Vienna is not a city that reveals itself all at once. Its beauty unfolds gradually, through imperial palaces and hidden courtyards, through music drifting from open windows, through elegant cafés where time …
Migration is not only a Greek story, or an Italian one. It belongs to everyone, everywhere, and it always has: the leaving, the packing of a whole life into one suitcase, and …
Bonjour art lovers! 🌸 Paris is not only the City of Light, it’s also the birthplace of Impressionism, a movement that changed the course of art forever. In the late 19th century, …
I loved the first one. Loved it enough that when a sequel was announced, twenty years after Andy first walked into Runway with the wrong shoes, I was equal parts thrilled and …
I went to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam for the self-portraits and found a room I had not expected at all. Five people round a table in a dark cottage, eating …
I have three of these on a shelf at home. They came from KLM flights, they are filled with Dutch gin, and each one is a scale model of a real building …
Hola, beautiful travelers! After exploring Madrid corner by corner and sharing so many stories with you on BubblyLiving, it finally felt like the perfect moment to bring everything together into one sparkling, …
Before I had ever been anywhere, I knew Venice from paintings. Gold light on green water, gondolas tipped like commas across a canal, a city that looked too lovely to be a …
Queen Victoria was born at Kensington Palace on 24 May 1819 and lived there, under a strict and closely watched upbringing, until the June morning in 1837 when she was woken to …
What I have always respected about Rembrandt is that he told the truth. Where so many painters flattered, smoothed and arranged, he set down what was in front of him, including his …
I was walking back from Covent Garden on a wet December evening, the kind where the Strand’s Christmas lights smear across the pavement and every black cab throws up a little wake …
The first royal I was ever drawn to was not British at all. She was Austrian. On my early trips to Vienna I kept circling back to Empress Elisabeth, the one everyone …
For a long time I thought the Renaissance was an Italian story, and mostly a Florentine one. Botticelli, Michelangelo, the great dome over Florence Cathedral. It was only once I began visiting …
I had heard the name for years. Whenever something big was happening in London, a royal wedding, a jubilee, a state funeral, the cameras always seemed to be pointing down the same …
Walk into the medieval and early Renaissance rooms at the National Gallery in London and the walls turn to gold. Almost every panel is religious: a Virgin and Child, a saint, a …
I came to St James’s Park the way most people do, straight from Buckingham Palace, with an hour to spare and no real plan. I have done it a few times now, …
In my last post on the National Gallery I followed the Early Renaissance in Florence, and ended with three quiet workshop masters: Verrocchio, who trained Leonardo, Ghirlandaio, who trained Michelangelo, and Fra …
I have always loved the Renaissance, and not just the famous paintings but the idea inside the word itself: rebirth. After centuries in which European art had mostly served the church in …
Pasta is my comfort food. It takes me straight back to Italy, one of my favourite countries, and in particular to a bowl of pasta I ate in Rome that quietly ruined …
