Happy New Year!

It’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other, and I take full responsibility.

It’s not you, it’s me. We only see each other if I send out an email, right?

I have many New Year’s Resolutions this year (hydrate! no scrolling!), but one of the main ones is to return to this space and send out more posts. I miss you all.

In the meantime, thank you for sticking around, thank you for reading my writing, and most of all Happy New Year! I wish everyone reading this message a year filled with joy and peace. May all of your resolutions become reality, and may all of your dreams come true…

XO

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{Arles, France}

To be honest, I had expected Provence to be a riot of color, with bright sunflower fields and lavender everywhere. But the truth is much gentler: the countryside is sandy and golden. Grass is scarce, but there are lots of trees - olive trees, of course, but also pine and cypress, and even oak. There are armies of trees with multi-colored bark that looks exactly like camouflage gear. I don’t recognize them, but I find out that they are sycamores.

But it is the stone that I know I will remember when I think of Provence - cobblestones lining the roads, honey-colored stone gates and steps, stone houses and churches, stone wells and bridges and stairways…stone everywhere.

Much like a pizza oven. And yes, the heat is still baking everyone like pizza here in the south of France.

I hardly ever say “Provence” when people ask where in France I’m staying. I don’t even like saying “the south of France”. For some reason it makes me cringe. I’m afraid it sounds fancy, or pretentious, two things I am definitely not. I tend to just answer “Arles - in the southern part of France” when questioned, but not everyone seems to be familiar with this city close to the Mediterranean.

Honestly, I don’t know that I would be familiar with Arles were it not for Vincent van Gogh, who famously painted the bedroom that he lived in here, and the yellow house that it was in. He painted the cafe on the square, too, which still looks much like it did when he was here…and later, when his mental health started to decline, he moved to the asylum in nearby St. Remy de Provence, and then went to the countryside to paint wheat fields and crows and cypresses and starry nights.

The truth is that this is a wonderful part of the world to visit, with all kinds of interesting places to see, and Arles is an affordable place to set up camp while you are here. Just ask Vincent - he knew.

Or Gauguin, or Picasso, or Matisse, or Cézanne. They all lived in Provence for stretches of time. Actually, Paul Cézanne was a native son - he was born and died in nearby Aix-en-Provence. His studio is on a hill in Aix…a long, long upward climb from the city center.

Paul Cézanne’s studio is nothing if not a snapshot in time. It is little changed since the artist’s death in 1906. The apples (probably not the same apples) that he painted over and over again sit in a bowl on a dresser - his coat and hat hang on the wall and his paintbrushes sit near an easel as if waiting for the artist’s imminent return. The light in the studio is soft and magical, mostly due to the dove-grey walls, painted a shade that Cézanne chose specifically to absorb the sunlight coming through the windows.

It is interesting to visit Cézanne’s studio: the employees horde about twenty people in at a time, and then just kind of let you poke around for half an hour. No tour, no guide, no annoucements, nothing. (Eventually I find some laminated cards on one wall, that provide at least some information in a variety of languages.)

In one corner of the studio is a very tall and narrow door in the wall - more of a slot really, less than a foot across - that Cézanne had cut so that he could move monumental canvases into and out of the space. This is my favorite detail.

We all know stories about how Vincent van Gogh never sold a single painting during his lifetime….but van Gogh died when he was 36 years old. I didn’t realize, until I visited his studio, that Cézanne painted in relative obscurity until the 1890s. His first one-man gallery show was organized by Amboise Vollard in Paris in 1895, when the artist was 56 years old. To be clear, Cézanne never led the life of a starving artist - his banker father first financed his pursuits, and then left him his fortune. Still, that’s some dedication.

It is Sunday, and there are markets all over town in Aix - several antique and vintage markets, a farmer’s market, and a used-books market in the square in front of the town hall. Markets really are the best thing about Provence - filled with color and people, inexpensive produce and artisanal foods. These Sunday markets in Aix feel different than the market that I’m used to in Arles. Touristy isn’t quite the right word - but the market in Aix feels full of visitors, and the one in Arles feels crowded by locals. You don’t hear much English spoken in the market in Arles.

The twice-weekly market in Arles is huge, and runs in a half-circle around the walls of the old town. Every food you can imagine is for sale, from live chickens and rabbits (which I can’t bear to look at), to olives and cheeses, to honey and mustard, fruits, breads, and more. There are stands set up selling expensive linens and home goods…but at the other end of the market, there are lots of stands that have piles of clothes and housewares and sheets for a dollar a piece. It is not picture-postcard Provence at this end of the market, but these are the stands that are the busiest, with huge crowds of people waiting for the vendors to fill their tables of wares.

Are you at all familiar with the little Provençal candies called calissons? I have always wanted to try them. In pictures, they look like they would be deliciously lemony, because of their color and shape. They have been making calissons in Provence since the 13th century…mostly in Aix-en-Provence, where you are greeted with a calisson manufactory just a block from the train station. It turns out, though, that the shape of a calisson is that of an almond, not a lemon, and they are made of ground almonds and candied fruit and then topped with royal icing. They are ever-so-slightly sweet and have a waxy melon flavor…a flavor I can only describe as “the kind of thing that a Medieval serf who had never had anything truly tasty would enjoy.”

And yet, they sell them everywhere here.

{The Luberon}

After weeks in the south of France, I finally find my first lavender field. It will be another month before the plants are in full bloom, but the rows of lavender in front of the Abbaye de Sénanque - in the part of Provence known as the Luberon - are just starting to show little purple buds. That’s okay - I don’t need showy blooms. The lavender’s heavenly fragrance still floats through the air, mingling with the scent of fresh pine that seems to be ever-present here in the countryside.

The French love a good story - who doesn’t? - and there is a sweet story regarding the cultivation of lavender in this part of France…and a little purple fairy named Lavandula, which coincidentally is the botanical name of lavender.

Lavandula was born and raised in Provence. Like most fairies, she wanted to see more of the world as she grew older - and particularly more of France. And so she traveled around the country, keeping sketches of the places that she visited in a notebook. One day, when she was feeling lonely and far away from home, she opened her notebook to a drawing of the golden landscape of the hills around her home in Provence.

Lavandula began to weep, and - because she was a lavender fairy - she wept deep purple tears that colored her drawing as they fell. She attempted to wipe the tears away, but her lavender tears spread across the landscape as she wiped, staining the hills a deep purple when they dried…and the hills of Provence have been awash in glorious purple lavender each summer since Lavandula cried her heart out in memory of her home.

The Abbaye de Sénanque was built in 1148, and still has a community of Cistercian monks living within its walls. The abbey itself is beautiful, built with clean Romanesque lines in that buttery Provençal stone, but its isolated setting in a secluded valley is what takes one’s breath away. Tourists swarm here to take photos, and there are tours several times a day. Despite the crowds, though, there is a hush in the valley - a sign of respect for the monks who call the abbey home. It is quiet and peaceful…and it smells good to boot. Honestly it’s hard not to think that if you’re going to be a monk, this is the place to do it.

Arles was founded in the first century BC and retains much of its Roman heritage. There is an large Roman necropolis just outside of the city walls called les Alyscamps, Roman baths, a half-moon Roman theater, and other smaller sites. Taken in whole, they are the largest and most important collection of Roman monuments outside of Rome, and many of them are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. It is the beautiful 1st-century B.C. Roman arena that dominates the old town, though. Perched on a hill, the arena still hosts concerts during the summer, and a bullfighting festival once a year.

Side streets radiate like sunbeams from every side of the arena. Tucked into one side street in particular is a bookshop: De Natura Rerum, named for the philosopher Lucretius’ long-form poem. The bookstore has two specialties: ancient classical literature - in French, alas, or you might never have gotten me out of there - and local alcohols that they source from Provence and all over the south of France. The kind owner is passionate about his business, and always willing to provide samples of the local brews. He sold several varieties of locally-made pastis, the anise-flavored liqueur that is a Provençal specialty. I love anise, and I learned to love pastis…even though I ordered it several times while out and about before I realized that the glass of water that they always bring with the drink is meant to combine with and dilute the liqueur. It was even better after I started drinking it the right way. I maintain that the easiest way to pretend that you are in Provence is to find the hottest sun you can imagine and sit under it, drinking a glass of pastis with some crusty bread and olive tapenade. It is a match made in heaven.

It is difficult not to stop in your tracks when walking past the shop front of Maison Lilamand. Candied fruit is the other sweet specialty of Provence, and Maison Lilamand doesn’t just sell run-of-the-mill lemon peel or cherries, but entire candied oranges, and melons - even whole candied pineapples. They are not inexpensive - a large candied melon can cost close to 70 euros. But wow, are they beautiful to behold. Glowing in the shop window they appear to be lit from within.

Of course, these are no ordinary melons - they are Provençal Cavaillon melons, which any local will gladly tell you are the best melons in the entire world. Their delicate fragrance fills the markets here, and yes, they are delicious. More delicious than calissons, I can tell you that.

My favorite square in Arles is the Place de la Republique. The large, wide open space is lined with government buildings on three sides, with a large church in one corner and shops on the other edge. It is always filled with locals: hanging out on the steps, perched on the fountain enjoying ice cream from the adjacent glacerie, and often celebrating weddings at the city hall or the church. The air is filled with laughter and warmth and good will…it is the very opposite of pretentious. Actually, I’m starting to wonder how I ever could have thought such a thing about Provence at all.

A few years ago, I went on a road trip across the western part of the United States with my twin sister. We drove through the plains of South Dakota and Montana, though Wyoming and Idaho and Oregon. We stopped at national parks along the way - Yellowstone and the Badlands, and ended up at Redwood National Forest.

We saw bison up close and wolves and herds of elk…but there was nothing - nothing - we wanted more during this trip than to see a bear. We had our eyes out the whole time, and spent hours driving through parts of Yellowstone that were known to have bears, to no avail.

And then, as we were driving on a quiet road out of Redwood National Park - a road that would lead us to the airport in Sacramento, where my sister would drop me off to fly home - we ran across a tiny little black bear, ambling his way along the side of the road.

“OMG, A BEAR!!!!!!” The excitement in the car was through the roof.

The bear was decidedly more nonchalant. He looked over his little shoulder at us as we passed. He probably turned simply because he heard a car, but it felt like he was looking at us and saying, “You just had to have faith in me…I was here waiting for you all along.”

He felt like a sign.

Back in Arles, I’m having trouble sleeping.

I love the view from the window in the front of the apartment. It is above a shop on a tiny curving street near the Arena. In the early morning it is quiet, but as the day goes on shopkeepers arrive to open their doors. During the day they stand in the doorways and chat with their neighbors, and watch people go by. Twice a day uniformed children stream by on their way to and from the school around the corner. Most of them stop by the bakery down the street to pick up breakfast or an after-school snack.

Occasionally a car drives through, but the car has to be either very small or the driver very brave.

Late at night, after the sun goes down, families walk by with young children. At first it seems odd that they are out so late, but you quickly realize that it is not until late at night that it is finally cool enough for the children to play.

The night I can’t sleep, I find myself sitting at the open window in the middle of the night, leaning out over the street and feeling lucky to be alive and healthy and in this beautiful town in France. As I sit, I hear a distinct clop-clop-clopping in the distance. As the sound gets closer, a man on horseback comes around the bend, slowly walks past the window and then turns around the corner. He looks up at me and nods as he passes. I look around for my camera, but he is gone too quickly.

As I write this, I feel like it may not seem remarkable, but as it happens it feels like a dream. Like magic. I have not seen any horses in Arles in the three weeks that I have been here, and I definitely have not seen any lone riders in the middle of the night.

When I tell my sister this story, I say that if I believed it signs, I would take it as a sign…but since I don’t really believe in signs, I’ll just take it as a reminder to be thankful for little, unexplained moments.

I can almost hear the shriek as she replies, “What do you mean you don’t believe in signs?! Don’t you remember the bear!?!”

And she’s right. As I contemplate the lone rider, I think about the little black bear, who’s prescence was a reminder of the importance of faith.

And I also think about the story of Lavandula, the lavender fairy. There are, of course, practical reasons why lavender grows in Provence, including the Provencal climate - and technical and scientific advancements. But oh, isn’t the fairy tale lovely?

And last, it’s the words of the Englishman Roald Dahl that come to mind:

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”

And for me, that might just be the most important lesson of all.

XO

P.S. - I really don’t know if my rider was a sign, or a lesson or a reminder…but sitting on a patio at a small cafe on an even smaller street a couple of nights later, the horse and his rider clop by again. The waitress stops in her tracks and says “Huh. Look at that.” (Except in French, of course.) I ask her if there are a lot of horses on the street in Arles, and she says that as long as she’s lived there, she’s never seen one before. I take this as proof that he was there just for me.

P.P.S. - If you enjoyed this letter, please consider becoming a subscriber to have Beautiful Things delivered to your inbox. Subscriptions are free, unless you choose otherwise. Absolutely no pressure at all, but if you’d like to support my writing, I’ve added a virtual tip jar as well: you can find the “Buy me a coffee” button below. Thank you for reading!

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{Whitby, England}

Bram Stoker arrived in Whitby on the Yorkshire coast in July of 1890. It was seven years before the publication of Dracula, and the novel was still just a loose sketch in his mind. His wife and daughter wouldn’t arrive until a week later, and so he took the time to explore the town, wandering the streets and climbing the long steps to the ghostly ruins of Whitby Abbey overlooking the North Sea.

Bram Stoker only spent a month in Whitby, but it was a visit that changed the culture of the town forever. He set part of Dracula in Whitby: Jonathan Harker’s fiancée Mina Murray visits her friend Lucy Westenra there…and it is in Whitby that Count Dracula himself first sets foot on English soil, in the guise of an immense dog-like animal.

Like Bram Stoker, Mina Murray arrives in Whitby in the middle of July, and she describes the scene in her fiction journal…

130 years later I, too, am arriving in Whitby in July and, as Bram Stoker and Mina Murray likely did, I am arriving by steam train. The North Yorkshire Moors Railway is one of the many heritage railways in the UK - and, as the name suggests, it winds through the beautiful North York Moors National Park before arriving on the coast. It is a rainy morning, and as I watch the purple heather of the moors blowing in the wind from the train window, I catch a glimpse of the great viaduct in the distance - a sure sign that we are approaching Whitby.

The harbor at Whitby is packed with tourists, even in the rain. Fishing boats sit in the water, quietly sharing space with touring boats. A replica of Captain Cook’s Endeavour floats near the bridge - Captain Cook lived in Whitby, and used locally built ships for his voyages. The harbor is lovely, but it is noisy and crowded, and I decide to go ahead and start climbing upward, towards the cliffs and the Abbey.

The rain clouds start to break up as I climb, and as I near the top of the cliff the sun shines down on the harbor and the town. The valley is steep, and by the time I reach the top, it is impossible to see the river below. Looking across the valley you can see a line of grand-looking hotels - holdovers from Whitby’s days as a Victorian resort town - and below them the red-roofed houses of the old town that Mina writes about.

It was in this area along the quay that the Whitby public library was located during the 1890s, and during his walks, Bram Stoker would occasionally stop by, looking for inspiration and conducting research. One day he came upon a specific book: a memoir of a British consul’s time in Bucharest, Hungary. The book mentioned a 15th-century prince: Vlad Tepes, who was also known as Vlad the Impaler and whose father was called Vlad Dracul. Vlad Dracul translates as Vlad the Devil, and therefore his son was known as “the son of the Devil”, or Vlad Dracula. Intrigued, Bram Stoker wrote the name down in his notes.

Wait, what? A ghost? In Yorkshire?

I’m kidding, of course, because everybody knows that Yorkshire is absolutely flooded with ghosts. Depending on who you ask York is either The Most Haunted City in Europe or The Most Haunted City in the World, and Yorkshire is definitely England’s Most Haunted County.

I haven’t seen any ghosts myself, of course - but, oh, I have definitely heard about them.

The abbey ruins at Whitby look over the North Sea, dominating the headlands. They are both grand and somehow haunting, and it is easy to imagine why they inspired Bram Stoker. Built in the 13th century Whitby Abbey, like so many of England’s Gothic abbeys and monasteries, was a victim of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century. Dissolved under the Second Act of Suppression in 1539, the building fell into gradual decline starting in the early 18th century.

Approximately 80% of England’s monasteries and abbeys were dissolved under Henry VIII, and the majority of those were either purposefully dismantled or left to ruin. It is heartbreaking, of course, to see the ruins of England’s great medieval abbeys scattered across the country. They are beautiful in their own right, of course, but it is a mournful beauty, tinged with sadness. Walking through the arches, I find myself wishing I could see the Abbey at night, darkened and shadowy: what is majestic during the day must be slightly mysterious at night.

Earlier this year - to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the publication of Dracula - a gathering was hosted at the Abbey: 1,369 people dressed as vampires attempted to break the world record for gatherings of people dressed as vampires. It’s an odd and very specific record…but they did it, shattering the previous record of 1,039 vampires. Go Whitby!

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Get used to it, Mina. If there’s anything you can count on more than ghosts in Yorkshire, it’s that old men like to sit and talk. Bram Stoker would walk through this graveyard and write down names that he saw on tombstones. One of the graves belonged to a Mr. Swales, and it is Mr. Swales who sits next to Mina on the bench, talking the day away. He also happens to be Count Dracula’s first victim in Whitby.

The church is St. Mary’s, and its graveyard is filled with interesting old headstones, often worn away from exposure to salty sea air. Many of the headstones are markers, without tombs, memorializing sailors and fishermen who set out from Whitby and were lost at sea.

By the time I reach the churchyard, the clouds have started to gather again, because, England - and I make my way over to the long set of steps that will take me back down to town and, hopefully, fish and chips.

There are 199 of them. I know because they are referred to, now, as the 199 steps. And they are as old as the Abbey and church, dating to at least the 13th century, although it is believed that there were steps here even earlier than that. Before Whitby Abbey was built, there was a smaller monastery on the site as far back as the 7th century, and it is said that the founding abbess of the monastery, St. Hilda, had the steps built as a test of faith for those who wished to worship at her church. The wooden benches that line the stairs are actually coffin rests, built to ease the journey of pallbearers carrying the coffins of the dead up to the churchyard on the cliff. Mina Murray’s assertion that they are built on a delicate curve, “gentle enough for a horse to climb,” doesn’t seem quite right...but she changes her tune a few chapters later.

“The time and distance seemed endless, and my knees trembled and my breath came laboured as I toiled up the endless steps to the abbey.” - Mina Murray’s Journal

That’s more like it, Mina.

I’ll be honest, I don’t love Dracula, but I have a new appreciation for it after today. And so, visiting Whitby, I discover something that surprises me: not only can reading books enrich your travel, but travel can enrich your experience of books, too. It’s no secret that my desire to visit England was at least partly rooted in a lifetime of reading, but as the train pulls away from the station in Whitby, I am even more excited about the next few months. I think about exploring Jane Austen’s Bath, and Charles Dickens’ London, visiting Shakespeare’s home in Stratford and the Bronte Parsonage at Haworth, and I give thanks, for the millionth time, that I was born a reader.

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England really is a book lover’s playground, isn’t it? There are cozy little bookstores and charity shops on every high street, charming villages straight out of Agatha Christie novels (with slightly lower murder rates, thank goodness), and lovely literary blue plaques and markers all over the countryside.

I just love it. Book history is everywhere. And of course, the country’s houses of worship are no exception. They are filled with literary history. So often when I tour the churches and cathedrals of England, I find myself echoing Kathleen Kelly in You’ve Got Mail, “So much of what I see reminds me of something I read about in a book…”

(Of course, she goes on to say “…when shouldn’t it be the other way around?” to which I saw PSHAW. It’s not one or the other.)

So here’s a little tour of English cathedrals for book lovers. Enjoy, and happy weekend! xo

{Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey}

I’ll start my tour of English cathedrals with the only church on this list that is NOT a cathedral. It is, however, a very large church, and a very famous one…possibly the most famous church in England?…so I hope you’ll forgive me for bending the rules a bit.

A visit to Westminster Abbey can feel a bit like a visit to a circus. It is jam-packed with tourists (which you really have no right to complain about because you are one, too), and visitors are encouraged to follow a maze of a path past all of the major tombs. Isaac Newton? Check. Queen Elizabeth I? Check. Move on to the next.

Poets’ Corner is a little bit of an oasis of calm at the end of the maze.

Geoffrey Chaucer was the first writer buried in this area of Westminster Abbey - not because he was a poet, but because his day job was Clerk of the King’s Works. Almost 200 years later, the poet Edmund Spenser asked to be buried near Chaucer, and the tradition began.

There are two types of monuments in Poet’s Corner: the tombs of writers who are buried there and memorials to writers who aren’t, but who are considered important enough to English literature to deserve a mention. It can be disconcerting at first because it’s not entirely clear which is which. Wait, you say, didn’t I just see Shakespeare’s grave in Stratford-upon-Avon? You did, his monument here is just a reminder that he was a great English writer.

The Dean of Westminster decides who is buried in Poets’ Corner and who isn’t, and who gets a memorial and who doesn’t. George Eliot famously requested burial in Poets’ Corner, but was denied because she was in a long-term relationship with a married man. She was allowed a memorial in 1980, which seems a bit like the literary equivalent of the Pope deciding that the Catholic Church may have been wrong about Galileo 300 years after his death.

T.S. Eliot is the only American with a memorial plaque here. He was offered burial at the Cathedral, but had made other plans in his will. He would have been the only American buried in Poet’s Corner - he’s now the only American with a memorial plaque here.

(There are people who will claim that T.S. Eliot is British, but there are also people who will claim that Henry James is British, which is pure lunacy. T.S. Eliot was born in Missouri, and it doesn’t get more American than that.)

If anything, a stroll through Poets’ Corner is a reminder of the incredibly deep and rich history that is English literature. It’s a wonderful place to start your tour.

{York Minster}

Ah, the beautiful front facade of York Minster. “The Minster”, as it’s known locally. It is in front of this facade, on a snowy February morning in 1807, that the Learned Society of York Magicians gathers in Susanna Clarke’s novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

“They were gentleman-magicians, which is to say they had never harmed any one by magic - nor ever done any one the slightest good. In fact, to own the truth, not one of these magicians had ever cast the smallest spell, nor by magic caused one leaf to tremble upon a tree, made one mote of dust to alter its course or changed a single hair upon any one’s head.”

The magicians of the Learned Society were theoretical magicians, you see, not practical magicians. But they have been invited here, to York Minster, by Mr. Gerald Norrell, who claims that he can prove that practical magic is alive and well in England. And if he can, the Learned Society of York Magicians will be forced to disband forever, and each member will be impelled to give up their theoretical study of magic.

Does he prove it? Does Mr. Norrell make magic happen? You’ll have to read the book to find out. And then you’ll have to read the next 800 pages, to find out what happens after that.

{Durham Cathedral}

There are few sights as lovely as the view of Durham Cathedral on its hill from across the river below. The writer Bill Bryson was Chancellor at Durham University from 2005 until 2011, and he declared, “I unhesitatingly give Durham my vote for best cathedral on Planet Earth.”

(I happen to agree. Best cathedral in England, at the very least.)

But Bill Bryson is not the writer who should draw you to Durham - or not the only one anyway - because enshrined in a tomb in the Galilee Chapel are the remains of the Venerable Bede.

It’s always struck me as a funny name, to be honest. You never hear Bede, or St. Bede…it’s always the Venerable Bede. But who was Bede, and why was he so venerable, anyway?

Born around 673 AD, Bede is one of history’s great polymaths. A scholar of history, religion, astronomy, mathematics, and language, his Ecclesiastical History of the English People is one of the most important primary sources of Anglo-Saxon history and of the early Christian Church in England. In fact, we refer to the year Bede was born as “673 AD” because Bede popularized the use of Anno Domini as a dating system in his Ecclesiastical History. Durham Cathedral was built in the 11th and 12th centuries in part to house the remains of the Venerable Bede and St. Cuthbert.

So why is he known far and wide as the Venerable Bede, besides his undeniable venerability? According to the Durham Cathedral website, it is simply because his tombstone was engraved with the words Hic sunt in fossa Bedae Venerabilis ossa, or “Here are buried the bones of the Venerable Bede”. Sometimes the simplest explanations are the correct ones.

{Salisbury Cathedral}

“The Rev. Septimus Harding was, a few years since, a beneficed clergyman residing in the cathedral town of ——; let us call it Barchester. Were we to name Wells or Salisbury, Exeter, Hereford, or Gloucester it might be presumed that something personal was intended; and as this tale will refer mainly to the cathedral dignitaries of the town in question, we are anxious that no personality may be suspected.”

So begins Anthony Trollope’s The Warden, the first book of his six-book series set in the fictional county of Barsetshire. Despite Trollope’s insistence in the opening that Barchester isn’t based on any particular English cathedral town, he later wrote in his Autobiography that he was inspired to write his novel after a stroll through Salisbury Cathedral Close one summer evening. And it certainly sounds like Salisbury: “It stands on the banks of the little river, which flows nearly round the cathedral close, being on the side furthest from the town. The London road crosses the river by a pretty one-arched bridge…The entrance to the hospital is from the London road, and is made through a ponderous gateway under a heavy stone arch…”

The dispute at the center of the novel was based on an incident at Winchester Cathedral, where Anthony Trollope had studied as a young man.

{Gloucester Cathedral}

Now we come to lovely Gloucester Cathedral, which has two links to children’s literature. And this is the point where I have to make a confession - a confession that at first may seem completely irrelevant to a tour of English cathedrals. And that confession is that I have never seen a Harry Potter movie, nor, indeed, read a Harry Potter book.

I mention that now because Gloucester Cathedral these days is very well known as one of the filming locations for the Harry Potter movies. From what I understand, scenes were filmed in the cathedral’s gorgeous fan-vaulted cloister, which stands in for the corridors of Hogwarts in some of the movies. But I can’t tell you exactly which ones.

Nearby the cathedral, in a little storefront right next to an arch that leads to the Cathedral Close, is another link to literary history. It is the House of the Tailor of Gloucester, setting of Beatrix Potter’s story of the same name.

“But the tailor came out of his shop and shuffled home through the snow; he lived quite near by in College Court, next to the doorway to College Green. And although it was not a big house, the tailor was so poor he only rented the kitchen.

He lived alone with his cat; it was called Simpkin.”

It is in this house that the poor tailor sleeps off his illness, while some very special little assistants help him to finish the finely embroidered coat he has been commissioned to make for the Mayor of Gloucester’s wedding.

{Winchester Cathedral}

In May, 1817, Jane Austen made the journey from her home at Chawton to the city of Winchester, less than 20 miles away. She was brought by her sister Cassandra and her brother Henry, who hoped that Jane could find the medical treatment that she required, as the illness that had plagued her for over a year grew progressively worse. Jane moved into a house at No. 8 College Street, where she was treated by a physician from Winchester Hospital. Alas, the treatment was in vain. Jane Austen died in the house on College Street just a few months later at the age of 41, of a disease that we’re still not able to definitively identify.

She was buried in Winchester Cathedral, in the north nave. Her epitaph, written by her brother James, reflects her family’s deep grief and reads, in part, "The benevolence of her heart, the sweetness of her temper and the extraordinary endowments of her mind obtained the regard of all who knew her, and the warmest love of her intimate connections.”

It is an extremely heartfelt memorial, but makes no mention of her writing, apart from the allusion to the “extraordinary endowments of her mind”. In 1869, Jane’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh wrote the first biography of the author, A Memoir of Jane Austen. A brass plaque was placed nearby her grave, funded by the proceeds of this memoir, that clarifies Jane’s status as a writer.

Isaak Walton, the 18th-century scholar and author of The Compleat Angler - beloved by fishermen worldwide - is buried on the other side of Winchester Cathedral. I stumbled upon his grave while touring the cathedral, but no one else seemed to be paying much attention. It’s hard to be buried near a superstar.

{Canterbury Cathedral}

And then there’s Canterbury.

Canterbury Cathedral: spiritual heart of the Church of England, and home to its leader, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Inspiration for Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and the setting of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral…and, of course, the site of the bloody killing that was the basis for both of them.

In 1170 Thomas Becket had been Archbishop of Canterbury for eight years, after having served as Lord Chancellor under his friend King Henry II. Several years into his term as Archbishop, Becket and Henry had a falling out. Becket wanted to assert the Church’s independence from the Crown, and Henry wasn’t having it. After Becket used his power to excommunicate the Archbishop of York and several bishops, all of whom were loyal to the King, Henry was done. Tradition has it that on Christmas Day, he was heard to exclaim in frustration, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Upon hearing this cry, four of the King’s knights traveled to Canterbury, hoping to take Becket prisoner - but Becket ran into the cathedral, desperately clinging to a column to avoid apprehension. In a series of powerful blows, the four knights decapitated the Archbishop. His body lay at the base of the column until the following day, when monks buried him in the crypt of the cathedral.

Shortly after the murder, rumours began to spread about miracles and healings taking place in the name of Thomas Becket. In 1173 he was proclaimed a saint. Shortly afterward, the monks of Canterbury opened the crypt to visitors, and pilgrims began to visit from all over England, in the hopes that the saint’s miraculous healing power would heal them.

Approximately 200 years later, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote a series of twenty four short tales told as stories recounted by pilgrims on their way to visit St. Thomas Becket’s shrine. We know them, collectively, as The Canterbury Tales.

{Wells Cathedral}

On a much happier note, there’s lovely, light-filled Wells Cathedral.

The early 20th-century novelist Elizabeth Goudge was born on the Cathedral Close here, as her father was vice-principal of the Theological College. She set her novel City of Bells here, where the town and cathedral are fictionalized as Torminster, likely due to its close proximity to Glastonbury Tor.

Which is another reason to visit Wells Cathedral - it is also just a hop, skip and a jump away from the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, which of course have strong literary ties as the purported burial site of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere. Although that is up for debate.

{Hereford Cathedral}

Hereford Cathedral is not, perhaps, the most well-visited cathedral on this list, but those who make the trek to this city close to the Welsh border are in for a very special treat. Not only does it hold one of the four surviving original copies of the 1217 Magna Carta, it houses the Hereford Mappa Mundi - the largest medieval map in existence. More than that, though, unassuming Hereford Cathedral is home to the largest surviving chained library in the world.

Chained libraries were common before the 17th century. Libraries that were open to the public used the chaining system to keep their valuable manuscripts and early printed books safe from theft. A chain was attached to the book via a ringlet at the front edge, and then attached to a rod that ran along the shelf.

Because the books are attached at the front edge, they have to be housed fore-edge out, so that the chain doesn’t damage the volumes next to it, or tangle when the book is withdrawn. Indexes are posted at the end of each row, so that visitors can determine which volume they’re searching for.

Hereford’s chained library includes almost 1,500 early books, including an amazing 229 hand-illuminated manuscripts dating to as early as the 10th century.

Chained libraries became less common in the 15th century, with the age of Gutenberg and movable type. Books became more common, and therefore didn’t have to be quite as fiercly guarded.

{Honorable Mention, John Rylands Library, Manchester}

Look at that Gothic architecture: the stained glass, the soaring columns, the rib vaults. And then look closer.

Tucked into each little alcove are not pews, but books. This beautiful Victorian Gothic building isn’t a cathedral; it’s a library.

The John Rylands Library opened on January 1, 1900. It was founded by Enriqueta Augustina Rylands, in memory of her late husband, John Rylands, a wealthy cotton manufacturer in Manchester, who had left Enriqueta his vast fortune when he died in 1888. She spent the intervening years collecting rare books and purchasing notable private libraries, including the Althorpe Library from the 2nd Earl Spencer, for which she paid $210,000 - a quite substantial amount of money in 1892. The Rylands Library is now known as The John Rylands Research Institute and Library and is part of The University of Manchester. The gorgeous building stands in the center of Manchester, is open free to the public, and gains honorable mention on our list as a cathedral to literature.

PS - If you enjoyed this tour, please consider becoming a subscriber to have The Diary of a Lady Traveler delivered to your inbox. Subscriptions are free, unless you choose otherwise. If you are interested in reading my previous letters from abroad, visit my homepage: The Diary of a Lady Traveler. Finally, absolutely no pressure at all, but if you’d like to support my writing, I’ve added a virtual tip jar as well: you can find the “Buy me a coffee” button below. Thank you for reading!

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Dear friends,

I’ve been thinking for the longest time that there should be a word in English for a curious person. I just recently learned that a philocalist is a lover of beauty…or someone who sees beauty in all things, which is decidedly harder. There’s a word for people who love the moon (selenophile), and a word for people who love sunsets (opocarophile). But no word for people who are curious. It’s a shame isn’t it? The dictionary tells me that the closest the English language comes to a curious person is nosy or inquisitive or busybody, but the first two aren’t nouns, and the third misses the point completely.

Anyway, that’s the kind of traveler I am: a curious one. I like to dig into the history and art and music and culture of a place before I visit.

And that’s where the idea for Pocket Guides for Curious Travelers came from. They are not complete guides in any way, but are meant to be more of an inspiration. They are a non-comprehensive, totally biased, and completely subjective miscellany.

Just a little fun, really.

But I’d love to know what I’ve missed…what are you favorites places and things in the south of France?

In the meantime, happy weekend, xo

{Did you know?}

That no one even thought of going to the French Riviera during the summer until the 1920s? In 1923, a wealthy American couple, Gerald and Sara Murphy, started renovating a villa, which they would call Villa America, near Antibes. They invited their artist and writer friends, played on the beach during the day and threw lavish parties at night.

That same year, Coco Chanel was photographed disembarking from a yacht nearby, sporting a deep tan after spending all day in the sun. Suddenly, after centuries of darkened skin being associated with manual labor, everyone who was fashionable wanted a tan. The age of sunbathing was ushered in, and there was no better place to do it than the French Riviera.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was among the visitors to the Murphys’ villa, and he modeled Nick and Nicole Diver in his Riviera novel Tender is the Night on the couple.

You can read more about the Murphys in Calvin Tomkins’ short book Living Well is the Best Revenge - which started out as an article for the New Yorker and in which Sara Murphy claims to bear no resemblance whatsoever to Nicole Diver - and in Amanda Vaill’s Everybody Was So Young.

{A few books to read in anticipation of your visit}

Perfume from Provence & Sunset House, Lady Winifred Fortescue

You can’t swing a dead cat in a bookshop these days without hitting an “escape to Provence” memoir, but Lady Winifred Fortescue did it in the 1930s, starting with Perfume from Provence and continuing with its sequel Sunset House.

Jean de Florette & Manon des Sources, Maurice Pagnol

Also his autobiographies My Father’s Glory and My Mother’s Castle. And his films, specifically the Marseille Trilogy. Who could be more Provençal than Marcel Pagnol?

The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

The Chateau d’If, where Edmond Dantès spends fourteen years in prison, is right off the coast of Marseille.

Perfume, Patrick Suskind

Set partly in Grasse, Perfume is the story of Grenouille, a man whose exceptional sense of smell leads him to murder.

Madame, Will You Talk, Mary Stewart

A mid-century caper set in Avignon and Marseille.

The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, Vincent van Gogh

There are a million fictional accounts of Vincent’s time in the south of France, but his letters, which are mostly written to his brother Theo, not only act as autobiography, they are also a reminder that the brilliant Vincent was as much a philosopher as a painter.

{A Piece of History}

The great and influential American food and cookbook writers James Beard, Julia Child, M.F.K. Fisher, Evan Jones (and his cookbook editor wife Judith Jones), and Richard Olney all happened to be on holiday in Provence in late 1970. Julia and Paul Child owned a small cottage - La Pitchoune - on her co-author Simone Beck’s estate near Grasse, and Richard Olney lived in the Provençal village of Sollies-Toucas. The 300-pound James Beard had come to Grasse to visit a famous weight-loss expert nearby, and spent much of his holiday on a strict diet. M.F.K. Fisher spent the year with her sister and children, traveling between Aix-en-Provence, Marseilles, and Arles. She kept a journal, and her great-nephew Luke Barr wrote about the memorable year in his book Provence, 1970. For her part, Fisher wrote about the year in her memoir Two Towns in France, and also in her collection of essays As They Were.

(Did you know you can rent La Pitchoune on AirBnB? It will cost you, though.)

{A little music to get you in that “South of France” mood}

Charles Trenet. Cheesy, maybe. But as soon as I hear the first few notes of La Mer, I’m off to the Mediterranean in my mind, sipping wine on a terrace as I gaze out at the bright blue sea.

Did you know that the Gipsy Kings are from Arles? They are known for playing Catalan and Spanish music, but the traditional folk music of Provence influenced their work as well.

Claude Debussy isn’t from the south of France, but his languid, dreamy melodies are perfect for long summer days and hot summer nights.

Then there’s Sur le Pont d’Avignon. I can’t in good conscience recommend it, because then you’d have it in your head all day. (Once you start singing, you can’t stop.) But, did you know that the Pont d’Avignon is a real bridge, and the story of its miraculous construction is fascinating? It’s worth reading about.

{One Piece of Artwork Not to Miss if You Visit}

I am going to cheat a little bit and tell you the one place that I wish that I had had a chance to visit, but didn’t. I do think it’s probably the one piece of artwork that you shouldn’t miss if you visit (and will be first on my list if I get a chance to return), and that’s Henri Matisse’s Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence.

Matisse was in his 70s and living in nearby Nice, when he underwent surgery for cancer in 1941. One of the young nurses who helped him during his recovery entered the Dominican convent in Vence soon afterward. After the war, the convent decided to build a new chapel nearby, and the nurse, Sister Jacques-Marie, asked Matisse if he would help. Matisse, who had recently relocated to Vence, agreed and designed everything from stained glass windows to furniture to priests’ clothing. He considered the resulting chapel his masterpiece - the culmination of his life’s work. She wrote a book about the chapel and her friendship with Matisse called, appropriately, Henri Matisse: The Vence Chapel.

{A few things that I love in the south of France, and I think you’ll love, too}

Market day in Aix-en-Provence - Full of artisan food, old books, antiques, lavender, produce, and color, market day in Aix-en-Provence is a feast for all of the senses.

Carrière des Lumières at Les Baux de Provence - An abandoned stone quarry is the setting for extraordinary immersive art shows. Over 100 projectors cast images on the walls and ceiling of the underground quarry, while visitors wander through the maze, surrounded by art and music.

Isle-sur-la-Sorgue - A lovely oasis of a town on the Sorgue River. With some of the largest antique markets in the south of France.

Cassis - Nestled near the edge of Calanques National Park, Cassis is a quiet beach town - more of a small city, really - surrounded by striking calanques (cliffs). With a lovely marina and white sand, it’s exactly what I would have liked the Riviera to have been.

Pont du Gard - Well, it’s just one of the wonders of the ancient world, isn’t it? Not one of THE SEVEN WONDERS, but a wonder nonetheless. This masterpiece of Roman architecture needs to be seen to be believed.

{A little off the beaten track, but well worth the effort}

The hill towns of the Luberon: Lacoste, Oppède-le-Vieux, Roussillon, Gordes, Bonnieux. They are not under-the-radar at all…the hill towns of the Luberon are most likely exactly what we think of when we picture Provence in our mind. I am categorizing them as off-the-beaten track solely for the fact that they are almost impossible to reach via public transportation. If you really want to visit the hill towns of the Luberon, you’ll need a car.

Of course, I am just scratching the surface…and this list reflects my favorites and my particular interests. If you really want to get to know more about life in the south of France, I have three Substack newsletters to recommend: Karen Karbo’s Yeah, no. Not Happening - which I promise will never fail to make you laugh, Betty Carlson’s France in Between - a wonderful resource for slightly off-the-beaten-track smaller cities around France, and Debora Robertson’s Lickedspoon - for inspiring your dreams of that south of France life. And if you are writing a Substack from the south of France, let me know in the comments!

{Substackers to know from the South of France}

Yeah, no. Not Happening

The newsletter for people who long to say no

By Karen Karbo

France in Between

A personal yet informative take on France's small to middling towns -- the scenic, the offbeat, and the nitty-gritty.

By Betty Carlson

Lickedspoon with Debora Robertson

Welcome to my newsletter. This is where I share stories from my seaside village in the South West of France, my trips to the market, weekly recipes, and updates on our house renovation. Most of it’s free, and will always be free.

By Debora Robertson 🦀

Finally, I’ve written more extensively about the south of France at Diary of a Lady Traveler. You can find my posts here:

PS - If you enjoyed this missive, please consider becoming a subscriber to have The Diary of a Lady Traveler delivered to your inbox. Subscriptions are free, unless you choose otherwise. Absolutely no pressure at all, but if you’d like to support my writing, I’ve added a virtual tip jar as well: you can find the “Buy me a coffee” button below. Thank you for reading, and happy weekend!1

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{Orvieto, Italy}

The rain has been relentless in Italy, and as a consequence, many trains at Santa Maria Novella station in Florence are running late. My train, however, has a different problem. An announcement scrolls across the arrivals board in Italian, and I try to read it with my very limited Italian skills. I know that it says something about a “grande animale”, but I can’t figure out if the large animal is on the tracks or actually on board the train. It doesn’t really matter, because either way my train is canceled, and I have to catch a much later one to Orvieto than I had anticipated.

Orvieto is a hill town in Umbria, the green heart of Italy. Instead of sitting on the side of a gently sloping hill like its Tuscan hill town counterparts, Orvieto sits high atop an isolated rocky cliff - a cliff so high that it is necessary to take a funicular from the train station at the bottom to the old town at the top. It is dark and pouring rain by the time I finally arrive in Orvieto, and I can barely see anything as the shuttle bus carries me the five minutes from the funicular at one end of town towards my apartment at the other end.

Read more

{Rotterdam, 1761.}

A weary and unusually dressed woman gives two large, leatherbound albums filled with handwritten pages to the Reverend Benjamin Sowden. I am dragging my ragged remnant of life back to England,1 she says, dispose of these however you see fit…}

The woman was returning to her homeland after receiving news of her husband’s death. She hadn’t seen him for 22 years - not since moving to the Continent in 1739 in pursuit of a dashing and much younger Italian man. But she had children in England, and things to take care of.

She was 72 years old, and dying of breast cancer.

Mary Pierrepont was 23 years old when she married the 34-year-old politician Edward Wortley Montagu. Eloped, actually, as her father was set on having Mary wed to the unfortunately-named Clotworthy Skeffington, 4th Viscount Massereene. The young Mary wasn’t sure that she was in love with Edward, but she did know that she didn’t want to marry Clotworthy. (Can you blame her?) And so, while negotiations between the viscount and Mary’s father dragged on, she agreed in secret to marry Edward Wortley Montagu, warning him in a letter, “I can esteem, I can be a friend, but I don't know whether I can love…”

Mary had been born into nobility—her father was Evelyn Pierrepont, Duke of Kingston-upon-Hull, and her mother was the daughter of the Earl of Denby—she was raised with every privilege the world had to offer.

Except education. Her encouraging mother and grandmother had both died by the time Mary was eight years old, leaving her in the care of her father. Evelyn Pierrepont didn’t believe that the education of his daughters was anything he really needed to be bothered with, and so Mary and her sisters were left to a series of governesses…and to their own devices.

Not a young girl to be discouraged, Mary took her education upon herself at the age of 12, devouring books from her father’s vast library and teaching herself to read Latin and later Greek. By 14, she was composing poems and working on a novel. By 23, she was an exceptionally well-read woman with an intellect to be reckoned with.

And so, when Mary Pierrepont eloped with Edward Wortley Montagu, she did so with full knowledge that she would be disinherited from her family’s fortune. That was ok, she decided, anything not to marry Clotworthy.

The newly-wed Wortley Montagues settled into London, where Mary struck up friendships with a who’s who of London society, including the poet Alexander Pope and the feminist writer Mary Astell. She gave birth to a son in 1713, but shortly thereafter contracted a serious case of smallpox. She survived, but, as was so often the case, the illness left her face scarred for the rest of her life.

In 1716, Edward Mortley Montagu was appointed English Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and was sent to Constantinople to help negotiate the end of the Austro-Turkish War. Lady Mary wasn’t required to travel with him, but she chose to anyway, expressing a desire to see the world.

And let’s just stop for a moment to note that this is where things really get interesting. Because, in 1716, women didn’t travel the world because they wanted to. They accompanied their husbands for work, occasionally. They moved. But they didn’t travel for fun. Lady Mary was absolutely the exception to the rule. In fact, according to the Virago Book of Women Travellers, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was the first woman to travel abroad for curiosity’s sake”.2

Perhaps her auto-didactic youth sparked something in her soul, because in 1816, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu traveled through Europe and on to Constantinople. And, lucky for us, she kept a record of her journey in the form of letters to her friends and family.

The Wortley Montagus didn’t travel lightly (“thirty covered waggons for our baggage, and five coaches for my women”), but made their way slowly through France, Holland, Germany and Vienna - where it seems they turned back again and made a circle around Germany before returning to Vienna and then moving on towards Turkey.

As much as I admire Lady Mary, her letters are not without problems for the modern reader. In Holland, she writes to her sister that she admires the cities there because “One is not shocked with those loathsome cripples, so common in London…”, and in Germany she praises the local sumptuary laws: laws that restricted extravagance, and maintained social order by regulating what individuals of certain classes could spend or wear. In England, she complained, anyone - man or woman - can fool a stranger into believing that they are someone, just by donning an expensive set of clothes. Oh, how much easier life would be if we were only required to dress according to our social status.

At last the Wortley Montagus reach Adrianople (modern day Edirne, not far from Istanbul). Lady Mary’s place in society is such that one of her correspondents is the Princess of Wales, and while she describes the beauty of the Turkish countryside, she can’t help buttering up the daughter of the king, just a little bit.

Lady Mary’s delight with Turkey is genuine. She writes to a friend, “This country is certainly one of the finest in the world; hitherto all I see is so new to me, it is like a fresh scene of an opera every day…” 3

In Adrianople she is taken with the beauty of Turkish women, and of their garments. She writes page after page describing their costume in exacting detail to her sister, and admires the fact that the veils that the women wear provide them a sense of anonymity. They can practically go about the streets doing anything they want! In a perhaps slightly short-sighted observation, she writes to her sister, “Upon the whole, I look upon the Turkish women as the only free people in the empire…”

It is obvious to us as readers, of course, that Lady Mary’s interactions with the ladies of Adrianople are limited to certain classes and stratospheres of wealth.

Interestingly, however, when Lady Mary visits a hot bath in Adrianople, the local Turkish women are shocked that she is unable to undress herself because of her corsets and stays. They thought her corset was a shackle on her personal freedom: “I saw they believed that I was so locked up in that machine (the corset), that it was not in my own power to open it…which contrivance they attributed to my husband.”

Lady Mary was so taken with the costume of Turkish women that while in Adrianople, she adopted their manner of dress. She found that she so preferred the Eastern costume that even upon her return to England she dressed in the “Oriental” style, donning the loose robes and headdresses she had grown fond of on her voyages.

During the Wortley Montagus’ first year in Constantinople, Lady Mary gives birth to a daughter—her second child. She assures friends in England that the rumors that they have heard about disease and plague in the Middle East are largely untrue…at least, the illnesses are mild enough not to be troubled about. In fact, she writes, smallpox, the disease that had affected Lady Mary so terribly and that killed countless Brits and Europeans every year, was barely a nuisance in Constantinople.

She writes that she had seen old women take the fluid from smallpox pustules and apply it in small amounts to cuts that they opened on the hands or feet of Turkish children. The children would contract smallpox, but the illness would invariably be very mild and rarely result in death.

Lady Mary had been introduced to inoculation.

Practiced for centuries in the Middle East and Asia, inoculation, which they termed engraftment, was at that time completely unknown in Europe and Britain.

Lady Mary was so impressed by the procedure that she, with the assistance of the English embassy’s surgeon Dr. Charles Maitland, had her son engrafted. He became the first British citizen to receive a smallpox inoculation. (For the record, she didn’t have her daughter inoculated because her wet nurse was not immune to the disease. She did, however, have the procedure done as soon as she returned to England.)

Lady Mary wrote to her friend, Sarah Chiswell, “I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England; and I should not fail to write to some of our doctors very particularly about it, if I knew any one of them that I thought had virtue enough to destroy such a considerable branch of their revenue for the good of mankind.” Oh, ye of little faith, Mary.

Despite Lady Mary’s cynicism, Dr. Maitland became the first doctor to perform smallpox inoculations on British soil upon his return to England—and when Lady Mary returned as well, she became a strong and vocal advocate for the operation’s use. It is, in truth, the reason most of us know Lady Mary Wortley Montagu today: she introduced smallpox inoculation to Great Britain, which paved the way for the smallpox vaccine, and then to vaccines of all kinds. It is at least in part due to Lady Mary’s efforts that millions of people’s lives have been saved in the centuries since her death.

And so, after two years, Lady Mary returns to England. She has kept at least one and possibly two copies of the letters that she sent from her voyage, and she spends the next several years reworking and editing them. She would never publish them, you see, it would be unseemly for a lady of her position. Or any lady, really. But she did circulate them among friends and acquaintances, including the writer Mary Astell.

In 1739, Lady Mary falls in love with an Italian count named Francesco Algarotti. Algarotti, who, it must be said, had a reputation that preceded him, engages in an affair with Lady Mary, while scandalously and simultaneously carrying on an affair with her friend, the politician John Hervey.

When Count Algarotti returns to Italy, Lady Mary makes an excuse to follow him. Her health, she says. She needs Italian air.

It becomes obvious fairly quickly (after a couple of years of chasing, anyway) that Count Algarotti has no intention of devoting himself to Lady Mary. Lady Mary, instead of returning to England, spends the next twenty-three years in residence in various cities around Europe, mostly in France and Italy. She carries her Turkish Embassy letters with her wherever she goes.

In 1761, she receives a letter that informs her that her husband, Edward Wortley Montagu, whom she hasn’t seen in 22 years, has died.

She leaves Italy to return to England, knowing that she has a large lump in her breast - a lump of the same kind that had killed her friend Mary Astell several decades before.

She makes her way to Rotterdam on the Dutch coast, where she will board a boat to return to England for the final time. While in Rotterdam, she gives the heavy leather albums containing her Turkish Embassy letters to the Reverend Benjamin Sowden, and instructs him to dispose of them how he sees fit.

Is this an effort to keep them from her daughter, who is now the Countess of Bute, wife of the John Stuart, Count of Bute and prime minister of Great Britain? Probably. The Countess of Bute was somewhat scandalized by the manner in which her mother had lived the latter part of her life, and may have been afraid that the letters would have humiliated the family.

The Reverend Sowden kept the albums until Lady Mary’s death the following year…and then decided that the proper thing to do would be to return them to her family. He sent them - for a price, of course - to the Countess of Bute for safekeeping.

The Countess must have been shocked when, shortly after receiving her mother’s portfolios, a book was published: Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e: Written during her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa. Published by T. Becket and P.A. DeHondt, The Strand, London.

The Countess of Bute wrote to the Reverend Sowden, demanding an explanation. He couldn’t understand it, he said, he had never let the letters out of his sight. Except…that one time he had lent them to a pair of English visitors, who were interested in Lady Mary’s journey. They kept them overnight, but brought them right back the next day. I remember one of them was named Becket…

Thomas Becket and his guest had spent the night furiously writing out a copy of Lady Mary’s letters, with the intent of publishing them upon their return to England.

A miracle, as it turns out, because Lady Mary’s suspicions about her daughter proved to be true. Before the end of her life, the Countess of Bute burned the entirety of Lady Mary’s journals - journals that she had kept for over 50 years.

The first edition of what we know now as The Turkish Embassy Letters was published in 1763 with a preface written by Mary Astell in 1624, in the hopes that Lady Mary’s letters would be published one day.

PS - Thank you, friends, for reading the first installment of Lady Travelers, my series about the rich history of lady travel writers. Next month, I’ll be jumping to the 20th century to write about the American food and travel writer M.F.K. Fisher. In the meantime, I have another travel diary on the schedule - I will see you soon! XO

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Hello, friends, from the newsletter formerly known as Beautiful Things and now called The Diary of Lady Traveler. Long time no see…

Did you miss me? Did you even notice I was gone? I hope you’re all having a lovely green spring filled with flowers and sunshine.

I’m excited to get back in the swing of things, and to start writing again…but first, I want to tell you about something that happened while I was on my break.

I’ve been thinking for the past few months about the direction I wanted this newsletter to take…or overthinking, to be more accurate. And honestly, it was tiring. I mean, I don’t have to tell you how exhausting thinking can be.

In the two years that I’ve been writing here, Substack has gotten to be a very crowded place. The travel section in particular seems to have taken a turn. It's gotten, for lack of a better word, more influencer-y. Which is fine, but it’s not me. I started to wonder if Substack was really where I wanted to be writing.

Anyway, these things were weighing on my mind when, in the first days of my break, I picked up a book: Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers by Jane Robinson.

Unsuitable for Ladies collects the writings of mostly 18th, 19th & 20th-century women travel writers. Some of the writers were familiar to me, but so many more were not. And the book turned out to be an inspiration to me in a few ways.

First of all, I remembered that women have been writing about their travels for as long as people have traveled. At first in letters and diaries, and then eventually in articles and essays, memoirs, and books. I found that I related more to the women featured in the book than I do to the influencers that seem to dominate travel media these days. My goal has always been to write about the places I visit so that people who haven’t visited can go there in their minds.

And so I decided that as Substack gets more influencer-y, I want to move in the opposite direction. I’m going analog, as they say. Which is not to say that I’ll be changing all that much, honestly…it’s more about telling myself that it’s ok to write 3,000-word essays on the places that I’ve visited. Short attention span theater be damned.

Substack is simply a tool, we can make it whatever we want to be.

I had been itching to change my title, though. As I glanced through the book, before I started even reading it, a pattern had emerged in some of the anthologized writings.

First, there were the anonymous books:

A Lady’s Tour Round Monte Rosa

Letters from a Lady

An English Girl’s First Impressions of Burmah.

An Englishwoman in India by A Lady Resident

Some of the authors were Ladies with a capital L, like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, or Lady Richmond Brown.

And some had names:

A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird.

Journal of a Lady’s Travels Around the World, by Mrs. F.D. Bridges.

A Lady’s Walks in the South of France by Mary Eyre.

A Lady’s Life Among the Mormons, Fanny Stenhorse.

But you can see what they all had in common. They were all self-proclaimed Lady Travelers.

(Some of the titles could even fall under the banner of self-help, like Lilias Campbell Davidson’s Hints to Lady Travellers published in 1889, in which she dispenses invaluable advice like: “As fellow passengers, perhaps, young babies are about as trying as any. Try to avoid them when possible…” and “Never travel without a small flask of brandy, strong smelling salts and an eau de toilette.”)

And so Diary of A Lady Traveler it is. It makes me smile.

Just to be clear, this isn’t a newsletter about solo female travel, or a girl’s guide to the world. I certainly hope my gentlemen subscribers will stick around, because I appreciate them every bit as much as the ladies (Hi, Guys!).

But there isn’t a doubt that, throughout history, women have written from a slightly different perspective than their male counterparts. (I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a men’s blog called Beautiful Things, for one thing.) But it may not be as simple as we first imagine. Jane Robinson, in the introduction to Unsuitable for a Lady, writing about the difference between men’s travel writing and women’s, says, “Part of the difference must lie in the nature of the journey itself. Women have rarely been commissioned to travel, and so their accounts tend not to be prescribed by the need to satisfy a patron or professional reputation (except the professional reputation every writer who travels — as opposed to traveller who writes — is obliged to uphold). Women can afford to be more discursive, more impressionable, more ordinary.” To further clarify the point, Robinson goes on to write, “Which brings us back to the essential difference between the two (men and women)…that men’s travel accounts are to do with What and Where, and women’s with How and Why.”

This is all to say that I won’t be changing the way I write or what I write about. This will be the Diary of a Lady Traveler, from the point of view of a modern-day lady who is interested in the how and why of the world.

Unsuitable for Ladies inspired me in one final way. The women I read about are so very interesting. I’d like to introduce you to some of them - both some of the writers whom I encountered in this book, and also some of the fascinating women whose lives have long been an inspiration. So, in addition to my regular essays about my travels, I’ll be writing once a month about the rich history of lady travel writers, starting later this month with the above-pictured Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her eighteenth-century Turkish Embassy Letters. Maybe you’ll even be inspired to read along with me?

Before I leave, a few pieces of housekeeping. I’m turning paid subscriptions back on (thank you so much to my paid subscribers!) - although all content will be free for now. In the next few weeks, I’ll be introducing another feature that I’ve been working on, and at that time, I’ll start paywalling the archive. So read all those old posts while you can! You can see them at my homepage Diary of a Lady Traveler, where you can also find a new directory of some of my most popular posts.

Thank you, as always, for being a reader.

Until next time,

XO

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Welcome to Diary of a Lady Traveler!

I’m so glad you’re here.

May 2025 marks my two-year anniversary of writing on Substack. The following posts are a good introduction to what you will find here.

I have to start, of course, in Provence, where a solitary man riding his horse unexpectedly down a narrow street in the middle of the night started me contemplating magic in the first place.

And then there was Antwerp, where a cast-iron fountain forged at the end of the 15th century reminded me of the life changing power of love.

In Tuscany, an engraved skull reminded me that: As you are, I was too: As I am, you will also be. Memento mori: Remember you must die.

And while it would never not be magical to walk to the top of Glastonbury Tor, it was really the tour guide dressed as a Medieval friar who told me about the time that Jesus came to England on a business trip with his uncle that really made my trip to Glastonbury special.When I visited Bram Stoker’s Whitby, in Yorkshire in 2023, I discovered that not only can reading books enrich your travel, but travel can enrich your experience of books, too. And literary travel continued to be magical for me in 2024.

I walked in the footsteps of Jane Austen, in Bath and came as close as I’ll probably ever come to attending a Regency ball.

I searched for the real-life stories behind Romeo and Juliet in Verona, and took the 19th-century author Henry James along with me as my guide in the Loire Valley.

And in the beautiful city of Oxford, lingering in the golden gleam, I found Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland.

Sometimes it’s easy to find magic - you’d be crazy not to in cities like Venice and Paris. But I’ll never forget standing on the Academia Bridge in Venice, contemplating the beauty of the city while the sun set over the Grand Canal…or watching the lights twinkle on the Eiffel Tower, and wondering if there’s a word for missing something before you’ve actually left.

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*Young is a state of mind.

When last we spoke it was early March, and I was telling you that I was ready for a makeover.

Well, the makeover is almost complete. The new, slimmer, better-coiffed and better-dressed me will be sending out posts again starting next week.

(I have a new logo, too. It’s nice to have a twin sister who is a patient and wonderfully talented graphic designer. Thank you !)

Here’s the thing, though: I’ve decided to rename my blog.

And so the reason I’m writing this short post is to let you know that the next time you receive a missive from me, it will be as:

No more Beautiful Things. From now on it’s The Diary of a Lady Traveler…for reasons that will become clear in my next post.

So, this note is to ask you a favor: Please don’t delete me!

When you see something pop up in your inbox from The Diary of a Lady Traveler, don’t unsubscribe. It’s still me! I just have a few exciting changes on the horizon.

Actually, if you could do the opposite, and spread the word it would be even better.

Thank you, as always, for reading and subscribing and liking and commenting. It’s so appreciated.

PS - It’s possible that there will be some downtime as I make the switch. Likely, in fact. I hope it won’t last long.

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Dear readers,

It’s hard for me to believe, but I’m coming up on the two-year anniversary of this newsletter. Two years!

And, it seems, I’ve got the two-year itch.

It’s time to do a little spring cleaning, and I think I’m ready for a make-over, too. So, I just wanted to let you know that I’ll be taking a little break. I’ll be back very soon, with a new look - and possibly with a new name.

To be clear, I’m just changing my decor - the content that you’ve subscribed to will remain the same, although I may expand on that a bit, too.

Because I’m taking a little break, I’m putting paid memberships on hold until I return.

To be honest, I struggle a little bit with the idea of paid content. I love my paid subscribers and appreciate your support SO MUCH, but it always niggles at me a little bit when I put anything I write behind a paywall. Because I appreciate my free subscribers, too.

So, when I return, all posts will be free to all subscribers. They’ll go behind an archive paywall after a month. Paid subscribers will have full access to the archive, and, of course, my eternal gratitude for your support!

In the meantime, I’m opening my whole archive up to all subscribers. Here are a few posts you may have missed:

Thank you as always for reading! Is it getting close enough that I can say happy spring?!

Happy Spring, and I will see you soon,

XOXO

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{Bath, England}

Here’s the thing: I was expecting balls.

This is my second time visiting Bath in as many years. I stayed for a week in the Widcombe neighborhood last year, and I’ve been Bath-adjacent for the past six weeks. And yet - it’s hard to believe - in all that time I haven’t attended a single ball. I haven’t even been invited to one, honestly.

Part of me is glad, I’m not traveling with a ball gown, after all.

But it would certainly be nice to get an invitation.

Since arriving, I’ve tried to follow the rules that Beau Nash, the famous 18th-century Master of Ceremonies of Bath - the man who MADE the city into what it is today - posted on the doors of the Assembly Rooms:

RULES to be observed at BATH.

1. THAT a visit of ceremony at first coming and another at going away, are all that are expected or desired, by ladies of quality and fashion,-- except impertinents. 

   (Actually, I don’t know what that means.)

2. THAT Ladies coming to the Ball appoint a Time for their Footmen coming to wait on them Home, to prevent Disturbances and Invoconveniences to Themselves and Others.

Ok, I’m going to stop there, because the next eleven items concern proper manners at the ball, and we’ve already established that I don’t get invited to those. There’s only so much a modern-day lady of quality and fashion can do.

I love Bath.

It was the city I was most looking forward to visiting on my first trip to England in 2022, and it turned out to be the city that I loved the most. It was also the city that I was the most anxious to return to when I came back to England this year.

Bath is England’s great Georgian city. Lying in the gently sloping valley of the River Avon, its streets are lined with elegant, symmetrical 18th-century homes and storefronts constructed of Bath limestone - a creamy stone that turns the color of honey in certain lights. It is architecturally interesting, delightfully bookish, loaded with history, and surrounded by some of England’s loveliest countryside. It is right up my alley.

(I know I should say it’s “right up my street” because I’m in England…but then again I should also try to pronounce Bath with an English accent. My experience tells me, though, that it is virtually impossible for an American to do this without sounding ridiculous, and so I stick with the American version. Besides, the guys on the train say “Baf”, so I think there is room for a whole range of pronunciations. I’m sure Beau Nash would have a different opinion, but I’ve given up on him until I get invited to a ball.)

Now, I am mostly kidding about balls, but if I did want to attend one, I’ve come at the right time of year. My stay near Bath this year coincides with the annual Jane Austen festival. The festival is kind of a big deal, with over 3,500 Jane Austen enthusiasts from around the world descending on Bath for ten days. Jane’s first completed novel, Northanger Abbey, and her last one, Persuasion, are both partly set in Bath - and the author herself lived here on and off through much of her twenties. Jane didn’t really love Bath, honestly. She was more of a country girl. Nevertheless, when you consider her history with the city and think about the backdrop provided by its beautiful Georgian architecture, it’s hard to deny that Bath is the perfect location for her large yearly party.

I’m not attending the festival. I am, however, very much looking forward to watching the opening day Regency Costumed Promenade, in which around 800 Jane-ites don period dress and parade through the streets of Bath.

It breaks my heart a little bit, therefore, when I come down with food poisoning on the night before the Promenade, and have to spend the entire day in bed. I am taken out in the most English way possible: by a bad scone. Bad clotted cream, to be more specific. To be honest, part of me knows when I am eating the crusty cream that I am making a bad decision, and yet I tell myself that I just don’t know enough about English cream, and that the café certainly wouldn’t serve cream that had gone bad to a customer. I was so, so wrong. I will trust my instincts next time.

Anyway, I don’t get to see the Promenade.

Which bums me out, because it turns out to be a beautifully sunny day, and the Promenade’s route goes past some of the most interesting sights in Bath - starting at the picture-perfect Holburne Museum at the eastern end of Great Pulteney Street. A few days later, when I am back on my feet, I walk the route myself.

Great Pulteney Street is Bath's grandest thoroughfare. It is difficult to get a picture of it today, with street signs and pesky cars everywhere - but this is what it looked like when Jane Austen lived nearby. You can see the Holburne Museum at the very end.

It wasn’t the Holburne Museum, then - it was Sydney Hotel, and the park that surrounded the building hotel was called Sydney Gardens. Jane Austen lived across the street from the Sydney Hotel, at 4 Syndey Place, and walked through Sydney Gardens every morning - pretending, presumably, that she was in her beloved countryside, and not stuck in Bath.

Great Pulteney Street looks much the same today as it did in the 18th century. Open and wide, and lined with identical, symmetrical, honey-colored row houses, it must be England’s Regency-est street. Walking from the Holburne Museum down to elegant, diamond-shaped Laura Place at the other end (where Sir Walter Eliot’s fancy cousin Lady Dalrymple lives in Persuasion), it’s easy to imagine Jane Austen and her contemporaries promenading the evening away - walking, observing and gossiping in hushed tones.

Just past Laura Place is Pulteney Bridge, designed by the great English architect Robert Adam. Inspired by the Rialto Bridge in Venice, and the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Robert Adam lined the elegant bridge with little shops on either side. Today, they are filled with art galleries and bakeries, a lovely florist and several cafés. I walk across the bridge, turn left and head towards the heart of the city. Along the way, I pass a fountain depicting Rebecca at the well, with the inscription WATER IS BEST at the base. I turn the corner and walk into the paved churchyard of Bath Abbey.

As I walk into the courtyard, a young musician pushes a full upright piano by me on a rolling dolly. A few minutes later, he is set up in the square next door, and the crescendoing notes of Coldplay fill the air. Not to play favorites, but street musicians in Bath are the best. They tend towards piano and classical or acoustic guitar, which is a very welcome change from the Andrew Lloyd Weber ballads and Andrea Bocelli knock-offs that seem to be more common elsewhere in England.

To my right is the famous Pump Room, the social center of Regency Bath. On the pediment above the door are inscribed the same words that I saw on Rebecca’s well: WATER IS BEST, this time in Latin.

In 1816, the author Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin rented a room in a now-demolished boarding house that stood directly next to the Pump Room. She attended local classes and worked on a book that she had started while she was in Switzerland earlier that year. In December, she married Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the following year she finished the book, which she titled Frankenstein.

Side note: Jane Austen gets all of the fanfare, but the list of authors who have called Bath home is seemingly endless: Ann Radcliffe, Fanny Burney, Tobias Smollett, L.P. Hartley and Angela Carter lived here. Edward Bulwer-Lytton of “It was a dark and stormy night” fame stayed here, as did Samuel Johnson. England’s great 18th-century female historian Catherine Macaulay lived here (until she ran away with a 21-year-old physician’s apprentice at the age of 47), and Alexander Pope lived here part-time, at Ralph Allen’s grand Prior Park estate on Widcombe hill, overlooking the city.

Ahead of me looms the unusual facade of Bath Abbey. A series of strange little angels climb up ladders on either side of a wall of stained glass. The ladders represent Jacob’s Ladder, of course…but it’s a quirky and uncommon motif. I learn later that the 15th-century Bishop of Bath was contemplating tearing down the Norman cathedral that stood on the site of Bath Abbey when a vision came to him in a dream of a cathedral with angels climbing up and down the facade.

What more does one need? The existing cathedral was demolished and Bath Abbey as we know it today was built.

At the opposite end of the courtyard is a small colonnade and through that are the Roman Baths that give Bath its name. Dedicated to the goddess Sulis Minerva, the baths are almost 2,000 years old. Bath wasn’t Bath at that point, but a small Roman settlement called Aquae Sulis - named, of course, for the goddess. The baths are fabulous (and have a wonderful audio tour narrated by Bill Bryson), but I have wandered off of the promenade path, and so I turn right and head toward the Circus and the Royal Crescent on my way to the final destination, the Assembly Rooms.

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I walk the short distance up Gay Street - where Sir Walter Eliot deigns to set up rooms in Persuasion - and into the great circle of the Circus. The Circus and The Royal Crescent, just blocks apart, are two of Bath’s masterpieces of Georgian architecture, the first designed by the architect John Wood (The Elder), and the second by his son John Wood (The Younger). The Royal Crescent is probably the more famous of the two, but I prefer the Circus. Like Great Pulteney Street, it is difficult to get a good photo of, but if you could look down on it from above you would see a great circle of townhouses, with a grassy lawn in the center. A cluster of massive trees dominates the lawn.

John Wood (The Elder), who was interested in Paganism and believed that Bath was at one time a Druidic hot spot, designed the Circus to the exact dimensions of nearby Stonehenge. A frieze above the doorway lines the entire length of the row houses, made up of 500 Masonic symbols, no two the same.

Legend has it that the road that leads from the Circus to the Royal Crescent is a ley-line, and that the circle of the Circus represents the sun and the Crescent, the moon. It’s all very mystical.

Also, it’s England, so the buildings are haunted.

I finally make my way to the Assembly Rooms - the building where Jane Austen danced, and where Beau Nash posted his Rules of Bath…and it is closed. Closed for a private event. The Assembly Rooms are owned by the National Trust, and, being a member, I have tried to get in on three separate occasions. Each time, it has been closed for a private event. It is frustrating. Almost as frustrating as trying to get an invitation to a ball. I give them a break just this one time, since it is Jane Austen Festival time, but I fear I may never get in.

I start to head back downtown, but along the way I pass Persephone Books, and I’m never, ever going to walk past Persephone Books without stopping in. As I browse, an American woman comes in in full Regency dress. We make small talk about the festival and I tell her my story of woe about the sketchy scone and the Promenade. She says that she has to catch a plane back to the States that evening, but that if I want to use her tickets to a period-dress reception the following day at the Assembly Rooms, I am welcome to them.

I know that this is as close as I will ever come to attending a ball in Bath.

And yet, I have to decline the offer. When one is traveling for several months at a time out of a carry-on suitcase, one hardly has space for the kind of costume required for such an event.

Still, it’s a kind offer, and it makes me smile. I pick out a few books and head back downtown, looking forward to an evening of good reading. After all, the person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid, right?

I’m pretty sure a very wise woman wrote that once, anyway…

XO

PS - If you enjoyed this letter, please consider becoming a subscriber to have The Diary of a Lady Traveler delivered to your inbox. Subscriptions are free, unless you choose otherwise. If you are interested in reading my previous letters from abroad, visit my homepage: The Diary of a Lady Traveler. Finally, absolutely no pressure at all, but if you’d like to support my writing, I’ve added a virtual tip jar as well: you can find the “Buy me a coffee” button below. Thank you for reading!

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{Bruges, Belgium}

Do you remember the movie In Bruges from a few years back? (Ok, I checked and it’s about 17 years back. Where does the time go, anyway?) In it, two hitmen, Ray and Ken, are sent to Bruges by their boss Harry for a few weeks after a hit gone wrong. Ray has been tasked with the murder of a priest, and he accidentally kills a young boy in the process. It’s an unacceptable mistake, and Harry tells Ray and Ken that he’s sending them to Bruges for a while - to lay low and to enjoy some sightseeing in the meantime.

Ken loves Bruges, but Ray, it turns out, is bored out of his skull. Soon enough, boss Harry tells Ken that he’s actually in Bruges to kill Ray as punishment for his mistake - and that he’s only sent them to the city so that Ray can have a beautiful experience before he dies. To which Ken responds that it’s a nice thought but, unfortunately, Bruges isn’t really Ray’s thing. Outraged Harry, played by Ralph Fiennes, responds:

“It’s a fairytale town, isn’t it? How’s a fairytale town not somebody’s thing? How can all those canals and bridges and cobbled streets and those churches, all that beautiful fairytale stuff, how can that not be somebody’s thing?

Is the swans still there? How can swans not be somebody’s thing, eh?”1

I mean, how can swans not be somebody’s thing? It’s impossible.

Swans have been in Bruges since the 15th century. local legend will tell you that swans were first brought here as a sort of punishment. Maximilian I of Austria - who had assumed control of Bruges after the death of his wife Mary of Burgundy - floundered in his first few years as ruler, and by the end of the 15th century was highly unpopular with the city’s residents. On one visit to Bruges, the citizens captured Maximilian and had him imprisoned for four months. During his imprisonment, he witnessed the arrests and executions of some of his closest companions, including one Pieter Lanckhals. When Maximilian escaped, he ordered 101 swans to be brought to Bruges in honor of his friend Lanckhals, which in English means Long-Neck.

Bruges, he said, would fall into ruin if the swans were ever removed from the canals.

(Honestly, if you’re going to be cursed with something, swans aren’t really that bad, are they?)

If you, yourself, are not inclined to believe in curses, that’s ok. A more prosaic and - ok - possibly more logical theory is that swans were brought to Bruges almost a century earlier, as a symbol of the city’s power and wealth. It could have been a last-ditch effort on Bruges’ part to assert its importance, as by the end of the 15th century the city had begun to fall into a decline that would last for almost four hundred years.

The “Golden Age” of Bruges stretched from the 12th century to the 15th century, during which time it was the most important port city in Northern Europe and a leading trading post of the Hanseatic League. Although Bruges lies several miles inland from the North Sea, the narrow Reie River provided ready access to the sea - and provided the water to fill the city’s canals. During the 15th century, the river started to fill with silt, making commerce more difficult - and this, combined with some sketchy leadership (see: Maximilian), contributed to the city’s long decline.

Bruges didn’t die off, though, it just hibernated. When travel as a tourist trade began to grow in popularity in the mid-to-late 19th century, Bruges became one of Europe’s first great tourist attractions. Visitors discovered a city that progress (and the Industrial Revolution) had mostly bypassed - a medieval city that was remarkably well-preserved. The resulting tourist capital provided an opportunity for the city’s renaissance, and thankfully Bruges chose to invest in its past. The 20th century saw widespread conservation and restoration of its architectural and cultural heritage.

Today, of course, the popularity of Bruges is at its peak. Statistics show that on any given day - particularly during summer’s high season - there are more tourists on its streets than locals.

It’s a day in late May when I arrive - an impossibly glorious, blue-skies-and-puffy-white clouds day. The city is filled with tourists, but it doesn’t feel crowded - it feels serene and calm and beautiful. Like a fairytale. Or a swan.

It’s the weekend after Ascension Day, actually - which means, sadly, that I’ve just missed the Procession of the Holy Blood, an annual festival that has taken place in Bruges since 1291. Called “Brugges Schoonste Dag” - the Most Beautiful Day in Bruges - in Dutch, the procession is a big deal: a celebration of civic pride as well as a chance to honor the city’s most precious relic.

The Relic of the Holy Blood - a piece of cloth, said to be stained with the blood of Christ - was purportedly preserved by Joseph of Arimathea after the Crucifixion (it seems he was more careful with this cloth than he was with the Holy Grail). There are, of course, conflicting stories about how it came to Bruges, but these days it is the city’s most precious relic, housed in an eponymous basilica - The Basilica of the Holy Blood.

The hand-painted banners of the Procession are still hanging, and they wave above my head as I walk down the Oude Burg, the oldest street in Bruges. I am headed for the Church of Our Lady. I may be too late to see the city’s most precious relic, but I’m not going to miss one of its greatest artistic treasures.

The Church of Our Lady has a distinctive Flemish flavor, with striking black and white marble architectural details and deep wood decoration. Tucked away in a chapel on the right-hand side is a sculpture so beautiful that it was stolen not only by Hitler, but by Napoleon, too.

She is the Madonna of Bruges, by Michelangelo. Purchased in Florence in 1504 and brought to Bruges by brothers Alessandro and Giovanni Moscheroni (who sound awfully Italian, but who were actually wealthy merchants from Bruges), the Madonna was the only Michelangelo sculpture to leave Italy during his lifetime. The Bruges Madonna is small (just about 50”), but exquisite. Featuring a serene Mary and a youthful, almost playful Jesus, the sculpture is a kind of bookend to the artist’s Pietà, completed just two years earlier.

The Madonna has been installed in this chapel since she first came to Bruges in 1504, with two exceptions. In 1794, she was sent to Paris by Napoleonic troops, where she stayed on display at the Louvre until Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815. And, more famously, she was stolen by Nazi troops during World War II, smuggled out of Bruges in between mattresses on the back of a Red Cross truck. She was thankfully recovered in the vast underground salt mines at Altaussee, Austria, along with hundreds of other Nazi-looted masterpieces, and returned home to Bruges.

It is a special kind of treat to a Michelangelo sculpture not in a museum, but in the very chapel for which she was created.

Madmen and Michelangelo have a long history. In 1972 a Hungarian man named Laszlo Toth attacked the Pietà with a hammer, knocking off Mary’s arm, and pieces of her face. “I am Jesus Christ - risen from the dead!” Toth yelled, as tourists scrambled to gather the broken pieces of marble, and take them home as souvenirs.

And in 1991, an Italian man broke off the toe of David at the Academia with a smuggled hammer. The same man would later deface a plaque in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria, because the wording didn’t make sense.

It is no wonder then that, if you look closely, you’ll see that the Bruges Madonna - even though she is at home - is safely guarded now in a subtle, expertly designed case of impenetrable glass.

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It pricks at my conscience a little to spend so much time talking about the Italian Michelangelo when of course Bruges itself was home to some of the greatest artists the world has ever seen - not least of whom was the brilliant Jan Van Eyck. I will assuage my guilt, however, by telling you that you’ll be hearing much more about him in my next missive…

Several of Van Eyck’s masterworks are housed in the Groeningemuseum, around the corner of which is perhaps the busiest spot in Bruges - the picturesque St. Bonafacius Bridge. Despite appearances, this narrow footbridge is the newest bridge in the historic center, built in 1910. Popular with young lovers, it is said that couples who whisper to each other while standing on the bridge will be rewarded with a lifetime of love and happiness.

Single people have reason to cross the bridge, too, as legend says that the first person they see when they step off of the bridge will be the person they will one day marry. And while I haven’t seen any solid statistics to back up the veracity of this claim, you can never be too careful. Choose your gaze with care.

The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow visited Bruges in 1842. Like all experienced travelers, he knew that rising early was the way to go. So one summer morning, he wrote in his journal, he “rose before five and climbed the high belfry…”

The Belfry of Bruges is the city’s bell tower, first constructed in the 13th century. It is the tallest building in the historic center, and tourists still climb the 366 stairs of the tower to this day. Longfellow climbed in the quiet of the misty early morning and wrote about his experience in a poem titled, fittingly, The Belfry of Bruges:

“Visions of the days departed, shadowy phantoms filled my brain;
They who live in history only seemed to walk the earth again;”

So inspired by his view of the silent, empty medieval city, he looked down into the market square below him and imagined that scenes from history were being replayed before his eyes.

“I beheld proud Maximilian, kneeling humbly on the ground, I beheld the gentle Mary, hunting with her hawk and hound…”

We know Maximilian, of course. The “gentle Mary” about whom Longfellow writes is Maximilian’s wife, Mary of Burgundy - a queen unknown to me until I stood in front of her tomb at the Church of Our Lady.

Mary of Burgundy, daughter of Charles the Bold of Burgundy and wife of Maximilian I of Austria. She became queen at age 19, and then married, ruled her kingdom, and had two children before dying at the age of 25 years old. She was hunting with her husband when her horse stumbled and threw her off. The horse then landed on top of her, breaking her neck.

She is interred next to her father in a grand tomb on a black marble base, memorialized forever in a gilded bronze effigy with praying hands and a pair of faithful hounds at her feet. The artist who was commissioned to create her tomb took a full seven years to finish it.

Standing at the tomb of Mary of Burgundy, tears fill my eyes. I am moved by the facts of her story of course, but it’s more than that.

I am emotional because I feel lucky. It is a privilege to be here and a privilege to learn Mary’s story. Moments like this are what I love most about travel.

I wouldn’t miss them for the world.

The internet is filled with people who will tell you that “tourist” is a dirty word. You should be a traveler, they say snobbishly, not a tourist. Or perhaps you should only engage in the kind of travel that they approve of.

I think it’s nonsense.

Overtourism is a huge concern in Bruges. The city has thankfully put a limit on the number of cruise ships that can dock nearby, and just this past year put a moratorium on the construction of new hotels, and on permits for short-term holiday rentals. And of course there are things that we can and should do on an individual basis to help alleviate the problem. Travel in the off-season if at all possible. Travel sustainably whenever possible. And most of all be respectful. Of people, of traditions, and of cultures.

But don’t ever let anyone ever make you feel bad about being a tourist. You’ll miss out on too much.

Being a tourist is the best thing in the world.

Until next time,

XO

PS - If you enjoyed this letter, please consider becoming a subscriber to have The Diary of a Lady Traveler delivered to your inbox. Subscriptions are free, unless you choose otherwise. If you are interested in reading my previous letters from abroad, visit my homepage: The Diary of a Lady Traveler. Finally, absolutely no pressure at all, but if you’d like to support my writing, I’ve added a virtual tip jar as well: you can find the “Buy me a coffee” button below. Thank you for reading!

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Buy me a coffee

{Antwerp, Belgium}

In 1548, a young bookbinder from the Touraine region of France set up shop in Antwerp, Belgium. His name was Christophe Plantin, and by 1555, he had expanded his little bookbinding business to include a print shop, as well.

Book printing was still in its infancy in 1555. Johannes Gutenberg had printed his ground-breaking 42-line Bible exactly 100 years earlier, just a couple of hundred miles away in the German city of Mainz. But it was Antwerp, along with Paris and Venice, that had grown to become a leading center of the new trade.

During Christophe’s lifetime, the Plantin Press grew to become the largest and most successful printing house in the world. In 1579, after years of growth and success, Christopher Plantin bought a residence on one of Antwerp’s oldest squares - the Vrijdagmarkt - and moved his press into one wing of the grand building. It remained in business there until 1867, when the press’s building, collection and archives were sold to the city of Antwerp. It opened as a museum and research center the following year.

The Plantin-Moretus Museum is a gem, a little miracle of a museum, really.

The museum suffered damage to one of its wings when a bomb fell on the Vrijdagmarkt during World War II - the museum’s collections had thankfully been packed up and placed in hiding in Brussels - but it was quickly rebuilt. Other than that, very little has changed behind these walls since the 16th century, and you can feel it.

It’s easy to be awed by the press’s library, lined with books bound in deep-aged leather and ivory vellum…or the printing room, home to eight original printing presses - including the two oldest existing presses in the world. (Watched over by the Virgin Mary, like so much of Antwerp - remember, she keeps the giant Lange Wapper at bay.)

Or the museum’s collections, which include works by fellow Antwerpian Peter Paul Rubens (who designed frontispieces for Plantin, and painted portraits of members of the family), and a copy of the world’s first atlas: Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, first published and printed by Plantin in 1570. Ortelius was born in Antwerp, and worked as an illustrator for the Plantin Press while preparing his maps for publication.

But it’s the more intimate areas that fascinate me, like the foundry where the press’s type was cast, or the little store-front in the corner where the public could stop by, buy a book (loose-leaf, as they were sold in the 16th century), or order a binding by the press’s bookbinders.

Or the proofreader’s desk: a built-in table, really, situated next to large, shuttered windows that helped to illuminate the proofreader’s painstaking work.

Christophe Plantin was so proud of his operation - and his proofreaders - that he would post proofs of his works on the exterior walls of the press, and offer a reward to anyone who could find a mistake.

Antwerp was part of the Spanish Netherlands in the late 16th century, and as such was ruled by the Catholic King Phillip II of Spain. In the early 1660s, Christophe Plantin was accused of heresy after a raid on his press turned up a Calvinist pamphlet. Plantin fled to Paris, where he stayed for two years until his name was cleared.

(Plantin was in fact a Calvinist sympathizer, although he himself was a member of the Familia Caritatis - “Family of Love” - a quiet, mystical sect founded by Henry Nicholis in Germany. The Familia Caritatis helped to fund the Plantin Press.)

During his exile, his business’s furnishings were sold on the Vrijdagmarkt, where a flea market and auction had been held every Friday since the 12th-century. (You can still attend auctions on the Vrijdagmarkt every Friday!) Plantin’s Calvinist friends purchased all of his business equipment and, when Plantin returned to Antwerp, they became his business partners.

While Plantin continued to publish “heretical” works on the down low, it was important to him to win the favor of King Phillip II. He began work on a polyglot Bible, printed in five languages: Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac. The project was monumental: the Bible was printed in 11 volumes, and required new sets of type in Hebrew, Greek, and Syriac. Plantin bought additional printing presses and hired forty extra printers. King Phillip promised funding for the project, and sent a Spanish theologist to supervise the project.

1200 copies of the Bible were printed on paper, and 13 were printed specially on vellum for the King himself: the printing took six years. The result is considered not only the masterpiece of the Plantin Press, but one of the great masterpieces of Renaissance printing. Very few copies exist today - many of the paper copies were lost in a shipwreck in 1572. (There is a full copy on display at the Plantin-Moretus Museum. Copies very rarely come up for auction, but if you’re interested, it will cost you.)

King Phillip II, presumably pleased with the result, appointed Christophe Plantin “Arch-Printer to the King”. He was given contracts to print liturgical materials for the Catholic church in Spain and all over Europe. Eventually Plantin - member of Familia Caritatis and a Protestant sympathizer - became the greatest publisher of Counter-Reformation printed material of the Renaissance.

Christophe Plantin died in 1589, leaving his printing house to his son-in-law Jan Moretus, who had been been a longtime apprentice and collaborator of the press. When Jan Moretus died in 1610, his widow Martina Plantin became the head of the family business. As a consequence of Martina’s success, over the next two hundred and fifty years, Moretus women would manage the company for extended periods of time, and - according to the museum’s website - it was the management of these “strong, emancipated women” that guaranteed the company’s prosperity and longevity.

PS - As I write this, it occurs to me that not everyone might be as excited by the idea of visiting a 16th-century printing house as I was, but I am here to tell you that the Plantin-Moretus Museum is truly a magical place. If you are interested in books, or printing - the history of books, or the history of printing, or history in general, or time-travel, or if you have a curiosity about the past in any way, shape or form, please do yourself a favor and visit if you ever find yourself in Antwerp.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider becoming a subscriber to have The Diary of a Lady Traveler delivered to your inbox. Subscriptions are free unless you choose otherwise. If you are interested in reading my previous letters from abroad, visit my homepage at: The Diary of a Lady Traveler. And please remember to heart, comment and share to your heart’s content - it helps others discover my little corner of the world. Thank you for reading!

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{December, 31, 2024}

Happy New Year from all of us here at Beautiful Things!

Which means me, really. It’s just me.

It’s just me sitting at my computer, typing in silence.

Which is exactly why I want to end 2024, and start 20025 with an enormous thank you to all of my subscribers. This newsletter continues to grow, slowly but surely, and it never fails to astonish me how many of you are out there, reading my words. So thank you with love to my friends and family who have been reading since the beginning, and thank you with sincere gratitude to my fellow writers on Substack for your support.

But I’d especially like to thank all of you who I’ve never met before, but who read my letters, and sometimes “like” them, comment or send messages - they are simple things but they make writing a less lonely pursuit. I hope you know that the time you spend reading my words will always feel like a privilege to me.

On New Year’s Day 2024, I wrote that the amount of beauty in our world is directly proportional to our willingness to see it. The same, I think, is true of magic.

“Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”

I ended my most-read post of 2024, a letter from Provence, with this quote by Roald Dahl, and it’s so true, isn’t it? And so, instead of a year end top ten, I decided to go in search of a few moments of magic from the travels I’ve written about this year…

I have to start, of course, in Provence, where a solitary man riding his horse unexpectedly down a narrow street in the middle of the night started me contemplating magic in the first place.

And then there was Antwerp, where a cast-iron fountain forged at the end of the 15th century reminded me of the life changing power of love.

In Tuscany, an engraved skull reminded me that: As you are, I was too: As I am, you will also be. Memento mori: Remember you must die.

And while it would never not be magical to walk to the top of Glastonbury Tor, it was really the tour guide dressed as a Medieval friar who told me about the time that Jesus came to England on a business trip with his uncle that really made my trip to Glastonbury special.

When I visited Bram Stoker’s Whitby, in Yorkshire in 2023, I discovered that not only can reading books enrich your travel, but travel can enrich your experience of books, too. And literary travel continued to be magical for me in 2024.

I walked in the footsteps of Jane Austen, in Bath and came as close as I’ll probably ever come to attending a Regency ball.

I searched for the real-life stories behind Romeo and Juliet in Verona, and took the 19th-century author Henry James along with me as my guide in the Loire Valley.

And in the beautiful city of Oxford, lingering in the golden gleam, I found Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland.

Sometimes it’s easy to find magic - you’d be crazy not to in cities like Venice and Paris. But I’ll never forget standing on the Academia Bridge in Venice, contemplating the beauty of the city while the sun set over the Grand Canal…or watching the lights twinkle on the Eiffel Tower, and wondering if there’s a word for missing something before you’ve actually left.

I go back and read my New Year’s post from last year, I’m embarrassed by how many places I said I’d write about in 2024, but didn’t get around to. To get to them, finally, is part of my plan in 2025…but there’s so much more than that. I hope you’ll stick around.

What are your travel plans for 2025? Where will you find your magic?

Wishing you all a 2025 filled with all of the good the world has to offer! Happy New Year!

XO

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When last I wrote, it was about Antwerp - longer ago than I’d like to admit. When I wrote that letter, I didn’t expect that I would be able to wish you a Merry Christmas in my next letter but here we are. Oh, how time flies.

Before I start to tell you about my stay in Brussels, I want to take a moment to send you my best wishes for a wonderful holiday season. I hope it is filled - in the words of Freya Stark - with the best in human nature: goodness and courtesy, and the happiness that the love of immaterial things can bring.

And smooth travels. Of course smooth travels.

Which brings me to Brussels, and the two-word phrase that can strike fear in the heart of the European traveler like almost no other…

{Brussels, Belgium}

TRAIN STRIKE.

I’d been warned that this can happen at any time, but of course it always happens at the worst time, doesn’t it? This is my last day in Brussels, and I’m supposed to be catching a train to Luxembourg first thing in the morning - a one-day stop-over on the way to southern France. Instead, though, I have spent the morning with all variety of customer service agents, trying to figure out any way at all of getting a train to France today. I’ve given up on Luxembourg - the strikes are taking place in Belgium AND Luxembourg, but not France - and at this point am just hoping to get over the French border so that I can make my way south.

After a stressful morning, I get lucky and a very generous railway conductor lets me hop on his already packed-to-the-gills train without an official ticket. As long as I don’t mind standing in the tiny hallway outside of the bathroom for the journey, I will make it to Paris. (And yes, in case you had any delusions that this was a glamorous trip, this should dispel those thoughts - I spent the entire journey from Brussels to Paris packed into a tiny little space outside of the train’s fragrant bathroom, perched on top of my suitcase with a handful of other desperate passengers.)

However, after an easy transfer in Paris, I am officially on my way south. With time to kill on the train ride, I have a chance to write down my thoughts about Brussels - the city I’ve just barely escaped.

I got up bright and early this morning to take a photo of the sun rising over the Grand-Place, because for the first three days I was here an annual jazz festival had filled the square with not only a specially constructed stage and lots of equipment, but huge crowds. The square is gorgeous this morning, with just scattered groups of tourists and early-riser Belgians getting ready for the day…but I wouldn’t have missed seeing it teeming with people over the weekend, the beating heart of the community, just like similar market squares all over Europe have been for centuries.

Brussels, of course, is both politically and geographically the center of Belgium - and the center of Brussels is the Grand-Place. The square is dominated on one side by the spired, 15th-century city hall and on the other by the King’s House, built a hundred years later. The King’s House was built to house the offices of the Duke of Brabant, and his grand residence stands on a third side of the square. (It is one of Duke’s staircases that I climb to get my picture…I don’t think he’d mind.)

But it is the towering, slim houses that fill up the spaces between these grand civic buildings that really catch my eye. They are similar to the buildings that line the Grote Markt in Antwerp, except that they are grander, and more numerous, with extensive gold detailing that glimmers in the sun.

There are 39 houses that line the Grand-Place. Most of them are the homes of the city’s guilds - guildhalls - but a few of them were built as private residences. Each of the houses has a name: “The Golden Tree”, “The Small Fox”, “The Donkey”, “The Swan”, “The She-Wolf” and so on. As I walk the perimeter of the square, taking in the architectural details I notice a small plaque that says that the French author Victor Hugo lived in “The Pigeon” during his time in Brussels.

It is looking up at the architectural details during this walk that I notice that the dates on the guildhalls’ facades are all remarkably similar: 1696, 1697, 1698, 1699.

A little research tells me that most of the Grand-Place was destroyed over the course of two days during the Nine Years’ War. On August 13 & 14, 1695 the square was bombarded and set on fire by French troops. Only the shell of the City Hall survived. But the proud citizens of Brussels rushed to rebuild their city center, and just four years later the renaissance of the Grand-Place was complete. The square was grander and golder than ever.

The Grand-Place gets my vote for the most beautiful public space in Europe. But to be honest, outside of the Grand-Place, Brussels left me a little cold.

There are beautiful buildings to be sure. Brussels is known as the birthplace of Art Nouveau, after all, and there are lovely examples of Art Nouveau art and architecture scattered all over the city - like the striking house designed by architect Paul Cauchie above. Cauchie met his artist wife Lina while he was a student at the Royal Academy of Arts, and together they built this beautiful modern house inside of the Brussels city limits. Paul Cauchie designed the dwelling, and worked jointly with his wife on the decorations. The words on the facade - Par Nous, Pour Nous - translate to By Us, For Us.

Nouveau structures have been preserved and re-purposed all over the city, sometimes with delightful results. Look how beautifully this Lebanese restaurant sits inside the storefront of the former Minet Freres bookseller.

And even Charles Delatre’s gothic revival Pharmacie Anglaise building has lovely Art Nouveau tiles lining the facade, announcing that this is the place to buy medical instruments, bandages, and elastics. Much prettier than my pharmacy. Today, the ground floor of the building is a fancy cocktail bar called, appropriately, Pharmacie Anglaise.

But, walk two or three blocks outside of the Grand-Place, and you may as well be in Atlanta. Vast swaths of downtown Brussels have been razed, replaced by all manner of modern architecture. The charm has somehow disappeared…or at least, I had a little trouble finding it.

And one hand, I can easily blame myself. As I look at my notes, it is not hard to figure out why I didn’t connect with Brussels:

“walked past the Cathedral”,

“walked past the Royal Palace”,

“walked past the Magritte Museum”,

“walked past the Old England building”.

This, of course, is not how you get to know a city…

And yet, at the same time, I learn a new word as I’m researching Brussels: Brusselization.

Brusselization: Haphazard urban planning due to an absence of zoning laws and with lack of respect for historical context - i.e. indiscriminately plopping down modern high-rises in traditional residential areas.

It’s unfortunate, because there is so much about Brussels to love.

Like the cookies. The cookies were my favorite.

Maison Dandoy has been selling cookies in Brussels since 1829. There are a handful of locations scattered about town, the oldest being on the Rue du Buerre - Street of Butter, appropriately enough. I decided to get in the long line at the location inside of the beautiful Galeries Royal Saint Hubert though, which happens to be the first covered shopping arcade in Europe.

There are dozens and dozens of varieties of cookies, and it is tempting to try them all - particularly since they cost less than a Euro each. But, in an effort to be conservative, instead of trying all of the cookies I settled for just trying most of them.

The cookies with the windmills on them are speculoos - the light one is the vanilla variety and the dark one is the traditional spice. Speculoos are a traditional Belgian cookie and are not to be confused with Dutch speculaas, which are totally not the same at all, because they have a slightly different combination of spices. One could be excused for thinking that they might be the same cookie because they have the same shape and color, and both have windmills on them. But they are obviously not. Speculaas are Dutch, speculoos are Belgian. Totally different.

They are both delicious.

The side streets that twist and turn around the Grand-Place are lively, and filled with restaurants of every international cuisine you can think of. Walking down one street late in the day, a young Italian man stands outside of his restaurant trying to lure passers-by off the street and inside for dinner. Not an uncommon sight in touristy areas, but this man in particular was full of choice, derrogatory words about the Italian restaurant directly across the street from his. Eventually the owner of the opposite restaurant walked into the street - full of rage, threats of slander and vicious insults about his competitors cuisine.

Only the slightest glint in the young man’s eye as he walks away gives the scene away as the show that it is, performed over and over for fun, or for attention, or just as an excuse to invent a new insult to get under his neighbor’s skin.

It is spring, but there is still a chill in the air that night as I sit at an almost-empty cafe on the Grand-Place. It is my last night in Brussels, and as I sit and watch the sun sink over the Duke’s residence, and the golden buildings slowly illuminate and start to shimmer in the dark, an elderly & distinguished gentleman sits down by himself at a table nearby. He is wearing a sports coat and a scarf and felt hat to protect himself from the cold.

He slowly and deliberately works his way through an absolutely enormous serving of moules frites: a huge kettle of steamed mussels in wine served with thick Belgian frites. He enjoys his mussels with a glass or two of wine: one at a time, slowly and with pleasure - no companion, no talking, no book, no phone, no scrolling. Just a man eating warm delicious food, surrounded by the most beautiful buildings in Brussels.

It is only a simple dinner for him - he couldn’t possibly know it’s a moment that I’ll never forget. It reminds me that for some, slow living isn’t an over-used internet trope, but a long-standing way of life.

But more than that, it reminds me that there are so many people in the world. And when I think of the elegant Grand-Place gentlemen, or the two Italian jokesters…or the ridiculously talented street musician who stops me in my tracks with his exquisite guitar playing near the Royal Palace, or the kind Israeli brothers who tell me with pride that the delicious food that they served to me in their tiny new restaurant was based on their mother’s old recipes, or the enigmatic young man who smiles at me from the steps of a gorgeous Baroque building…so many people, and so many stories.

And it reminds me that, finally, it is the people and the stories that make the city, and not the buildings and the streets.

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Alone or not, it is indeed a thrill to awaken in a strange town, surrounded by adventure and with no idea what is in store for you. Especially when it’s a town (or city) that you don’t know much about.

Such was the case when I visited Antwerp, at the very beginning of my European adventures in the spring of 2022. To be honest, I didn’t know much about the city on my arrival - it was just a convenient place to spend a few days on the way from Amsterdam to Paris. But it is a city that won me over, and one for which I will always have a soft spot in my heart. Sometimes overshadowed by close neighbors Brussels & Bruges, Antwerp is a city that seems to have it all: a historic market square and cathedral, a grand shopping street lined with Baroque architecture, an illustrious artistic heritage, the most beautiful train station in all of Europe, and the kinds of outdoor cafes and shaded squares that Americans can only dream about. It’s also where I learned some of my first words of Dutch, starting with the unusual word handwerpen…

{Antwerp, Belgium}

Did you know that the symbol of Antwerp is the hand? Little hand-shaped cookies and chocolates fill the windows of pastry shops, and on the city’s coat of arms you can just make out two disembodied hands looming over a stylized Medieval castle. What’s it all about?

The dutch word handwerpen gives us a clue - and the answer can be found at the Grote Markt, the historic market square. The Grote Markt is lined on one side with a row of beautiful vertical guildhalls, and on another with cafés, restaurants, shops, and bars. On the third, and, because the “square” is actually triangular, final side is the vast Flemish Renaissance city hall - and directly in front of the city hall is a towering bronze fountain, at the top of which is a muscular, naked man throwing something.

It’s a huge, gory hand. When the fountain is active, water spews out of the hand like an arc of spurting blood.

The man is a Roman soldier named Silvius Brabo, and he plays a huge part in the mythology of the city. According to legend, there was a giant called Druon Antigoon who guarded the main bridge across the River Scheldt into Antwerp. The giant was greedy and extorted tolls from anyone who wanted to cross the bridge. If a seafarer refused to pay the toll, Antigoon not only denied passage but punished them by cutting off their hand and tossing it into the river.

One day the brave Brabo wanted to cross the bridge. Instead of paying Antigoon’s toll, he challenged the giant to a battle and, miraculously, won. Afterward, in a symbolic show of retribution, he cut off Antigoon’s huge hand and threw it into the river for all to see.

In Dutch, the word for hand-thrower is handwerpen - a word that eventually morphed and became the name “Antwerp”.

It’s a bloody legend for a city so filled with art, culture, and beauty. But if you think that Antwerp is the kind of city that has just one giant legend, well then you are sorely mistaken.

You could be forgiven for thinking that this strange giant in front of the city’s Het Steen castle in Druon Antigoon - that’s what I thought at first. But no, it is Lange Wapper, the shape-shifting trickster who is Antwerp’s other legendary giant. Lange Wapper spent years tormenting the citizens and children of Antwerp, until the population realized that the one thing Lange Wapper feared was the Virgin Mary. Statues of Our Lady popped up on the corners of buildings all over town - they are still there, multitudes of them - and Antwerp has been unbothered by the tricky giant since.

Spend a little time in Antwerp and it becomes obvious very quickly that it is a city that cherishes its artistic heritage. It is, after all, in the heart of Flanders, a small part of a small country that produced some of the most well-known and technically skilled artists the world has ever seen.

Right off of Wapper Street (named for our giant, of course) is the home and studio of Peter Paul Rubens. A single step into the courtyard is enough to temporarily dispel the myth of the starving artist - at least in 17th-century Antwerp, when the thriving city was Europe’s second largest and wealthiest after Paris.

Rubens was the very definition of a Renaissance man: in addition to being a prolific artist, Rubens was a classically trained linguist, a published author, a designer and architect, and a diplomat. He renovated his home at the center of town to resemble a grand Italian palazzo, executing the designs himself. His studio is to the right of a formal garden and is accessed through a grand archway lined with statuary. The window-lined double-height studio is slightly separate from the house, allowing visitors and potential clients to enter the studio through the grand courtyard without walking through his private residence. It is hard to imagine that they would not be impressed.

All told, Rubens executed close to 1500 paintings in his fifty years as a painter, which breaks down to one painting every week and a half. All the more astonishing for anyone familiar with Rubens’s massive, oversized canvases. Reports are that he was an inveterate multi-tasker, who was able to dictate letters while entertaining visitors and having classics read aloud to him, all while painting.

Of course he had a studio and workshop full of assistants and apprentices to aid him in his efforts - the most famous of which was fellow Antwerpian Anthony van Dyck, who Rubens called “his best pupil”. Such was Rubens’s dominant success in Antwerp, that after completing his work in Rubens’s workshop, the brilliant van Dyck spent most of his career abroad, so as not to be forced to compete with his mentor.

There is a statue of Anthony van Dyck on The Meir - the wide boulevard that is the city’s fanciest shopping street. It is a cloudy day as I walk past his statue, and the statue of fellow artist David Teniers the Younger a bit further on. Even though it is spring, the skies are a deep grey - one could say they are not unlike the skies of a Golden Age Flemish oil painting - and there is a chill in the air.

It’s a good night to duck into a cozy restaurant, and there’s one right next to the Cathedral of Our Lady - the church in the heart of the city that at the moment happens to be entirely surrounded by scaffolding - that fits the bill. Elfde Gebod, “The Eleventh Commandment”, is an Antwerp institution - one that plays on its proximity to the cathedral not only in its name, but in its decor. Occupying the first floor of a snug 15th-century building, Elfde Gebod is filled with antique religious statuary: carved angels float above diners heads and seats are as likely as not wooden pews.

Because this is Belgium, the eleventh commandment is: Thou shalt drink beer. Belgium is a tiny country - about the size of the state of Maryland - but there are more than 400 breweries here, producing over 1500 varieties of beer.

I talk a lot about UNESCO World Heritage Sites in my letters, but I just learned that UNESCO has another list - the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and - as of 2016, Belgian beer is on that list.

According to UNESCO’s website:

Intangible cultural heritage is an important factor in maintaining cultural diversity in the face of growing globalization. An understanding of the intangible cultural heritage of different communities helps with intercultural dialogue, and encourages mutual respect for other ways of life.

The importance of intangible cultural heritage is not the cultural manifestation itself but rather the wealth of knowledge and skills that is transmitted through it from one generation to the next. The social and economic value of this transmission of knowledge is relevant for minority groups and for mainstream social groups within a State, and is as important for developing States as for developed ones.

I attempt to keep the solemn importance of intangible cultural heritage in mind as I try not to giggle watching a group of Belgians drink beer for breakfast.

(Waffles, of course, are another essential Belgium foodstuff - and it is embarrassing to admit that my only Belgian waffle experience was at possibly-not-entirely-authentic restaurant called House of Waffles, right on the Groenplaats in the heart of the old town. I think I knew someplace in the back of my mind that waffles are eaten as a mid-day snack in Belgium, and not as breakfast - but it slipped my mind that morning. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why there were so many charming little windows that said “WAFFLES” on them, but none of them seemed to be open for breakfast. I can happily tell you that I will more than make up for this complete cultural fail when I visit Bruges and Ghent.)

Snuggled between the House of Waffles and the Cathedral is one of the city’s original wells - a well that is topped with a beautifully intricate wrought-iron decoration. At the base there is an inscription stating that the wrought-iron was forged by Quentin Matsys.

If you know the work of Quentin Matsys, it is probably this striking portrait - at the National Gallery in London, called The Ugly Duchess, also known as The Grotesque Old Woman:

The duchess may be grotesque, but she is also unforgettable…and painted by an artist with exceptional skills. But Quentin Matsys (1466-1530) wasn’t always a painter. He trained to be a blacksmith as a young man in nearby Leuven, following in his father’s footsteps. The only existing work from his blacksmithing days is this beautifully intricate well in the square nearby the Cathedral of Our Lady. It was forged at the end of the 15th century and is topped by none other than Silvius Brabo, Antwerp’s favorite hand-throwing hero.

A few years later, Quentin the blacksmith was a young-ish widower. According to legend, in 1508 he met and fell deeply in love with Catherine Heyns, the daughter of an accomplished Antwerp painter. Quentin decided that he would like to marry Catherine, but two things stood in his way. First, Catherine declared that she couldn’t possibly marry Quentin because blacksmithing was too loud for her delicate ears, and second Catherine’s father declared that no daughter of his was ever going to marry a lowly blacksmith.

And so Quentin the blacksmith turned to painting - and proved exceptionally skilled at it. One day, he snuck into the studio of Catherine Heyns’ artist father and painted a small fly on his prepared canvas. The artist Heyns returned to his studio, and swatted at the fly in an attempt to brush it from his canvas.

Upon realizing the illusion, he granted permission for Quentin and Catherine to marry: surely an artist who could fool an artist such as him had the skills to become a wonderfully successful painter.

There is a small room in the Rubenshuis that contains examples of some of the paintings in Rubens’s art collection. In this room stands a large decorated cabinet, with folding doors in the front that open to reveal dozens of small drawers. It is a wunderkammer: a cabinet of curiosities.

Wunderkammer have taken many forms over the centuries, from actual cabinets - like the one in Rubens’s house to large rooms filled with objects of wonder that had been collected from near and far, and their purpose, no matter the size or medium, was always the same: to tell tales. Every object in the cabinet of curiosity provided an opportunity to embellish a story, to preserve a legend, and - most importantly - to spark curiosity and imagination in the listener.

Quentin and Catherine Matsys lived a long and happy life in Antwerp. They had a family of ten children, several of whom became painters in their own right. Quentin would eventually be considered the founder of the Antwerp School of painting.

Now, there are records that show that Quentin Matsys may have been in training as an artist long before he met Catherine Heyns. However, the majority of his attributed works date to 1510 or later.

Standing in the Groenplaats, I wonder if it matters. At the end of the day, the people of Antwerp have an exquisite well, around which they have gathered for centuries, to sit and relax and talk with their friends, and they have a legend they can proudly share - one that just might spark curiosity and imagination in the city’s visitors - about the lowly blacksmith who love turned into a world-class painter.

PS - If you enjoyed this letter, please consider becoming a subscriber to have The Diary of a Lady Traveler delivered to your inbox. Subscriptions are free unless you choose otherwise. If you are interested in reading my previous letters from abroad, visit my homepage at: The Diary of a Lady Traveler. And please remember to heart, comment and share to your heart’s content - it helps others discover my little corner of the world. Thank you for reading!

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{Venice, Italy}

Is there a moment in travel more magical than stepping out of the Santa Lucia train station in Venice, and gazing at the Grand Canal for the first time?

Amid the chaos of street vendors, teenagers flying by on scooters, and travelers rushing to buy tickets for a vaporetto that will take them deeper into the city, I stop for a second to take in the scene. Instead of concrete, there is water. Instead of buses and cars, the canal is crowded with gondolas and motorboats, both small and large. When I expect to hear the squeal of tires, only the sound of lapping water meets my ears. I silently will the chaos around me to disappear, look into the distinctive sea-foam green water of the canal, watch it gently break against the stone steps of the domed church across the way, and give thanks quietly for this miracle of a city.

I am lucky, it is a crisp fall day. The air is cool and clear, and the skies are pale blue with delicate white clouds. The forecast says rain for the next three days, but as it turns out the forecast lies: each morning the canals fill with fog - a disconcerting fog, so thick that it settles on my eyelashes and blurs my vision - but the fog breaks early and soon enough the sun starts to shine as brightly as it does on my first day here.

It is not far from the train station to my hotel and so I decide to walk. The route I follow takes me down what must be the most touristy street in Venice, lined with fast-food restaurants, chain stores and shops selling cheap trinkets. After quickly checking into my hotel, I walk to Piazza San Marco. It is late in the afternoon, and the square is packed with people. This is the one thing that you can’t help noticing about Venice right from the start: the heart of the city is absolutely swarming with tourists. I can’t rightfully complain, because I know full well that I am a tourist myself. But, it would be easy to get so incredibly frustrated by the crowds that you would miss the otherworldly beauty and history all around you here. And that would be such a shame.

So I decide that in a city like Venice sometimes you have to pick and choose what you allow yourself to see. And when I find myself getting frustrated, I stop, squint a little bit, and let my mind wander back to the past…

{ January, 828. Two Venetian merchants arrive back in Venice after a trip to Alexandria. They are carrying a bundle with them, and it smells vaguely of pigs…}

The first thing that you notice about Piazza San Marco is that it is absolutely enormous. To be honest, it takes me a few minutes to even register the Byzantine basilica at one end, my eyes are so taken by the brilliant white arcaded buildings lining the other three sides of the square. The arcades are filled with shops and cafés - several of the cafés have music platforms, and as the evening progresses they play live orchestral music, taking turns so as not to drown each other out. Near the southeast corner of the large square is a much smaller square that leads to the part of the lagoon known as the San Marco basin. This is the Piazzetta and it is bordered, on one side, by the Doge’s palace, home for centuries to the rulers of Venice. Close to the water are two columns, the columns of San Marco and San Teodoro. San Teodoro (St. Theodore) is the patron saint of Venice in 828, when our two merchants arrive from Alexandria.

Things are looking pretty bright in Venice in 828. The republic is becoming more powerful, and locals start to wonder if St. Theodore is important enough to be their city’s patron saint. Rome has St. Peter, after all, and he’s about as important as it gets. Venetians are jealous. Two merchants take matters into their own hand - they plan an excursion to Alexandria, to “recover” the remains of St. Mark the Evangelist. They smuggle him back to Venice underneath a pile of pork and vegetables, so as not to be disturbed by Muslim inspectors on their way out of Egypt. After a journey filled with trials, they arrive back in Venice at the end of January. Venice has a patron saint they can be proud of, and they get to work building a basilica to honor him.

The basilica that stands at one end of Piazza San Marco today was completed in 1094. It is covered, inside and out, in mosaic tiles and colorful marble. People wait in line to visit the basilica all day, every day. Venice is very proud of the basilica, and the square that shares its name - but I can’t help noticing that they don’t really talk a lot about how St. Mark came to Venice in the first place.

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I get up early the next morning to get coffee and to walk around a little before the crowds descend. I make my way to the Rialto Bridge, and over to the market on the other side. The first wooden bridge in Venice - lined with shops on both sides - was constructed here in 1255. The Republic of Venice was at the height of its power in the 13th century, and this little corner was a center of international trade. Rugs, silks, tapestries, and spices arrived from the Far East via the Silk Road and filled the shops on the bridge and along the market nearby. The wooden bridge was susceptible to collapse, and a competition was held in the 16th century for a design to replace it with a sturdier structure in stone. The Venetian architect Antonio da Ponte won the competition, and the Rialto bridge was completed under his direction in 1591. It was considered an architectural marvel at the time - wide enough to accommodate two rows of shops and three stepped walkways, it was also high enough in the center to allow ships to pass through. All of this while being truly lovely to look at. For three hundred years, the Rialto Bridge was the only spot in Venice where you could cross the Grand Canal on foot.

Still seeking quiet, I walk towards the Fondamente Nove, the embankment on the north side of Venice. On the way, I stop into a church with the longest name ever: Chiesa di Santa Maria Assunta detta I Gesuiti. There are hundreds of churches in Venice, and I poke my nose into as many as I can while I’m here. They are almost all lovely, but this is my favorite. The interior is completely decorated in green and white marble - with a decorative pattern resembling jacquard covering most of the walls. The green marble reminds me of the lagoon, and the pattern is reminiscent of the silk and brocades that passed through the Rialto Market. It is unusual, and I like it. John Ruskin - who wrote the 19th-century Venetian travel book, The Stones of Venice, disapproved, but what did he know?

{1450. The port of Venice. A hooded monk stops a merchant returning from abroad. He has some questions for him…}

From the Fondamente Nove, I have a good view of Isola di San Michele, Venice’s cemetery island. For centuries, Venetians would bury their dead underneath the stones of the city, but - because of health concerns - that practice was halted in the early 19th century. Now, this cypress-crowded island is where Venetians come when they die. And this, in 1450, is where we meet our hooded monk. His name is Fra Mauro, and - in addition to being a monk at the island’s monastery -and their accountant - he is a cartographer. Venice was the perfect home for a cartographer in the 15th century…still a center of trade, foreign merchants and visitors traveled through on a daily basis. Fra Mauro would corner them as they arrived in Venice, ask questions about their homeland, and gather information about their voyages and what they had encountered along the way. He made very careful notes. When he compiled his map, it included over 3000 hand-written notations.

The finished map is considered one of the masterpieces of world cartography: the greatest European map of its time. It is on display at the Correr Museum, at one end of the Piazza San Marco. It is a marvel, brilliantly hand colored on vellum - though it does take a minute to orient yourself as north is down and south is up. Fra Mauro didn’t get everything correct - he asserts, for example, that England used to be inhabited by giants - but for its time the map is incredibly accurate. Somewhat ironically (as it was drawn by a monk) the map is considered groundbreaking in that it was one of the first that didn’t consider Jerusalem the center of the world.

{1495. A new printing press opens in a small storefront. A young printer sorts through type…}

On the other side of the Grand Canal, everything is calmer. I like it over here. It feels less touristy. Venetians seem to be going about their daily business here - shopping for produce on a floating fruit barge and ducking into bakeries. I visit the Frari Basilica, where the Venetian artist Titian is buried, and secretly think to myself that it is much more interesting and beautiful than St. Mark’s Basilica and there is no line here at all. Afterward, sitting on a bench in a nearby square I watch as a group of young people walk by serenading a recent graduate: “Dottore, dottore”, they sing…

It was in this neighborhood in 1495 that Aldus Manutius set up the Aldine Press. Printing was in its infancy in 1495, and most printed books were still large, unwieldy, and prohibitively expensive. Aldus, a scholar and teacher, opened his press with the goal of making classical texts available to a wider audience. He collaborated with a group of scholars, who would gather in his little print shop, working on translations of Greek and Latin classics. Instead of using heavy Gothic black-letter type to print his books, he produced typefaces in a new, easy-to-read font that mimicked handwriting, which he called italic, and then created the first set of type that allowed books to be printed with Greek letters.

But most importantly, he printed his books in small, lightweight editions - the first printer to produce books in the size we know them today. The books were portable and more importantly, affordable, and as such Aldus’s lasting legacy is not only beautiful books but the democratization of knowledge.

The next day I walk over to Piazza San Marco for the final time. I look around. There are so many more stories to tell, just in these few blocks:

{1609. A young professor from nearby Padua named Galileo Galilei brings his new discovery, the telescope, to the bell tower of St. Mark’s and shows the Doge of Venice how he can view the heavens…}

{1723. A redheaded priest named Antonio Vivaldi writes a new set of concerti - The Four Seasons - while working as a violin teacher at a girl’s school a stone’s throw from the Bridge of Sighs. It is performed at the church nearby…}

{1756. A prisoner named Giacomo Casanova breaks out of his cell beneath the Doge’s Palace, where he has been imprisoned for crimes against the Holy Church. He flees to Paris, and begins to write the story of his life…}

So many stories. Every city has stories, but somehow they seem more important here. I want to hold onto them more closely. I find myself wanting to write them down so that I don’t forget.

I walk from Piazza San Marco to the Academia Bridge and watch as two painters set up their easels to paint the view. I take a few final photos of the Grand Canal.

The Grand Canal is lined with about 170 palaces and public buildings. They haven’t changed much over the years, most of them date from the 13th to the 17th centuries. Their histories are richly documented. It’s tempting to say that there are no secrets here, but who am I kidding? There are probably a million secrets along the banks of the Grand Canal. Still, the stories here come fast and furious. We know who lived in these buildings, and when…and what they did there.

Standing on the Academia Bridge, looking towards the San Marco basin, you can see a palazzo to your left, just past the one painted a deep ochre color. That’s the Palazzo Barbaro. At the end of the nineteenth century it was owned by a wealthy American, Daniel Sargent Curtis. His cousin, John Singer Sargent was a frequent guest, and the palazzo became the center of ex-pat artistic life in Venice. Frequent guests included Edith Wharton, James Abbott MacNeil Whistler and Robert Browning. Isabella Stewart Gardner stayed for long stretches - Anders Zorn painted her portrait here. One year, she invited the novelist Henry James to visit - he wrote The Wings of the Dove during his stay. It is partially set in Venice.

Further down the Grand Canal on the right you can just make out the Casa Semitecolo, where Henry James’ close friend - the American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson - jumped to her death in 1894. Across the way is the Palazzo Ca’Giustinian, where George Eliot’s much younger new husband flung himself into the Grand Canal in a suicide attempt on their honeymoon. He later wrote that he was overcome by the Venice heat. The building plays host to the Venice Biennale these days.

The low-slung white palazzo on the right is one of the most famous of all. It is Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, the former home of Peggy Guggenheim and now a museum that holds her world-class art collection. Before Guggenheim, it was owned by wealthy British socialite Lady Doris Castlerosse, and before her the Marchesa Luisa Casati, who considered her life a work of art and who never left home in less than full flamboyant costume, her pet cheetah at her side.

There are palazzos that are haunted, of course, and palazzos that are thought to be cursed. I try to take note of them all.