“Green was the silence, wet was the light,
the month of June trembled like a butterfly.”
Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets
And Florence shimmers in the heat of June.
Summer reading.
I know, the calendar hasn’t officially cleared summer for take off. But, as I write this in Florence on Saturday evening at 6:30 p.m., the temperature is 91 degrees F. Summer has arrived, secondo me. If it gets much hotter than this, I may have to move way way up north to Scotland.
Keeping cool for me requires a lot of good reading material. My latest enjoyment has been found in this great non-fiction tome, filled with art intrigue, a connection between Italy and the US, and historical context of the 1960s and 1970s. A fun book to read, and not just for art historians, I promise!
The Boston Raphael: A Mysterious Painting, an Embattled Museum in an Era of Change & A Daughter’s Search for the Truth by Belinda Rathbone
Great summer reading.
The restorative beauty of the commonplace.
A garden with a view.
The Giardino Bardini has many views, actually.
To begin, with the heat of summer upon us, it always nice to gaze at a fountain.
Or the silhouette of a sculpture in the shade.
But, then, there is the showstopper view! Eccola!
Giardino Bardini and Villa Peyron
Many of the beautiful terra cotta pots in the Giardino Bardini bear this stamp. I hope to investigate it further. I imagine they were produced in Impruneta or possibly Siena. Will report back!
The perfect shoe for the little black dress.
Pearls included.
Why didn’t someone think of this a long time ago!
Straw hats and summer jewelry: gioielleria
Palio, Siena
The time of the new race is coming up soon. I was just looking through my pictures and found these from Siena, which I forgot to post months ago. Actually, I shot these on January 1, 2017.
Let’s think Siena!
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How does your garden grow?
My new little terrace garden seems to love the sun and heat of Florence! It’s doing better than I am!!
A sign of good things to come.
Pretty much every morning, on my way to language school, I pass my favorite pasticceria in Florence: Rivoire. When they are open (which is mostly every day, but not always), I stop in for a pasta da portare via, a pastry to go. You pay at the cassa, about 1.5 Euro, and then walk over and choose your poison. The cameriera wraps the pasta in a napkin and places it in a pretty little bag, as here:
My favorite pasta, or pastry, is a ciambella. A ciambella is a doughnut, but at Rivoire “a doughnut” hardly does justice to the confection. At Rivoire a ciambella is a yeasty circle of fried dough, covered in a granular sugar that covers your lips and cheeks when you’ve finished. Trust me, it’s worth the trouble of wiping your face! It is very much vale la pena.
Today Rivoire had no more ciambelle, so I got an apple strudel. OMG. This picture comes no where near how good it tasted!
Buon appetito!
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