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!