Strange Closets

When I visited Rome earlier this year, I walked something like 20 miles in two days. That’s all the time I had, and I didn’t want to waste a second. After all, Rome’s vibrant neighborhoods, spectacular ruins and prevalence of sixteenth and seventeenth century buildings make it the perfect city for wandering – my favorite [...]

Carpet and textile company Renata Bonfanti was the final stop arranged by the Vicenza Chamber of Commerce during my recent trip to Italy. The business was started by Mrs. Bonfanti herself in 1954, and she and several family members still work at their facility outside Vicenza. The building is just large enough to house every [...]

Crash. It’s pretty much the last thing you want to hear in a ceramics studio. But while snapping photos at the family-owned Crestani Ceramiche in the spectacular countryside of Vicenza, Italy, I felt the back of my leg brush up against something and then . . . crash. To make matters worse, we had just [...]

After walking nearly 20 miles in 24 hours, I nearly spent my last night in Rome hanging out in my stellar hotel room at the Trilussa Palace Hotel, but the excellent hotel happens to be located in the Trastevere, an area known for its cobblestone streets, nightclubs and restaurants, so despite my exhaustion and the [...]

Although I’d only booked one night in Venice, I was looking forward to finally seeing the legendary city and visiting the nearby island where factories produce the world’s sometimes gorgeous (although often gaudy) Murano glass. But my eighteen hour trip to the city of grand canals, narrow streets and stylish Italians, was one of misconceptions, [...]

Don’t hesitate if you want to take a picture of a particular political poster, billboard or even graffiti tag in Italy, because especially in Rome, there’s an all out war for your attention with various groups pasting over, scratching out or spray painting each other’s messages. In the U.S., Shepard Fairey’s instant classic Obama poster [...]

There’s only so much you can do with an IPhone camera, but the light was too good, and I was too enthralled not to take a few photos when I finally logged off the computer and took a walk outside last night. As I strolled the streets of Florence near dusk, I was reminded that [...]