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Maillol in Banyuls

28/08/2025 11:50

In 1861 Banyuls de la Marenda, in Roussillon, saw the birth of sculptor Aristide Maillol, one of the most representative of the 20th century, who at the age of twenty moved, like so many others, to Paris. When he returned to his native land, in 1910, he settled on a farm in the Roume Valley, on the...

The Farnese Collection

23/06/2025 14:01

The Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (MANN) preserves and exhibits one of the largest collections of ancient sculpture that was formed during the Renaissance, linked to the family of Alessandro Farnese (1468-1549) who was Pope Paul III and his nephews, the dukes of Parma. The origin of the...

Around the Zuider Zee

02/06/2025 09:47

The Zuider Zee, the South Sea, was a vast, shallow water inlet of the North Sea in the middle of the Netherlands. In 1932 this inland sea was enclosed by a dike of pharaonic dimensions, the Afsluitdijk, since then regulates the marine flow between both sides. Above, a highway runs through almost...

Aphrodite in Milos

26/02/2025 10:25

If there is one thing that made the island of Milos, in the south-west of the Cyclades, famous, it was the discovery of an extraordinary statue that ended up on display in room 346 of the Sully Wing of the Louvre Museum in Paris: the Venus de Milo. Venus is the name of the goddess of love in the...

Two Deserted Villages

07/12/2024 10:49

The depopulation of rural areas is usually due to the search of work and better living conditions. It was a constant after the industrial revolution, but in these two cases, Belchite and Jánovas, in Spain, the reasons were completely different but they got common elements: the civil war and human...

A Square in Plaka

27/10/2024 08:17

Filomousou Etaireias is a popular square in the centre of Athens, also known as the Plaka Square, which, despite Lonely Planet's reputation as touristy in the extreme, is a pleasant place with curious details. Plaka neighbourhood extends below Acropolis north-eastern slope around the ancient...

Spanish Armada Castaways

12/10/2024 09:50

Spanish King Philip II said he had sent his ships to fight the British not the elements. And he was right. Just battled against the British a few skirmishes in the English Channel and had a little bit more than words in Gravelines, but nothing serious for the Spanish fleet. The truth is that the...

Edith Piaf's Square

12/08/2024 09:14

Gluges is a tiny town in the north of the Quercy region, today in the Lot department, south-west of France. The twenty or so houses that make up the place are lined up under the protection of a large rocky outcrop where, in the past, some troglodyte dwellings were built. Since 1997, the small...

Procida, Italy

30/07/2024 09:51

It is the smallest of the islands in the Gulf of Naples, less than four square kilometres, and is located halfway between the city and the island of Ischia. The third is the famous Capri, further south. According to Pliny and Strabo, Procida was separated from the mainland because of a great...

Rome Keats' House

03/06/2024 11:54

John Keats was a contemporary of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, with whom he embodied the second wave of British romantic poets in the wake of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. In 1816 he published his first poems in the newspaper The Examiner: An imitation of Spencer, O...

Cologne Gateways

19/04/2024 08:47

Since Roman times, Cologne had strong walls to ensure the defence of the city. Later, in medieval age, new walls and gates were built, some of these have survived to this day. Between the 1st and 3rd centuries, the Roman city on the banks of the Rhine, on the limits of the Empire, built walls to...

Conques, in Aveyron

23/02/2024 14:49

The small town of Conques, in the former province of Rourge and a few kilometres away from the Lot Valley, today between the departments of Cantal and Aveyron, retains the charm of having preserved its medieval appearance in the shadow of the great abbey of Sainte Foy, in the measure of what...

Fauves in Collioure

06/01/2024 10:28

At the beginning of the 20th century, Collioure had begun to attract the attention of artists who went to the coastal town as the preferred centre for their work stays. Since 1905, Henri Matisse and André Derain took it as their headquarters. Matisse resided periodically until 1914. Other painters...

Oviedo Bronzes

22/11/2023 10:57

The Asturian capital is dotted with more than a hundred statues, mostly bronze that, impassive under the Cantabrian rain, decorate downtown streets. They represent real and fictional characters, who are or have been famous and to whom the city pays tribute. Starting the tour in the same centre, in...

The Book Village

11/11/2023 11:14

Urueña is a unique town, not because of its well-preserved medieval walls or for the views it has over the Valladolid plains of Tierra de Campos, but because of the particularity that its barely two hundred inhabitants have more bookstores than bars. From the hermitage of La Anunciada, a...