Author: a love letter to rome and italy!

the dear one

| a love letter to rome and italy!

I miss the sweetness I assigned to you.
I miss the laughter I put into your mouth, the twinkle I applied to your eyes, the desire I affixed to your grin. 

I miss picturing the heart of you, a creature solely of imagination. I miss creating in you an image I longed to see in myself, like two threads occasionally meeting at intervals of time and space. 
I miss the secrets behind your eyes and the smile I dreamt was profound and beautiful. 

I miss the hope of you, which was really the longing for a life of beauty and understanding. 

I miss pretending I knew you and you knew me. I miss your bright spots in my dark days … I miss shining onto you my dearest wish for your happiness. 

To reveal myself I am no longer a figure of desire, but to not reveal myself I am not truly myself, I am a shadow of a monster on my worst day, I’m a ghost haunting my body, not a soul seen through a plaintive word or smile or gesture. And I am at my best not in my cup nor quip, but l’esprit d’escalier… the wit on the staircase, comebacks better left for my notebooks or to renewed silence set serenely behind a mysterious smile. 

Too much light, too many open doors and windows, too many candles glowing too brightly, burning twice as fast, illuminating darkness all around me, always looking for that hint of color, that fresher air, that rain storm and later sun to make the clouds and the sea more terrible and more beautiful. To feel and see it all more intensely. That’s what life is for, isn’t it? That’s what makes the pain more bearable? 

The returned love which dies, and the love returned without reply? That’s what makes the grim and the grey take on luminous shades against the backdrop of the sea inside, the waves and crests, the pull back, the crashing over, and the light always lit, whether we draw the curtains or fling them open again after a long slumber.

the renaissance Boboli Gardens of Florence Italy  

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The Palazzo Pitti is a large villa museum built in 1458 for a Florentine banker near the river Arno, in the heart of Florence, Tuscany, Italy, and is sumptuously laid out with antique furnishings and priceless works of Italian paintings and sculptures. It contains nearly 500 Renaissance  and baroque frescoes and masterpieces by Artemisia Gentileschi, Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Fillipo Lippi, Perugino, Correggio, Peter Paul Rubens, Andrea del Sarto, Fra Bartolomeo, il Rosso, Canova, Verrochio, and Pietro da Cortona, among many many others. I am writing a piece about these incredible collections, accompanied by photographs, and the background of some of the most important and beautiful works to see if you can visit. It’s highly recommended for serious art or palazzo fans.Surveying the grand grounds and estate from a distance as visitors have admired the beauty and harmony of the Boboli Gardens for centuries. The house and land were bought by the de’Medici’s in 1549 and they filled it with their incomparable art collection, second only to their nearby famed Uffizi Gallery and residence. Napoléon even used this as his main living headquarters in Italy in the late 18th century. The exterior courtyard where horses and carriages would draw up. Paris and Helen of Troy.Themes of alchemy and the occult mingled with myths of classical antiquity in the natural caverns decorated to enhance an atmosphere of enchantment.Far away seashells and coral encrusted on water formed stalactites. Sea nymphs and faeries and aristocratic crests.The prisoners in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.The fascinatingly carved and decorators part natural, part artificial cavern the Buontalenti Grotto in the Boboli Gardens is a fascinating place, is encrusted with seashells and stalactites, housing mythical, fantastic, and allegorical elements, as well as symbols referring to esoteric subjects. The Grotta di Buontalenti (also known as Grotta Grande or the Big Grotto) was built by Bernardo Buontalenti between 1583 and 1593, and commissioned by Francesco I de’ Medici.

Winding labyrinthine hedge walkways to get lost in or sneak into for a stolen kiss.A brilliant blue heron rests in an artificial lake. Naked trees promise a boast of riches at the first bloom.Wild iris and flowers of delicate violet and pale lavender dotted among tall wild grasses of rolling meadows.Oranges a reminder of the beautiful year round climate of most of Italy.I was there on an overcast early spring day before the beauty of the garden really bloomed but shall return their in autumn to take photographs of the richer, fuller gardens. The little wildflower meadows and orange trees and statutes were lovely against the grey sky and ornate fountains (turned off in the cold) but I long to see this place teeming with color and fullness after the long hot summer, as autumn turns the leaves Amber and gold. I get that chance this early October.
Watch this highly interesting and gorgeous historical and visual tour of the Boboli Gardens by Brit and garden expert, Monty Don. Boboli Garden — Tour of Italy – Florence

Berlin; a Grecian ode in black and white 

| a love letter to rome and italy!

I am exceedingly charmed by Berlin. I’m smitten with it, in fact. This German city is pristine and enormous, with beautiful stretches of wide open boulevards and bridges betwixt baroque, art nouveau, Romanesque and post modern architecture (with character).

They have turned part of the old Soviet regime of East Berlin, that former extension of the cold eastern bloc into a museum island of buildings housing rare antiquities and art from around the world… in an homage to ancient Grecian architecture — one could almost imagine what it felt like to walk between intact Greek temples and palaces, everything is just so well tended to, the whole part of the city marries the past and the present together seamlessly.

I stayed in the chic, sleek, uber modern Potsdamer Platz East Berlin neighborhood, just a short jaunt up from the stunning Brandenberg Gate. Another ode to Ancient Greece, you feel in Berlin as though you are in a city which truly both reveres and celebrates learning and culture.

Because East Berlin was isolated for so long after World War II, it was the perfect spot to turn Bizmarck and Weimar Republic era buildings into museums and hotels, and the Soviet utilitarian era 20th century monstrosities into apartments and offices. The sleekest designs of exciting new architects are in areas like Potsdamer Platz, and it’s fascinating to walk through areas where you can still catch a sense of the ambience of the Stasí and yet where 21st century modernity has taken over.

Berliners take their coffee very seriously, and I fell in love with every cup of coffee or chai or tea or double espresso I had in East and West Berlin. I will be writing about my favorite cafes in Europe soon… And Berlin truly impressed me with their innovation and attention to detail and quality.

There’s so much to enjoy about Berlin, there is dark history to absorb yourself in, sumptuous art to view in gallery after gallery, classical antitiquites like the Ishtar Gate, Greco Roman ruins and objets, the Pergamon altar, and the brilliant Berlin Philharmoniker, restaurants and bookshops and even elegant BMW taxis to recline in the back of as you drive through the city listening to Beethoven.

Museum island 

Ishtar gate

Roman market gate from Ancient Greece/Turkey.

snapshots of architecture, art, and antiquities of beautiful Berlin

| a love letter to rome and italy!
greco roman
roman ruins
roman bust
pantheonesque
art goddess
pagan lovers
madonna
roman warrior
caspar
caspar
caspar
caspar
architecture
architecture
ruins
design
museum
beauty
art
pantheonesque
architecture
sculpture
detail
ode
detail
brandenberg
ode to grecian
detail
detail
through the columns
modern berlin
view
berlin philharmoniker
detail
classic
detail
classics
emperor
roman
greco roman
goddess
goddess
goddess
view
art detail
art detail
art detail
greco roman
beauty
greco roman
detail
gate
ishtar gate
ishtar gate
ishtar gate
greco roman
roman doors
greek
antiquity
antiquity

Berlin, Germany is a living, well kept up ode to Grecian architecture, Roman and other ancient world antiquities, classical treasures in sumptuous museums, 19th century design and art, classical music, coffeehouses, bookshops, culture, beauty, ideals, dark history, fresh hopes, and a detached but genial air keeping time with efficiency. The architecture and the antiquities in the museums are seductive and worth the visit! What a charming and fascinating city!!!

the berlin wall

| a love letter to rome and italy!

Visiting the Berlin wall in Germany in March was such an amazing experience. The recent history of the most basic freedoms stripped from half of Berliner‘s every day lives for decades is a vital reminder of why fascism and totalitarian societies don’t work under any conditions. Power always corrupts, art and education are replaced by propaganda, and group think, not individuality, is encouraged. Any political or social group who fears satire or who encourages Orwellian newspeak or Kafkaesque show trials or book burning or word banning, is its own little Stasí police state ripe for the taking. The wall pieces must stay, the new city must continue to grow, and history must be taught and learned so we all have the possibility for it not to repeat itself with total abandon. Berlin is a fantastic city!

let me tell you everything from 3000 miles away

| a love letter to rome and italy!

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What if a girl met a boy online and they talked and talked and talked in a series of messages and photos and videos but never on the telephone or face to face?

What if a girl did this over and over again with a few boys over a few years, searching for herself in someone else, in a series of misconnections, and connections, oft times shallow, but at times seemingly, beautifully deep? What is real and what is artifice – between two people who “feel” they “know” each other intensely – for awhile? When is the exact moment the lines blur and fantasy and reality become too entangled? Where do you escape the escape when it grows too real, and therefore, too untenable?

What if a girl made a little “story” about a dead girl who rhetorically tweets a boy 3000 miles away from the tomb, and he doesn’t even know she is gone? 


This is from a series I worked on and wrote two years ago (2014)

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dido’s lament 

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Loneliness is so much richer in a crowd.
False flashes of happiness skim over you like patches of sun between all the shadow. But nothing penetrates your skin. You don’t live, you just float, dreamlike, for awhile, eyes closed or open, you just… exist.

You keep losing track of yourself in the mirror. The photograph doesn’t count missing pieces or the inner picture of a brain anymore.


You strange relic to be categorized and placed somewhere not too prominent, some desecrated Venus to half-interested visitors. You’re hard and smooth as stone, you’re inaccessible, always just out of reach of the rare hand grasped to touch.

You’re not to be saved or relished by anyone.
There’s no path to get lost on in your head, no map to follow home, no ship at port bearing signs of departure.

There are no more conversations worth having or kisses to be stolen behind a smile.

All overtures are purely academic. Disavowal doesn’t make a sound in an echo chamber.
When you were younger, and almost beautiful, you shone like a light to the world. But you carried a constant pang and a dread. They were your only constants in a tempest. Death felt black and hollow and lay somewhere between your heart and the brief eclipse of a dead child once taken from there.
Silence, these days, is a relief from the lies offering escape or release for you. There is nothing to return to. There is no destination ahead.

Love is too heavy an abstraction for a literal mind. Music and lies and make believe passions do not move you the way they used to.
Desire is the new death knell, desire in your ice age, desire that can never be answered.

Ghosts cannot be measured or weighed, merely forgotten in the absence of appraisal.

So I’m using the metaphor of a broken goddess of love statue because I’m a forty year old woman and worry about losing the Aphrodite aspect of my life sometimes. Which is pretty realistic but whenever I think I know a door is closed to me another one opens up unexpectedly, so what do I know?! 😉

let us lose ourselves 

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Are they a shadow now? Can they hear your thoughts now that they’re ether, a chimera, soon to be dust? What becomes of love when you lose the object behind it?

To think you will join them one day; older, wiser, less you than they remember.

Your dust will never become theirs. There is no map to follow, no compass, no ship or footpath to take, no direction to fly in except to fling oneself back into space.

The will of love, the struggle, the battle for tender ownership is gone. They have vanished, you will vanish, it appears life is lived to once more succumb.


What are subterraneans to each other but cells divided once more and spread through the earth? That cold science of it, when emotions which once ran hot have now ended.

What is love but a bargain with a dream to not yet wake up?

You love your visceral charge, the pulp and sponge of brains and bodies mingling, the clawed caress of longing. The rush of losing. The falling. A little pain goes a long way towards desire, toward the fumbling of the living.

You like your love laced with sadness, no, you like your misery traced with desire, you like the reaching out to hold onto another who turns and looks and then really sees you. No motherly embrace, no fatherly pat on the hand, no lone anchor inside yourself compares with the mirrored eyes of a lover.

To know the unknowable, to reach the unreachable, to fold into a future grief as though the stars made a gift for only you. The pulse means more when there is someone else to listen to it. The ticking clock of your life suddenly speeds up… Every bell once a death knell has become a hallelujah.

The blush of love is the breaking of sun through the tops of trees, the breaking of the waves, the sky after the storm, the first cry at birth, the first hint of pain that can be sweet. To become alive in another’s eyes and heart, to ignite a mind, to wish for them more than you wish yourself.

—An excerpt from one of my pieces in the ongoing writing and audio installation series “Let Me Lose Myself” in Skogskyrkogården in Stockholm, Sweden, 2016 — for ccseven.

Naples, Italy; seducing and fascinating me

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Sorrento, Capri, and Napoli… The dreamlike beauties and chaotic back alleys of the Campania… Southern Italy… Always I hear the sirens call. Ruins, art, the pastoral by the sea, sweeping views, intense, looming cities and everything in between.
There were some days I had to dedicate to love and experience (so I took spontaneous shots with my iPhone) because if I don’t check myself I live, sleep, eat & breathe my cameras and film. (And men like attention sometimes)