paintings, this one was great. (Sorry I didn’t snap the title.)

Detail:

More Kandinsky:

Sophie Taeuber-Arp:

A lovely little Mondrian:

This is cool, this painting is titled Voice of Space by Rene Magritte, 1931:

The dude must have read War of the Worlds.

Look at this lovely work by Fernand Leger painted in 1919:

The Miffy-esque colour palette and the busy but engaging composition, it’s just gorgeous.

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Ciao!

Here are some highlights from the Venice Biennale.

Curated collections of thousands of postcards in the Spanish pavilion. It felt endearing, it spoke to humanity’s cute obsession with travel, sightseeing and correspondence. On point for me this week.

Plaster and instruments from Belgium. We love a Precision Bass.

Cool paintings and textile collages from Great Britain and France (sorry I didn’t note most artist names).

Khaled Sabsabi’s beautiful curtains.

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A lovely little garden in Venice:

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More Venice!

A weird little pond with heaps of turtles.

Sights and today’s lovely lunch.

Some very Venetian scenery.

San Marco’s square.

Haribo polka - you can only get it in Europe. I really love Haribo lollies and try to only eat them on holiday.

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Ciao from Venice!

It’s Sunday afternoon and we’ve spent the weekend here, it’s been gorgeous. Having a rest in our lovely air conditioned apartment and going to just dump a heap of pics here in no particular order.

Souvenir kiosk in Venice:

Food, peach Bellini:

Houses and apartments in shades of peach, lemon and terracotta:

Last night’s beautiful dinner situation. Exquisite vino, gorgeous delicate lasagne, Lew had a bowl of squid ink linguine with cuttlefish (I tried some and even I liked it):

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We went to CERN!

Our trip to Geneva was mainly to visit CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research, where they house the Large Hadron Collider. We visited the museum, the Cern Arts centre and went on a tour, it was delightful.

Some artworks at the Arts at CERN museum. They run a fantastic art program with residencies and fund artists to spend time at the facility and get inspired to make art.

This is a part of the Synchro Cyclotron, their first ever collider built in the 1950s.

Awesome artwork on the side of one of their buildings.

Some other cool stuff on the tour.

We learned that when the LHC is fired up and they’re smashing protons together, there are a few concentric metres of detectors.

It was something absurd like 14 million collisions per second (I think I remembered that right) and many of them are boring and uninteresting, so they cull their data in real time and just don’t record boring events. They only store data from interesting collisions that produce funky particles.

Here’s some merch we bought:

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Other pics from Geneva:

We did the Swiss chocolate thing.

The gist of things.

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Geneva feels like one of those cities built on money; big banks and bougie shops everywhere, and it was possibly more expensive than Dubai.

But the lake was pretty. There’s a cool bar and community space which was a nice change from all the rich normies in beige pants at the fancy bars lol.

So we had beers and snacks by the lake in a little spot you can get into. It was so refreshing!

No one’s ever called me a water baby, but I totally am one.

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Days ago in London!

I haven’t had a chance to report on last Sunday. We squeezed in a trip to the Tate modern gallery and saw some work by Tracey Emin, before getting the train to Richmond and spending the afternoon with Lew’s family at his sister’s nice place.

Here are some bits by Tracey Emin:

As Lewis said after we’d been jokingly calling her Tracey Lemming all morning, “There was a strong theme, and that theme was not lemmings.”

A Gerhard Richter painting that looks just like high speed rail travel.

No pictures of our afternoon as they’re not really photo people! But we had a lovely time with Lew’s sister Sophie, her husband Rob, their kids Marcie and Rory and Lew’s parents who were staying there as well.

Very nice house with garden in a fancy area. Sat outside and caught up over very nice barbecue lunch and wine, they’re nice people and they’ve always made me feel very welcome 💖

It was Sophie’s birthday on Monday so we brought her some Natio beauty treats from Melbourne. The highlight of the day was seeing 4 year old Rory who is twice the age we last saw him, a very cute kid. I took him and Marcie some treats; Marcie wasn’t fussed with the glittery hair clips, but I got Rory a dinosaur on wheels and it was an absolute hit.

Think a draw-back matchbox car, but where the car body should be is a plastic stegosaurus. Brilliant. It went everywhere with him that day haha.

So, that was London. Curry, catching up with family, some art. Here’s a cute pic of perfect pastel houses in Notting Hill, that look like sugared almonds.

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Days ago in Paris!

After we visited the industrial museum, we meandered to some other part of Paris and caught up with a good friend of mine.

We spent the afternoon and into the evening bar hopping with my friend Rhett. Rhett is from Perth and we met met years ago when he taught me sculpture at tafe. Since then we’ve been mates and he’s been a mentor in all things art teaching. Some years ago he moved to Edinburgh to study and met a nice French lady, and they’ve since settled down in Angers and had kids.

He caught the train into Paris and we we drank wine and ate cheese and snacked our way across town, catching up all day, it was really lovely.