Shots from Rome in October.
A quick photo hello
bostonian
Italy and England
There’s old Winston Churchill watching Big Ben, in Westminster, London, in March 2014.
An anglophile’s dream: the omnipresent iconic red telephone box.
Wandering around Portobello Road, in the Notting Hill neighborhood.
The street art / grafitti is like The Sex Pistols and the Bbc all rolled into one.
Tea at Sherlock Holmes and Watson’s house was quite amusing.
Enjoyed searching for british china tea cups and white darjeeling on a half deserted faire.
After wandering the many lovely garden parks of london wound up at Buckingham’s Gate.
Making the pilgrimage to John Keats house at Hampstead Heath, London, after years of visiting the flat he died in, and laying flowers at his grave, in Rome.
A room with a view…over the Thames, I was always excited to wake up to (and to raise my glass to) Big Ben.
Saw the beautiful La Boheme set in 1940s Paris at the Royal Albert Hall.
From the window of “221 b Baker Street, London
From the beautiful garden of John Keats home, where he fell in love with Fanny Brawne and wrote some of his greatest poems.
From the cloisters of Westminster Abbey. I do love a cloister.
You have no idea how deep my anglophilia goes because I am always going on about Italy but these signs gave me a profound joy.
This sign is so British it hurts.
One of those moments in London an American or most foreigners savor.
Always, a pilgrimage, a beauty, a joy. John Keats forever. English Romanticism forever. 
Down the cloistered hall… like a dream of English classics, literary characters dancing in my head, London, a city looming in my brain of larger than life characters and eccentric, wonderful stories and frightful tales.
The heartbreakingly beautiful dream of Italy view from my dreamy Sorrento hotel room terrazzo.
Walking along the Appian Way on a quiet, car-free Sunday in Rome or along the Renaissance Via Guilia, I am forever excited and in awe over the small beauties and signs of the ancient world in this magical, mysterious city open-armed to the world.
The architecture and cafes are familiar but I feel and live Rome anew each visit. There’s always something new to discover or a passion to stumble onto. Life is in the moment. It is heavy with the past, it is so alive it smacks of the future, but it is so wildly, lightly felt in the now, in the moment, Rome is like dreaming awake, feeling everything. Everything!
Finding new off the beaten path cafes was a big favorite of mine in Italy this year. Always in search of the quiet moments and the hidden corners of Rome. This cafe was in Trastevere where you can sit and sip espresso and gaze at a Baroque Madonna painted onto a church exterior wall.
I love the Eternal City because it has so many layers of history and love and unknown stories and marks of time and beauty in decay and new life bursting forth in a macabre, colored, brilliant celebration in Roman life today.
Took a boat around my favorite island and swam in the Tyrrhenian sea on Capri, a place which invokes everything beautiful, lush and ancient about Southern Italy. There’s nothing quite like it.
Returned to a lot of the same pleasures of the past, freshly squeezed oranges and lemons, under the Italian sun, by a Neapolitan woman who sings all day as she flitters around her Kiosk on the gorgeous Via Tragara.
A return to Pompeii, the fascinating buried city with Vesuvius watchful in the distance.
Meeting new friends abroad 🙂
Long walks soaking in the sun and the past.
Architectural details in half-obscured gardens of small villa art museums (full of amazing Renaissance, ancient and baroque Italian art)!
Being the foreigner in a city you fall into like a comfortable affair.
The moments you can’t anticipate but happen upon in the most beautiful of happenstances.
My favorite spot on earth for the golden hour, on the Pincian Hill in Rome. This is before the view of the Popolo.
A typical Roman street, wrapped into the mystery of fragments and pieces of history.
The beauty of being overwhelmed in Rome.
Cafe life in Italy, a class of wine or a coffee, a little treat, there is nothing like it. Another layered moment captured, to be savored and remembered palpably.
On every wall there is a reminder of death and a reminder of love, the eternal kind, of love that lasts, and of life in the hand too.
Rome, a city to return to, one that keeps its shutters open to the world, long enough for an unforgettable peek.
Since that first moment I arrived there, now, and always, for Roma.
For traveling, for seeing the world, for meeting new people, and for being at home in the world.
Here’s to 2014… and here is a cheers to 2015 and a new year of adventure and experience and chasing beauty!
Henry James in Rome
The Protestant Cemetery from THE ITALIAN HOURS by HENRY JAMES
“I recently spent an afternoon hour at the little Protestant cemetery close to St. Paul’s Gate, where the ancient and the modern world are insidiously contrasted. They make between them one of the solemn places of Rome – although indeed when funereal things are so interfused it seems ungrateful to call them sad. Here is a mixture of tears and smiles, of stones and flowers, of mourning cypresses and radiant sky, which gives us the impression of our looking back at death from the brighter side of the grave.”
“The cemetery nestles in an angle of the city wall, and the older graves are sheltered by a mass of ancient brickwork, through whose narrow loopholes you peep at the wide purple of the Campagna. Shelley’s grave is here, buried in roses – a happy grave every way for the very type and figure of the Poet. Nothing could be more impenetrably tranquil than this little corner in the bend of the protecting rampart, where a cluster of modern ashes is held tenderly in the rugged hand of the Past. The past is tremendously embodied in the hoary pyramid of Caius Cestius, which rises hard by, half within the wall and half without, cutting solidly into the solid blue of the sky and casting its pagan shadow upon the grass of English graves – that of Keats, among them – with an effect of poetic justice.”
“It is a wonderful confusion of mortality and a grim enough admonition of our helpless promiscuity in the crucible of time. But the most touching element of all is the appeal of the pious English inscriptions among all these Roman memories; touching because of their universal expression of that trouble within trouble, misfortune in a foreign land. Something special stirs the heart through the fine Scriptural language in which everything is recorded. The echoes of massive Latinity with which the atmosphere is charged suggest nothing more majestic and monumental. I may seem unduly to refine, but the injunction to the reader in the monument to Miss Bathurst, drowned in the Tiber in1824, “If thou art young and lovely, build not thereon, for she who lies beneath thy feet in death was the loveliest flower ever cropt in its bloom”, affects us irresistibly as a case for tears on the spot. The whole elaborate inscription indeed says something over and beyond all it does say.”
“The English have the reputation of being the most reticent people in the world, and as there is no smoke without fire I suppose they have done something to deserve it; yet who can say that one doesn’t constantly meet the most startling examples of the insular faculty to “gush”? In this instance the mother of the deceased takes the public into her confidence with surprising frankness and omits no detail, seizing the opportunity to mention by the way that she had already lost her husband by a most mysterious visitation. The appeal to one’s attention and the confidence in it are withal most moving.”
The whole record has an old-fashioned gentility that makes its frankness tragic. You seem to hear the garrulity of passionate grief.”
Boston a week after the bombs.
I was born in Boston and lived there until I was six. We moved a lot, sometimes every six months and I lived in a series of small coastal towns on the south shore of Massachusetts, lining the seascape and woodsy old New England towns from the edge of the city to Cape Cod. I spent a lot of time in the city and its influence never really left me even when I was shuffled about the little beach communities. I moved back to Boston for high school and college and I’ve lived and worked there or nearby ever since, barring travel and living for a little bit in Los Angeles, Seattle and New Orleans. I have loved my city my whole life. It’s a different city for different Bostonians and it certainly has changed for me over the years. In the most compelling ways its been a city of art and books and learning (and difficult weather) and funny accents. It’s a college town, it’s a historical city, it’s mixture of working class and tony neighborhoods and has great hospitals and art museums and concert halls. It has a rich literary past. It’s full of Irish pubs, seafood restaurants and is home to one of my favorite Italian neighborhoods in the US. It’s a tough city at times and it’s a pretty one too. It has its own troubles but ultimately I found opportunity and inspiration here. I rode its trains and wrote about Boston life in the aughties. I photographed it in the last few years. And like most other Bostonians I was hit hard by the terrorist attacks at the 2013 Boston Marathon. About a week after the attacks I took my film camera and some art film and shot the makeshift street tributes and some of the scenes of the attacks. I also shot some of Cambridge (MIT – another scene of the attacks and Harvard Square and Tory Row/Brattle area) and other spots of Boston. I wasn’t surprised by strength of the city and its people in the face of the manhunt and the aftershock of violence which was palpably felt in every square mile. What struck me most was how much Bostonians were trying to be normal and live their lives and pick up the pieces on a beautiful spring day. The killers had not yet been caught. The aftermath was laid out in the closed off city blocks and there was an air of somberness in the heart of the city; at famous Copley Square, on posh Newbury Street, on beautiful, brownstone-lined Comm Ave, at the Public Garden and on Boston Common, in Back Bay and the South End. But it was also a sumptuously lit afternoon, the birds were finally out, the blossoms were opening on the cherry trees, the swan boats emerged, children ran about in the park, tourists walked with their maps and Colonial attired guides and there was a wedding in the gardens. We were still alive. We had to be. We were Bostonians. Life goes on on a lovely spring day despite ourselves. In spite of it all. Because we want to live. We have to.
My art deco building – I lived here in the dormitory for Emerson College. The location was incredible. Now they are luxury apartments.
A Bostonian moment…
I was at the Boston Marathon today. As a Bostonian I am devastated by the tragedy of the bombing. Not only do I love my city, I think about the international guests we were hosting on this special day. I send my deepest condolences to the family and friends of those killed and badly injured. So much courage in the face of adversity, good Samaritans at every turn.
a love letter to rome 