Two weeks in Rome – part two.
I spent two weeks in the Eternal City of Rome this January. The first part is here I’ve been here on numerous occasions over the years, either for work or for passing visits en route to elsewhere. I’d been…
Category Arts
Two weeks in Rome – part one.
In January 2025, I spent two weeks on holiday in an apartment in the centre of the Centro Storico (Historic Centre) of Rome and I felt I had lived there for ever. It was like being at home, but with…
Me and my virtual art gallery
Welcome to Glinka Gallery, it's open 24/7. it has six individual galleries for fine art, photography, poetry, dance and music and it is just a few finger clicks away from you wherever you are. I want to show you around.
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…
Ravenna – Italy’s forgotten capital, a beautiful city of mosaics and poets.
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…
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…
Ladies in Black, Ladies in White, some Gentlemen too. John Singer Sargent à la mode at Tate Britain
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…
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…
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…
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…