Ravenna: the mosaics – essential sites and sights to see.
The city of Ravenna in Emilia-Romagna on the Adriatic side of Northern Italy, is a civilised and quietly prosperous place, if it wasn’t for its most famous treasures, we wouldn’t guess that once, over a thousand years ago, the city was the capital of the Western Roman Empire. Those treasures are the sublime works of…
Ravenna – Italy’s forgotten capital, a beautiful city of mosaics and poets.
Piazza del Popolo, Ravenna’s main square. Basilica di San Francesco The beautiful city of Ravenna, on the East Coast of Italy, in Emilia-Romagna, sits between Venice and Rimini, but is less crowded than its more famous neighbours. Once, however, it was the capital of Italy and one of the grandest cities of Europe. San Vitale,…
The end of a depressing era in Britain – I hope.
Britain votes for its next government tomorrow. It is definitely the end of an era. The polls (haha) tell us the present Conservative government is heading for a crushing defeat – maybe the worst in its nearly two hundred year history. If so, a depressing era in British politics will come to its well-deserved end….
I’m reading my poem Aleppo in Manhatttan, New York.
My poem Aleppo will be on display at Pleiades Gallery, Manhattan, New York City from 11 June until 6 July where it will be displayed with Heather Stivinson’ s exhibition Borders and Boundaries. Opening reception: 13 June, 6-8pm. It will be followed on Saturday 6 July with a special event: Ekphrasis: A Poetry Reading with…
Schoenberg in Lewes
I live just up the street from the Lewes Chamber Music Festival, now in its 12th year, and I’m just back from the final concert of this year’s truly inspiring festival. The theme was Schoenberg and friends, and the festival director kept to her brief with a series of concerts that explored and celebrated the…
Greek Tragedy in Manhattan
Donald Trump found guilty on all charges in hush money case. He is guilty of so much more. A Greek tragedy in British English – Noun (ɡriːk ˈtrædʒədɪ ) (in ancient Greek theatre) a play in which the protagonist, usually a person of importance and outstandingpersonal qualities, falls to disaster through the combination of a personal failing and circumstances with which he or she cannot deal Collins English Dictionary….
Ladies in Black, Ladies in White, some Gentlemen too. John Singer Sargent à la mode at Tate Britain
John Singer Sargent, self-portrait, 1906 Ladies is an old-fashioned word in 2024, we say women, or even other less gender-specific terms, but, in the 1880s and 1890s, in Europe and the US, it was lady if you were a lady, and woman if you were female, but not a lady in the class-conscious world that…
Baudelaire Day at Wolfie’s Poetry Surf
Last Thursday (16th May 2024), I finished a three-year marathon, reading the whole of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (155 poems in English and in French) at my weekly on-line poetry event called Wolfie’s Poetry Surf which will have been running for exactly twelve years this coming Thursday. I’ve hosted poetry events in my…
Nostalgia addiction or just good memories?
I was thinking about nostalgia today – you know the things ain’t what the used to be feeling. Well, I’m not really someone who dwells in the past, or so I think. I like the present, my day today, and I’m quite keen on the future too. I’ve found recently that more than a few…
I’ve caught up with blogging about the last seven years of my European adventures.
I’ve been catching up with the blogs on my website, sadly neglected for over a year, but now back in action. In fact, I’ve neglected it for longer than that, considering I hadn’t posted anything about my foreign travels since 2015, when I went on two trips, to Italy https://wolfiewolfgang.com/it-was-all-mistake-my-three-inspiring/ and to Portugal https://wolfiewolfgang.com/my-time-in-lisbon-portugal-was-pure/ During…
Back to Lahti in September 2023
It was like coming home when I looked out of the window of the apartment in Lahti, just as it felt like leaving home when I said goodbye to the cottage in Virtaa, near the little town of Sysmä, after a week’s break in Finnish rural paradise (see previous blog https://wolfiewolfgang.com/away-from-it-all-at-the-centre-of-all-things-in-rural-finland/). I’m a bit like…
Away from it all at the centre of all things in rural Finland.
It is early September in 2023, I am sitting in a rocking chair in a cottage, a converted 19th century log house, in a little village called Virtaa, 7.7 kilometres from a small town called Sysmä. The cottage is in the grounds of an old manor house, Virtaan Kartano, owned by Juhani and Tiina Stjernvall….
I’m a Berliner now
I was in Germany in April 2023, I’d been to Leipzig for the Bach 300 festival before catching a train for ten great days in Berlin. A city I last visited in the late 1990s, just a few years after Germany’s reunification and the city was still like a building construction site. Then it was…
An Easter Meeting in Leipzig with JS Bach – 300 years on.
Even people who don’t think they like classical music know and even like at least some of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 – 1750). Those who love classical music are mostly in consensus that he was probably the greatest of all the classical composers. I certainly feel that he stands tall not just…
Trying to be the best man in Georgia
I was checked in at the Old Metekhi Hotel over-looking the Mtkvari River in Tbilisi, Georgia , on 13th September 2022, after a booking that had been made in 2019, long before Covid changed everyone’s plans. I was here to be the best man at one of my oldest friend’s wedding, a wedding that had…
Day Trip to Tallinn in Estonia
On the 7th September 2022, during the second week of my trip to Finland, I got a ferry across the Gulf of Finland, in the Baltic Sea, from Helsinki to Tallinn, the capital of the Republic of Estonia. From one country bordering Russia to another, six months after Russia invaded Ukraine, another of its ex-Soviet…
Ainola, Finland – Jean and Aino Sibelius’ place.
I was in Finland in August and September 2022 and, when I was staying in Helsinki, it was relatively easy to get a train for the 24 mile journey to a place I had read about often and wondered what it would really be like there. I mean Ainola – the home of Jean Sibelius…
A week in Helsinki – homely art nouveau city by the water.
In September 2022, after a wonderful time at the Sibelius Festival in Lahti, I stayed on in Finland for another week and moved to Helsinki, a place that everyone I know who has been there to told me that I would love it. I did. I love the way it manages to be a capital…
Flying to Lahti in Finland for Sibelius
My first sighting of Finland, land of lakes, forests, saunas and music, seen from the air on a scheduled flight to Helsinki. It all started six months earlier, in the Runaway Cafe on platform two at Lewes Station, UK, my home town. I am not talking about my journey to catch the plane to Finland….
Tropea – taking it easy in Calabria
This was in June 2022, my first foreign trip after Covid decided to keep us all home for a couple of years. I had been going on holiday to Italy annually for ten years. I love the place, the culture and the language. Cerco di fare uno sforza per parlare italiano ogni volta che posso….
Pompeii lives on after the destruction
I spent a week in Naples in January 2020, and on a sunny winter’s day, I took the train to Pompeii, the ancient Roman city that was destroyed by a cataclysmic eruption of the volcanic mountain of Vesuvius in AD 79 The eruption lasted for two days and killed at least 1,150 of the inhabitants…
Back in Naples – weeks before Covid -soon we were all told to stay home.
On the 6th January 2020 I returned to Naples not realising it was going to be my last foreign journey anywhere for two years. On 31st January two Chinese tourists in Rome were tested positive for the Covid virus and the Italian government declared a state of emergency. The first case of Covid was documented…
Milan – city of fashion, music and art, even in the rain.
In December 2019, I spent a week in Milan. It was raining, no surprise there for this part of Italy during December. It was wet but achingly beautiful. As a fashion-shopping mecca internationally, not even the rain could dampen its elegance and style – especially as the rain appeared to be here just to highlight…
Going to Naples and Sorrento – on an Italian opera trail.
In September 2017, when I was looking at Mount Vesuvius from Sorrento, across the Bay of Naples, I thought of Pliny the Younger (born 61 AD), as you do, who wrote a detailed description of the catastrophic eruption of the volcano (79 AD) that killed his uncle, the great Roman naturalist, Pliny the Elder, who…
On the Amalfi Coast
I’m looking back at some of the photographs I have taken on my Italian holidays over recent years for blogs that I am only just getting down to now. In the summer of 2017, the year before I went to Puglia (see previous blogs), I spent two weeks in a tiny fishing village of Marina…
On the road from Polignano to Matera, via Alberobello
Nicola, or simply, Nic, was my effervescent driver and guide for a day trip from Polignano across southern Puglia in June 2018 and, as well as being fun, he was informative and good company. The idea was to head to two famous towns, both beautiful and also, in their own ways, unique. Everyone I met…
Some other towns on my journey through Puglia in Southern Italy
I was based in Polignano in Puglia, South East Italy, for two weeks in June 2018, see previous blog, and, from there, I could travel to a number of other interesting Pugliese town and cities. Lecce – Baroque or not. on a particularly hot day, I travelled to the city of Lecce, famous for its…
Two weeks in Puglia : Polignano a Mare
I take too many photographs, I know. I have too many of them on my computer these days too and, during the last ten years, I have fallen behind in publishing the photographs I have taken on my foreign travels during what has been for me quite a turbulent time. I have finally got round…
Welcome to my website where I publish regular blogs about subjects that interest me, concern me, or are just about my work as a writer.
As well as the blogs there are also photographs and short videos mostly inspired by my poetry or just because I want to share them.
I am Colin Bell, an Anglo-Irish European citizen based in the UK. I am a novelist and poet, previously a TV producer-director of arts programmes for British, American, German and Japanese broadcasters. I am also known as the blogger Wolfie Wolfgang.
My two novels are Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love (Ward Wood Publishing, 2013) and Blue Notes, Still Frames (Ward Wood Publishing, 2017). They are both available in paperback or as Kindle editions. My debut poetry collection, Remembering Blue (Ward Wood Publishing 2019) is now available. My poetry has been published in various journals and anthologies in the UK and the USA.
Remembering Blue is the debut poetry collection by Colin Bell, whose novels Stephen Dearsley’s Summer of Love and Blue Notes, Still Frames are also published by Ward Wood.
‘These poems were written during ten years recovering from a life-threatening brain haemorrhage.
‘The poems began before I left hospital. They document, often tangentially, that period, from awakening out of a six-hour coma, through several years of rehabilitation, remembering and decoding – the good things as well as the bad: childhood and adolescence revisited, adult relationships reassessed, and most significantly, what is important now that I am fully recovered.
‘Awakening from that death-like coma was a rebirth. When things were difficult, it helped to remember blue.’
– Colin Bell
It’s Brighton in 1994 Busker Joe lives on the beach with his flute and his troubled Goth girlfriend, Victoria, who’s a singer. He borrows a bath towel for her from Rachel and Alan, a prosperous young couple from the rapidly growing world of computers. The meeting will change all their lives…and other lives too.
There’s Harry, a beach bum drummer; Nico, a transient American who takes revealing photographs of passers-by; Kanti and Diep, mysterious artist twins from Nepal; Lionel and John who reveal more than their bodies on the nudist beach; and pub landladies Jacqueline and Rosemary who top up their income by dabbling in the sex trade.
Joe is always there, somewhere, weaving more than melodies with his flute.
– Colin Bell
It’s 1967 and the start of the Summer of Love. In Brighton, Stephen Dearsley is tempted and intimidated by the way his generation is casting off traditional ways of dress along with the old ways of thinking. His ambition to become a biographer is fulfilled when he’s commissioned to research the life story of the mysterious Austin Randolph
– Colin Bell