TRAVEL: Lazio / Umbria, ITALY [Part II]

The lake of Bolsena feels like the sea, it is vast, an extinct volcano filled with water from a spring - most lakes are fed by rivers so water flows in and out.

The most charming and erudite of princes,
Don Giovanni del Drago has restored his family castle with care and great taste...

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UMBRIA 

Orvieto in the distance [top left]

Orvieto

The house of the beautiful and gifted designer Donna Verde Visconti

in rustic mode. She has used Indian fabrics and furniture indoors - an homogeneous, most comfortable and beguiling house.  

NOTICE: I have cleared my cupboards! One Kings Lane

Catch this sale and grab yourself a bargain!
Sale on Thursday October 18, 2012

 https://www.onekingslane.com/sales/15129

POETRY: The Autopsy

The Autopsy

And so they found that the gold of the olive root had dripped in the re-
cesses of his heart.

And from the many times that he had lain awake by candlelight 
waiting 
for the dawn, a strange heat had seized his entrails.

A little below the skin, the blue line of the horizon sharply painted.
And 
ample traces of blue throughout his blood.

The cries of birds which he had come to memorize in hours of great 
lonely
ness apparently spilled out all at once, so that it was impossible for 
the knife to enter deeply.

Probably the intention sufficed for the evil

Which he met—it is obvious—in the terrifying posture of the innocent. 
His eyes open, proud, the whole forest moving still on the unblem-
ished retina.

Nothing in the brain but a dead echo of the sky.

Only in the hollow of his left ear some light fine sand, as though in a 
shell. 
Which means that often he had walked by the sea alone with the pain 
of love and the roar of the wind.

As for those particles of fire on his groin, they show that he moved 
time 
hours ahead whenever he embraced a woman.

We shall have early fruit this year


Odysseas Elytis

LIVING BY DESIGN: Hints

The Loo, the Gents, the Guest Cloakroom, the Lavatory or whatever else you call it can be hung with school and university group photographs, wedding pictures and the like or can be architectural and painted in trompe l'oeil faux marbre! Note: the Baroque frame attached straight onto mirror.

East 71st Street, New York

   

TRAVEL: Lazio, ITALY

Poussin's Rape of the Sabines

Palazzo Parisi in the Sabine Hills
 - an antique land with Roman remains. 

The Palazzo Parisi was once a Roman fort and still has its dungeons. The family house of Arabella Lennox-Boyd [see my Gresgarth Hall blog entry of May 2, 2012 ]. Praised by Virgil, Sabine olive oil, as produced here, is excellent!

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Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza by Borromini once opened
 on Sunday morning - now only on a Wednesday
 so I was unable to revisit its amazing interior 

       

      Crochet ears covers to keep flies away

 

The Convent of Trinità dei Monti at the top of the Spanish Steps, founded in the late 15th century by the French Minimes.  In 1798, when as a result of the French Revolution, the convent was devastated and became studios of the French Academy - Villa Medici - where Ingres lived and worked.  In 1828, the Pope intervened and the Sacré-Coeur order opened a school.  The Trompe L'Oeil room of ruins [see my Curiosity blog entry of July 16, 2012] is firmly closed for restorations to take place.  

Happily there are charming wall paintings of the walls of the Refectory - paint on the walls
NOT frescoes [which are wet and absorbed by the plaster] the former are more difficult to restore.

BUT the great surprise is a corridor which is an enchanting 16th Century sun dial, more correctly, a Catoptric dia by Pierre Maignan.    

            

   ...and another corridor of strange anamorphic perspective

     

The highest hill of Rome, known as Mons Vaticanus, now called Monte Mario - The disease has spread!

[see Pont de l’Archevêché my Paris Part II blog entry of January 26, 2012] - t. 

BOOKS: Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies

I:Pad convenience when travelling - I have just finished Hilary Mantel's Bring Up The Bodies - as readable as her last - will she, can she, might she win the 2012 Man Booker Prize after winning last year?

POETRY: A PARABLE:

A PRINCE FROM WESTERN LIBYA

Aristomenis, son of Menelaos,
the Prince from Western Libya,
was generally liked in Alexandria
during the ten days he spent there.
In keeping with his name, his dress was also suitably Greek.
He received honours gladly,
but he didn't solicit them; he was unassuming.
He bought Greek books,
especially history and philosophy.
Above all he was a man of few words.
It got around that he must be a profound thinker,
and men like that naturally don't speak very much.

He wasn't a profound thinker or anything at all--
just a piddling, laughable man.
He assumed a Greek name, dressed like the Greeks,
learned to behave more or less like a Greek;
and all the time he was terrified he'd spoil
his reasonably good image
by coming out with barbaric howlers in Greek
and the Alexandrians, in their usual way,
would start to make fun of him, vile people that they are.

This was why he limited himself to a few words,
terribly careful of his syntax and pronunciation;
and he was driven almost out of his mind, having
so much talk bottled up inside him.

C.P. Cavafy

LIVING BY DESIGN: Hints

How to deal with a corner of a room - a comfortable chair covered in a woven stripe from Antico Setificio in Florence [represented by Tissus d'Helene at London's Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour], an antique mirror and a John Stefanidis designed oak table. 

BOOKS: Frederic Prokosch

I thought discovering the writer Frederic Prokosch was to be a source of joy and quickly ordered on Amazon. 'The Asiatics' and 'America, My Wilderness' [both best sellers in their time], proved to be travel books and fables - although remarkable - too artificial and dated.

MORE EGYPTOMANIA

Hollywood's version - Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra [1963]- a film by Joseph L. Mankiewicz - unforgettable for its grandeur and a Cleopatra WINK!

The Sphinx guarding Cleopatra's Needle, London by George J. Vuillamy [1880]

The Suicide of Cleopatra by Reginald Arthur [1892]

Cleopatra by  François-Auguste Fannière [1902]

Cleopatra by Demetre H. Chiparus [1925]

Moïse sauvé des eaux by Frederick Goodall [1885]

Cleopatra's eulogy was sung by the Roman poet Horace:

Indeed she preferred a finer style of dying;
She did not, like a woman, fear the dagger
Or seek by speed at sea
To leave her Egypt for distant shores.

But gazing on her desolate palace
With a soft smile, unflinchingly accepted
The angry asp until
Her veins had drunk the deadly poison deep;

And thus more determined, fiercer than ever,
Perished.  Was she to grace a haughty triumph,
Dethroned, paraded by 
The rude Liburnians? Not Cleopatra!