September 2026

Exploring Catania on foot through its palaces, churches and fish market, with Bellini along the way, pasta alla Norma at dinner and rather too many reasons to miss my train.When Venus and Mars make love, Vulcan rages in the depths of Etna, spewing his pain into the sky. Fire rains down on Catania, but Liotru, the mighty black elephant, takes the go

Lost photographs from a 2007 trip to Bulgaria bring back Plovdiv, Bachkovo, a global conference and a suitcase misrouted to Tirana.In 2026, while looking for photographs for a completely different blog, I found an old compact camera. I had assumed that whatever remained on it had disappeared from my life years ago, yet its memory card still contain

Amsterdam 20 Years Later: Same Tracks, Tired Windows, Stronger Weed — and the Suspicion That the Party Moved to BerlinIn 2004, Amsterdam ended for me with a daytime train to Cologne. Twenty years later, Cologne was where Amsterdam began again. I was returning along the same railway corridor to a city I remembered well enough to miss, but perhaps no

Fifteen stops, one phone, years of Prague experience — let the hunt for the best Prague photograph begin.I have been to Prague enough times for another round of classic sightseeing to make very little sense. I know the major landmarks, I have photographed most of them before, and I certainly do not need another picture proving that Charles Bridge i