How
do you do an issue on “favorite places?” Whose favorites? My knowledge is
too limited to do the theme justice;I
just haven’t been everywhere yet, but I’m certainly trying! So I asked our
staff, our c
Tour Host Review
No trip to Tuscany is complete without two things: lots of art and oodles of great food and wine. Welcome to the Renaissance knows how to provide both. Having spent a few summers in this very region, delving deeply into the art and food previously mentioned, I can assure you that these folks know just what they are talking about.
The company is owned by two Renaissance art instructors; Sam Hilt a...
Host of the Month
The most popular festivals on earth are the pre-Lenten carnivals in places like Rio de Janeiro, New Orleans and Quebec City. For people who’d like to attend the above-named events, there are drawbacks: Rio is overcrowded, heavily booked and far away from Europe and North America. New Orleans’ Mardi Gras is also crowded, and the youthful aspect of the celebrants often gives its party th...
Festival Pick
The story of the Statue of Liberty is a patriotic myth, a melodrama, a public relations stunt and complex human transaction all in one. In 1875, France, seeking to honor the centenary of the United States, proposes to erect a giant statue that will overlook the entrance to New York Harbor, the immigrant gateway to North America. The statue will be a super-sized versio...
World Heritage Site
In Florence, where art is strewn about as casually and extravagantly as the clothes and possessions in a teenage girl’s room, there is still an underlying sense of order. Rather than trying to be all things to all people, or vying to outdo one another, each of the city’s major museums has a specialty. Visitors who love paintings will go to the Uffizi. Those who are fascinated by modern...
Museum Pick
Experts say a good way to remember somebody’s name is to associate it an object or picture. If you meet a man named Miller, you think of a windmill or a pepper grinder, then recall that image when you meet him again. When I first met John Riffey in late 1973, I learned to associate his name with Toroweap, the deepest gorge I have ever seen. Pogo, the name of a famous comic strip character, w...
Centuries ago, in a cliff-face in the midst of China’s vast Taklamakan desert, artists hollowed, sculpted and painted 492 caves, creating more than 450,000 square feet of spectacular murals. That is more than 30 times the mural area of the Sistine Chapel. But whereas the Sistine Chapel was painted over a few years, the works at the Mogao Caves began in the fourth century...
Awe before the majesty and mystery of existence – that feeling of wanting to sink to one's knees in gratitude for having been present – is in my DNA, I suspect, and travel is a fine conduit for such moments. So ask me my favorite place, and a panoply of favorites plays freely across the wide screen of memory.
Yet somehow, it is always Rome, the Eternal City, calling to me. If Rome is diffuse and without a single center, no matter; she is...
Cusco Airport, Peru: I boarded the 12-seater plane that would fly over the Andes to the landing strip in Boca Manu. It was strange to leave the beautiful city of Cusco, nestled in the mountains at 3,500 meters (11,500 feet) above sea level, and watch as the scenery changed from rocky peaks to lush lowland...
Over the past three years we’ve been told more than once that we are old-fashioned, behind-the-times fuddy duddies for insisting that we’d never allow pop-ups or other irritating ads on our web site.Now, even the New York Times has seen the light and come over to our way of thinking. (More about that in a bit.)The conventional wisdom said that the way to get readers to respond to online ads was to make the ads as intrusive, irritating and obnoxious...
Caravans of big tour buses seem out of place as they thread their way through the tree-lined streets framed with narrow 17th and 18th-century step-roofed buildings in Delft, Holland. Laced with canals and cobblestone lanes, the village seems much more suited to the horse-drawn carriages that take tourists sightseeing. In fact, Delft looks much the way it did when Vermeer painted here in the 17th...
If you’ve enjoyed the chateau of the Loire in France or the castles along the Rhine in Germany, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet until you’ve been to the Czech Republic. The Czech Republic is full of fairy tale towns with castles towering over town squares.
Most travelers who have visited the Czech Republic go to Prague. Prague is regarded as one of the most...
Devon and Cornwall conjure up images of secluded coves and wild windswept beaches, lonely moors and bustling holiday resorts, Cornish pasties and clotted cream teas. This area, known as the West Country, has attracted writers such as Daphne du Maurier, Agatha Christie and Rosamund Pilcher. A delightful gateway to the region is the elegant city of Bath, a relaxing and spacious town that’s easy to reach by motorway or train from London.
How
do you do an issue on “favorite places?” Whose favorites? My knowledge is
too limited to do the theme justice;I
just haven’t been everywhere yet, but I’m certainly trying! So I asked our
staff, our
On a warm spring day, with the Kiso River rushing headlong down the valley, and the snowy peak of Mt. Ontake fading behind the morning haze, 80‑year-old Yoshido Kuroda tends to his small garden plot of root vegetables and assorted fruit trees.
His house, a thatched-roof traditional country farmhouse, known as a gassho‑zukuri, is more than 200 years old and has been in Mr....
Take, for instance, the castle of Montal, a Renaissance jewel. Mainly built between 1523-34, Montal features a double spiral staircase, said to be the France’s most beautiful. (If you visit, you won’t see – and never could see – a famous visitor: the Mona Lisa, who spent World War II hidden here. Poet Paul Valèry also spent much of World War II in a Lot...
I first discovered the joys of shopping and window-shopping in Paris in 1967 when I was all of 12 years old, and now almost a half-century later, I am confirmed believer that there’s no city like this one for great shopping, whether it’s for clothing, home furnishings, antiques or art.
Even if you never buy anything during a trip to Paris – and knowing...
Tuscany is a place that people fall in love with. You sense right away that there is something here that you’ve been missing in your daily life back home, and you can’t seem to get enough of it. You realize that the vacation will be much too short, and you quickly start scheming about how you are going to get back here again. Soon.
The Mexican town of Guanajuato filled the little valley below us like fruit in a bowl, its colonial buildings an array of delicious colors: pineapple, mango, blueberry and lime. Alejandro, a trained architect and practicing tour guide, had brought me to the top of San Gabriel Hill to help me get my bearings.
The story of the Statue of Liberty is a patriotic myth, a melodrama, a public relations stunt and complex human transaction all in one. In 1875, France, seeking to honor the centenary of the United States, proposes to erect a giant statue that will overlook the entrance to New York Harbor, the immigrant gateway to North America. The statue will be a super-sized versio...
Centuries ago, in a cliff-face in the midst of China’s vast Taklamakan desert, artists hollowed, sculpted and painted 492 caves, creating more than 450,000 square feet of spectacular murals. That is more than 30 times the mural area of the Sistine Chapel. But whereas the Sistine Chapel was painted over a few years, the works at the Mogao Caves began in the fourth century....jpeg)
Cusco Airport, Peru: I boarded the 12-seater plane that would fly over the Andes to the landing strip in Boca Manu. It was strange to leave the beautiful city of Cusco, nestled in the mountains at 3,500 meters (11,500 feet) above sea level, and watch as the scenery changed from rocky peaks to lush lowland...
The Mexican town of Guanajuato filled the little valley below us like fruit in a bowl, its colonial buildings an array of delicious colors: pineapple, mango, blueberry and lime. Alejandro, a trained architect and practicing tour guide, had brought me to the top of San Gabriel Hill to help me get my bearings.