The door is at least four metres high, the colour of burgundy wine aged to perfection in a brick-vaulted cellar near Beaune. Its gloss clings to the massive oak like pinot noir tears, as if it preferred crystal to the crimson-painted lips of the woman with the boyish haircut. She has just raised her glass.

A toast to Paris.

Mr. Watson jumps over the brass threshold plate and onto the minuscule pavement of Rue de Miromesnil, walks thirty centimetres, and lifts his leg for a few sovereign drops. Enough for the neighbourhood dachshunds and bulldogs to know who runs this small stretch of the 8th Arrondissement. Another alpha male holds court just down the road.

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Le Tricolore, on the corner of Avenue de Marigny, hangs as limp as some of France’s latest prime ministers. Reporters and camera crews have assembled to go live with updates on France’s position on the war in Iran. The empire is long gone, but not its attitude. Most of the crews are French, their microphones carrying the logos of the larger channels. Mobile journalists scramble for a place among them. From the Élysée garden, President Macron’s dog barks in protest. The chestnut trees burst into life in the spring sun, scattering a pattern of Kusama-like dots across the pavement.

Nemo keeps barking from inside the Élysée garden as we walk on, Mr. Watson’s lead pulled taut towards Square Marigny. A grey-haired woman, camped above a warm métro vent, slowly strokes the huge ginger cat nestled beside her in her sleeping bag, its eyes fixed on the pigeons circling and hopping through the air rising from below. Nearby, men in suits walk towards meetings, while women in heels and long spring coats cross the pavement, heads high, self-possessed, as if the city had arranged itself around them. The trees are in blossom.

Paris is perfectly at ease with itself. So are the Parisians.

The hostess at Le Grand Café reigns with enlightened authority from behind her computer, her court of black-and-white-clad waitresses close at hand. One springs into action and leads us to a table in the darkest corner, though the restaurant is awash with spring light and the low buzz of horse owners and special guests of the Saut Hermès. There is a way to refuse a table in a French restaurant. A certain elegant sovereignty, delivered with eloquence and a touch of humour, is enough to make the waitress reconsider. Three weeks of observing Parisians does the rest: we are led to a table in daylight.

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Two men were shown to the table we just turned down and ended up next to us, the older of the two negotiating with the waitress. She gave in immediately. “I’ll be the woman,” says the other. He sinks into the banquette beside me as it sags under his weight. We look at each other and realise at once how ridiculous we both look, our torsos barely visible above the table while our companions tower over us from the other side.

They are property developers. I overhear them talking about new regulations and the inability of civil servants to understand their business. Politics comes up within the first ten minutes, as it does at every table you share with the French. I hear my neighbour rave about his new lawyer. The first thing he mentions is how well the man dresses and the effect he has on a room the moment he walks in. Attitude beats billing rates hands down.

R’s Steak à Cheval arrives as a perfect stack, the poached egg perched on top of the seared steak tartare. My Côtes d’Agneau arrives as an architectural composition Frank Gehry might have approved of. Eating Agneau des Pyrénées in spring is among the most perversely delicate experiences in French cuisine. But my sense of guilt disappears at the first bite.

At least the cows were spared for the indecent amounts of butter in the potato purée, I tell myself.

Mr. Watson scratches my leg, trying to close the gap to the lamb bones on my plate. He knows we’ll take them home, but patience has never been a Jack Russell’s virtue.

“Vous êtes très stylés,” our older neighbour says, addressing us without introduction. It happens to us regularly in Paris, and every time our shy “merci” falls short of how flattered we really feel.

Maybe we need more time in Paris. Time to learn how to accept compliments gracefully.

And be perfectly at ease with ourselves. Just like Parisians.

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THE ÆSTHETIC NOMADS BLUE BOOK: PARIS 8ÈME

SAUT HERMÈS
Horses on the Champs-Élysées? The world’s best show jumpers take over the Grand Palais for three days of competition. Charles de Gaulle watches unperturbed from his pedestal at the centre of the schooling ring. Book early if you want a seat.
Every year in March at the Grand Palais
Sauthermes.com

PRESTIGE CELLAR
Just steps from the Élysée Palace, this wine shop takes French wine as seriously as the republic takes itself. You can splurge on a flight of Château Pétrus or a magnum of Romanée-Conti, but the wiser move is to ask the team about lesser-known bottles from rising winemakers. You may leave with something exceptional and far less predictable. Also available online.
3, Rue de Miromesnil
prestige-cellar.fr

LE BRISTOL PARIS
More than a century old and still looking fresh. Le Bristol is about sophistication and elegance, not bling. You will be surrounded by businesspeople, diplomats, and the fashion crowd. Room rates too steep for your budget? There is a €75 lunch menu at 114 Faubourg, well judged for a one-star restaurant. Or indulge in the pastries, viennoiseries, and chocolates at L’Épicerie, all homemade.
112, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré
oetkerhotels.com/hotels/le-bristol-paris

LAURENT
The delicately pink mansion, partly hidden by the trees of Square Marigny, began life as a hunting pavilion under Louis XIV. It later became a tavern frequented by revolutionaries and, by the end of the 20th century, a discreet refuge where Élysée power brokers closed deals in private salons. Pick a sunny day and ask for lunch on the terrace.
41, Avenue Gabriel
laurent.paris

LARDANCHET
We had passed this art bookshop on the corner for years before finally giving it the attention it deserved. Owned and run by the Meaudre brothers, Thierry looks after the art books while Bertrand oversees the rare books and editions on the first floor. A catalogue raisonné of Matisse sits beside Miroir de la Tauromachie, a limited edition of four Francis Bacon lithographs.

100, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré
Lardanchet.fr

LE GRAND CAFÉ
Restaurants should not only be good. They should also be beautiful. Le Grand Café is majestic. Huge yet intimate, it occupies the first floor of the Grand Palais. The terrace is overwhelming in scale and still manages to feel private. It was too cold to sit outside when we were there, but on a sunny day this is where you want lunch.
1, Place Clemenceau

legrandcafe-paris.com/

It was mass murder.

This is what the few survivors shout—those rendered unsteady by the terror of that avalanche of water and by the despair of finding themselves alone, powerless before a reality that had become nothing. Or rather: stones and slime, fused by the blood of their loved ones. A reality that, in seconds, altered the face of entire villages—and yet had been foreseeable for years. Even at the start of work on the great Vajont hydroelectric reservoir, engineers knew they were building on unstable ground, terrain that could slide.

Mass murder, therefore, must be shouted aloud, so the cry can shake the public conscience. So that people, whose lives never count for anything to those in power, will finally sweep away, with anger and indignation, those who squander thousands of human lives with impunity, coldly, for profit and control. (1)

On October 9, 1963, at 10:39 PM, a landslide—about 260 million cubic meters of rock, nearly 2 kilometers wide—raced down Monte Toc at roughly 110 kilometers per hour. Within 45 seconds, the debris displaced the Vajont reservoir and drove a 250-meter-high wave over the dam built three years earlier. What came first felt like a shockwave: a force that struck before the water.

So strong that many victims were found naked, their clothes torn away.

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Longarone instantly became a bleached wasteland. More than 2,000 people died. The dam survived. Only 30 children from Longarone did too. To this day, it is remembered as one of Italy’s most devastating disasters.

Or, as journalist Tina Merlin exposed soon after, not a natural disaster at all: a man-made one. Against the advice of geologists, the dam—then among the tallest in the world, a technological trophy—was built to power the rapidly growing Italian economy. “Toc” means “rotten” in Friulian, one of the region’s native languages. Locals called Monte Toc “the Walking Mountain.”

But business interests overruled both local knowledge and expert warning. Disaster engineered into the inevitable.

The entrance to the Dolomites is brutal. The muted Veneto landscape crashes into steep limestone. Vineyards give way to larch forests. And as the valley narrows, the Piave eradicates all memory of a gentler life on the plains.

That’s when you meet the church that tries to hold what can’t be held.

You enter Santa Maria Immacolata, and the chill hits you low. An amphitheater of darkness where light is sparse and the monolithic white marble altar cuts against the grey, raw concrete. A salvaged Christ—armless, legless—is pinned out of reach, fixed to the architecture itself. As if the Lord himself is helpless against what men will do for profit.

From the external amphitheater above, you see the Vajont dam. It is still standing across the river, abandoned by its purpose. Here, Giovanni Michelucci’s architectural concept snaps into focus. Concrete answering concrete. Not just a material for building, but a material for memory. The church’s sweeping walls rhyme with the dam’s arc: two curves made to contain. One to serve a system. One to hold a wound.

One failed. The other remembers.

Somehow the building echoes the Dolomite landscape. The concrete has weathered to the exact hues of the mountains on a January day heavy with clouds: threatening but awe-inspiring. Grounded and celestial at once. Sinuous in some places. Ragged in others.

The sound is muted as you walk the church’s winding ramps. A brass plaque with an endless list of victims covers an entire wall. It descends into the crypt strewn with broken sculptures, bells, and fragments of the old church that stood at the exact location. Survivors spoke of a deafening noise that still haunts them, like metal shop shutters crashing shut.

Then all went black for them.

The Italian language has two words for the English survivor: superstite and sopravvissuto. For the superstite—from super + stare, “to stand”—that night determined their lives. They are like the dam and the scarred Monte Toc, eternally reminding us of a tragedy that should never have happened. The sopravvissuto—from super + vivere, “to live”—chose to live their lives despite the disaster and share their experiences. They are like the Santa Maria Immacolata church.

They remind us: impunity has a cost.

But not for all.

(1) Tina Merlin, “E’ Stato un Assassinio,” L’Unità, October 11, 1963 (translated by the author)

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THE ÆSTHETIC NOMADS BLUE BOOK: LONGARONE

SANTA MARIA IMMACOLATA
Built late in life by architect Giovanni Michelucci, the Church of Santa Maria Immacolata is a striking brutalist building consecrated in 1983. It acts both a the local parish church and as a monument to the 1963 Vajont dam disaster.
Piazza J. Tasso, 32013 Longarone

This story is an update of an earlier piece on Cortina and Villaggio ENI. It was published in Dutch by Knack Weekend en in French by Weekend Vif

In 1956, the world arrived in Cortina d’Ampezzo to watch Italy’s historic comeback. Cameras rolled in on new roads, the ammonia-cooled ice glittered under the floodlights of the stadium, and the Winter Games were broadcast live across Europe for the first time. A once-in-a-lifetime investment that cemented Cortina’s ‘Queen of the Dolomites’ crown.

Seventy years later, cranes and temporary grandstands are back for Milano–Cortina 2026: the same valley, but a very different idea of progress. Just behind the TV cameras, a social journey began that would outlast the Olympic fortnight.

While Toni Sailer skied to gold on the slopes above Cortina, a few kilometers south, in Borca di Cadore, another Olympic-era project was rising. It had no medals, no sponsors’ banners, and no television coverage. It had something rarer: a CEO who wanted to build a utopia for his workers.

Enrico Mattei had a knack for making enemies—powerful enemies.

In the end, it got him killed.

His rise from humble beginnings to one of Italy’s most influential post-war figures was meteoric and contentious. Mattei was a man of contradictions: a shrewd industrialist with utopian ideals, a corporate leader with an eye for the social good. As CEO of ENI, Italy’s national energy giant, he dragged his war-torn country into a new modernity, carving a place for it among global powers.

He wasn’t known for subtlety: he broke the oligopoly of American oil companies, negotiated energy independence for Italy, and openly meddled in geopolitics, from the Middle East to North Africa, backing Algeria’s liberation from French colonial rule.

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His enemies called him a rogue. His admirers, a visionary.

Mattei’s plane never landed at Linate Airport that October night in 1962. It disintegrated. Lowering the landing gear triggered a hidden bomb. It was a shadowy, cinematic end to a man whose ambitions had touched every corner of post-war Europe. Yet Mattei’s vision was not just industrial or geopolitical. It was cultural.

Nowhere does it survive more poignantly than in Villaggio ENI, a modernist utopia nestled in the Dolomites near Cortina d’Ampezzo.

When Cortina hosted the 1956 Winter Olympics that showcased Italy’s rebirth, ENI was part of that same narrative: a state-backed giant proving that the country could stand on its own feet, underwriting the very idea of mobility and abundance that the Games were selling. Its logo followed Italians along the roads and into the mountains, a promise that the future would run on domestic energy.

Villaggio ENI was the quiet, off-camera counterpart of that spectacle: if the Games were Italy’s shop window to the world, Borca di Cadore was the backstage where the new Italian middle class was being rehearsed. Not for two weeks of competition, but for a new way of inhabiting leisure and the landscape.

At Borca di Cadore, where Monte Pelmo rises pink and radiant in the morning sun, Mattei’s vision endures, subtle but unmistakable. His industrial empire was built on the labor of thousands, yet he insisted on seeing his workforce not as a hierarchy of executives and laborers but as a single collective. In this vision, Villaggio ENI played a central role. Conceived as a company retreat, it was not a luxury reserved for managers but a shared space for all ranks.

Here, workers and executives spent their holidays side by side, staying in identical chalets, studios, or hotel rooms, equal in size and design. Traditional markers of social class were deliberately erased, and in their place was an egalitarian community where families would meet at the same bar, share pews at the same church, and enjoy a lifestyle shaped by the innovations of Italian modernity: Agip fuel, Vespa scooters, Fiat 500s, and the buoyant optimism of a post-war renaissance.

To build this utopia, Mattei needed an architect who understood not only form but purpose.

Enter Edoardo Gellner.

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A pioneer of modernism and architect of the Agip motel in Cortina, the concrete-and-timber gateway built for the 1956 Winter Games, he had already helped redraw the town for its Olympic close-up. His hand is still visible in Cortina today: in the Palazzo delle Poste and the adjoining Telve telephone building in Largo Poste, designed for the Olympic boom and recently restored, and in Ca’ del Cembro, his own house-and-studio perched above the valley, a laboratory where he first worked out his new alpine language. By the time Mattei called, Gellner was no longer just an up-and-coming architect; he was the man who had already rehearsed a modern, Olympic Cortina in built form.

He approached Villaggio ENI in the same spirit as the Bauhaus architects. His work here was a “total design” project, encompassing urban planning, architecture, interiors, and even the smallest details of furniture and fittings. He envisioned a community that would encourage spontaneity and interaction. The chalets, built in modular clusters across the landscape, created intimacy without isolation. Communal spaces—the bar, the church, the tabacchi—were carefully placed to serve as natural gathering points.

The chalets perch amid pine forests like angular sculptures. Through the south-facing windows of their minimalist frames, the Dolomite scenery bursts forward—raw, majestic, and intrusive. These were homes designed not to tame nature but to showcase it, as if to remind visitors of their humble place within its grandeur.

Inside, the contrast with the setting is striking. Bright yellow concrete floors play against blue and red walls, vibrant Formica kitchen worktops, and furniture of disciplined simplicity. Gellner’s designs speak to a harmony of contrasts—the bold and the serene, the natural and the man-made. His architecture was radical for its time. It rejected the heavy, ornate traditions of Italian Alpine design and replaced them with an unapologetic modernism: angular forms, sloping pent roofs, and minimalist interiors. His materials were local and honest—stone, timber, and concrete—and his palette restrained, save for those few, shocking patches of color. In 1956, when the first chalets were completed, the effect must have been disorienting—an alien landscape of geometric structures set against the jagged Dolomites. Yet, to those who stayed there, Villaggio ENI offered something visionary: a model for a new Italian way of life.

Villaggio ENI was more than a design triumph. It was a social experiment: a company resort reimagined for the modern age, shaped by the same post-war optimism that powered Cortina’s Olympic dream.

But time has not been kind to this ideal.

What the 1950s called progress, we now rebrand as heritage and then rebuild it as if nothing had changed. The sliding track above Cortina is being reconstructed for 2026 at a cost of over a hundred million euros, in a valley with less and less reliable snow and under a sustainability label that convinces few. The construction site for the new track has swallowed the old Bob Bar, where locals once ate porchetta sandwiches.

Down in Borca, Mattei’s idea of legacy—modest chalets for families, a church, a summer camp for children—has quietly been hollowed out by second-home speculation, their interiors gutted and replaced with IKEA furniture. The bold colors have faded, and windows hide behind laced curtains. The bar and tabacchi, once the heartbeats of community life, have closed. Without its original purpose—to foster connection and equality—the architecture has become a quiet monument to an idea that failed to thrive.

Some chalets have been bought by design enthusiasts and remain perfectly preserved.

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The church still stands as the crowning jewel of Villaggio ENI. Gellner brought in Carlo Scarpa, his friend and mentor, for the design. Its stark yet commanding form rises from the mountainside like a solemn sentinel. Inside, light filters through narrow slits, illuminating bare concrete walls and wooden beams with a reverence that feels almost sacred. Religious services are infrequent, but the structure remains open for occasional events. Its presence is indelible—a reminder of what Villaggio ENI was meant to be and what it could never fully become.

When the world tunes in, Cortina will look different. The cameras will linger on the rebuilt sliding track, the refurbished ice stadium, and the branding draped over the Tofane grandstands at the women’s downhill races. Press releases will talk about sustainable investments, regenerated infrastructure, and a future-proof mountain economy. For a few weeks on air, the valley will once more be a showroom for whatever version of progress we currently believe in.

Borca will not feature in that story. The village will sit where it always has, half-asleep among the trees, its geometry softened by snow and lack of care. Some chalets will be perfectly preserved, others strangled by PVC windows. The church will open occasionally; Gellner’s colors will keep fading beneath laminated flooring. Villaggio ENI will not read as a triumph. It will read as a question.

Mattei’s dream was both naïve and serious. Naïve in its faith that a benevolent corporation could engineer equality with architecture and holiday bonuses. Serious in its insistence that workers deserved beauty, time off, and a place in the mountains that wasn’t just a backdrop on a postcard. That insistence still matters.

Design can set the stage. It doesn’t guarantee the performance.

The Olympics will come and go, as they always do. The sliding track will age. The slogans will be out of date by spring. But somewhere in Borca di Cadore, the pink morning light will keep spilling across a yellow concrete floor, catching the edge of a built experiment that never quite worked and still, stubbornly, refuses to disappear.

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THE ÆSTHETIC NOMADS BLUE BOOK: CORTINA

LA COOPERATIVA DI CORTINA
Founded in 1893 as a consumer cooperative, this remains the department store on Corso Italia. It is the town’s great equalizer: everyone shops here for an eclectic mix of local cheeses, car batteries, thermal baselayers, or the latest novel by Paolo Cognetti. You walk in wearing ski boots or your newest fur coat; nobody blinks.
Corso Italia 40
coopcortina.com

EL BRITE DE LARIETO
Dining happens right next to Nanda and Flavio’s dairy cows, high above the valley floor. Riccardo Gasparini crafts the menu strictly from the farm’s own produce, offering an authentic agricultural experience. He also commands the kitchen at the sister restaurant, San Brite, which has since secured a Michelin star.
Località Larieto
elbritedelarieto.com

ENOTECA CORTINA
Come 6 PM, it is standing room only at this institution, the town’s definitive wine bar since 1965. Elegant regulars catch up over a glass of dark Lagrein or a crisp Sauvignon Blanc from Manincor. The house-made tramezzini are non-negotiable.
Via del Mercato 5
enotecacortina.com

RIFUGIO DIBONA
From the entrance of the Natural Park, it is a two-hour hike up to this rifugio sitting beneath the looming Tofana rock face. You come here for the legendary casunzei: local half-moon ravioli filled with beetroot, ricotta, and poppy seeds. Drowned in butter, naturally.
Vallon di Tofana
rifugiodibona.it

FRANZ KRALER
Without Franz Kraler, Cortina would lack its sartorial edge. Here you find top-tier Italian and international luxury brands in spaces that are completely redesigned every season. It is exclusive, certainly, but the welcome is warm and the multilingual staff impeccably helpful.
Corso Italia 107 (and other locations)
franzkraler.com

CAFFÉ ROYAL
The obligatory stop for a final cappuccino before hitting the slopes. Drunk al banco—standing at the counter—just as it should be.
Piazza Silvestro Franceschi 12

Let’s hit the kill switch on 2025.

It’s been a year of friction; illustrious for some, devastating for others. If progress truly finds its origin in conflict, the future is going to be so bright we’d better wear shades.

I’ve always preferred the company of animals—four legs and a tail usually suggest a superior moral compass. Except sheep, perhaps. Mr. Watson and I are united in our stance on ovine objectification: he sees them as high-speed sport, I see them as a succulent, slow-roasted shoulder.

As the scent of rosemary and fat rises from the oven, I’ll let him have the last word of the year.

Happy New Year. May your 2026 be bright.

(And may Timbuk 3’s cynicism be misplaced.)

My first journey headed south. I was ten weeks old. My humans, R and H, had one of their brilliant ideas: let’s drive to Andalusia. Two thousand kilometers on R’s lap in a sports car. Holding my pee was still a work in progress. Especially on bumpy roads.

And in Madrid. The warm feeling I gave her didn’t last long.

I should have known that my wandering wasn’t going to end in Granada. Twenty hours in airports and Iberia planes to reach Uruguay put real pressure on a small bladder. Emptying it on three legs against Montevideo’s nearest pillar took ten minutes and gave me cramps in my left thigh.

Since then I’ve learned to negotiate better travel terms: back to my roots, the United Jack Russell Kingdom.

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Devon, specifically. Fox-hunter by birth, tennis-ball retriever by conditioning. Sticks, as required by countryside statutes. An observer of the human comedy. Holy Pooch, they’re entertaining. More on them later.

We returned after five years when humans barricaded themselves from a collective sneeze, hid behind their computer screens, and covered their faces with unsightly paper contraptions that only delighted those with overdue dental appointments. In the equally collective mania of smoldering insular pride, the kingdom decided to redraw its friendships across the Channel, forgetting—momentarily—that its empire had disintegrated three generations ago. Paperwork grew teeth. I could be locked up in a pet crate for the wrong stamp. R and H, for a missing vaccine.

But we made it to my mountains green.

We took quarters with the Landmark Trust at Endsleigh: slate roof, steps slick with moss, and a pond so clear I had trouble tearing myself away from my reflection. No nymph required to boost my self-esteem. Huge “rhubarb” too. The kind that suggests a wild boar could part the leaves any minute. I’d growl if I weren’t frightened out of my senses.

Foxes are my size class. Smart, too.

Sheep are not. More wool than wits, even after shearing. And there are plenty on the moors, menu as much as sport.

Not convinced sheep are dimwits? Go to Greece around Easter for kefalaki—sheep’s heads, roasted or stewed. A plated countenance divine, if I ever saw one. Their eyes are bigger than their brains. And tastier, apparently. Can’t wait to pop one between my molars like wax candy. Fat chance; translucent sheep eyes are to Greeks what garlicky snails are to the French.

But on England’s pleasant pastures green, these future wall-to-wall carpets are my greatest playmates. I chased them over the hill, disappearing over the peak in full pursuit. Get one running and they all follow. Me grinning like a psycho on a field day when I returned twenty minutes later—sheep exhausted, me just getting warmed up. R and H blamed each other’s lousy dog-parenting instead of playing along. I, apparently, could have been shot by an angry farmer seeing his woolly Dollys in a mad downhill dash rather than tediously munching clover, adding fat to their rumps and value to his inventory on the hoof.

There’s not a mile of straight road in Devon. We searched for days.

I discovered the method to my humans’ trajectory madness. First, they decide where to go. It’s a democratic process; the strongest always wins. So R decides and H drives. For him, the journey between two points is linear: you go from A to B by the optimal route.

That lasts until R sees the sun break through and set an old oak ablaze. Or a lane with clipped hedges on either side. A farm-shop sign; a field with corrugated-iron pig arks and the thought of bacon setting salivary glands to work; or a road sign for Frenchbeer, for the name’s sake. All justifications to veer off the track ingrained in H’s hunter focus (though he’s never hunted anything except hypothetical girlfriends in his youth, mostly without success—except for those desperate enough to prefer him over getting blasted, or those so plastered they hit on him).

R’s instructions reach him half a mile after the turn-off.

Information that demands disproportionate processing. We’re three miles down the road before the directive finally takes effect. H swings the car around, stamps the accelerator, and grumbles that Ugborough will be exactly what it sounds like: a lifeless commuter village with mail-order high-vis vests and a pub that closes on a Sunday afternoon.

R is mostly right, though. Maybe not about Ugborough. So right we never arrive at our destination. But end up everywhere else.

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Like leaving Devon for Cornwall. And St Mawes. Swapping sheep for mackerel.

Thanks to my diminutive presence, this means lunch outside on a terrace, autumn clouds drifting in from the bay, and the wind shifting. R and H are cold; I’m comfortable on a lap under the table, beneath a warm mohair blanket. Anyone in a high-vis vest would be as rare as hen’s teeth. R knows where to deploy her mohair.

The sun breaks through as we approach Endsleigh again. No detours on our way back. No grumbling. No bouncing the rev limiter in frustration with whatever testosterone remains in men of his age.

As we arrive, horse trailers are hitched to Range Rovers that have yet to see the first speck of mud. Steam rises from beneath the horses’ intricately stitched blankets. Grooms stroke their flanks and tap their wet necks in reward, peeling off splint boots caked with mud. I hear dogs: beagles, distant cousins that never made it beyond the airport arrival halls, sniffing Samsonites for actions better left unreported. Or dirty laundry.

The hotel bar is a tide of leather riding boots and scarlet brass-buttoned jackets; I’m reflected in each, or the ceiling’s plasterwork in those with embonpoint. There’s a faint whiff of sweat and layers of Dior Sauvage. Leather wax too. But gin and tonic hits my nose more intensely than a recent squirt of a fox’s violet gland.

Logs roar. A sheepskin. I curl up and doze off. Perfect, if only it still had legs.

Bring me my bow of burning gold

Bring me my arrows of desire

Bring me my spear—O clouds unfold!

Bring me my chariot of fire.1

Let’s cut the giant rhubarb first. Wild boar can wait. Wet slate, gin in the air, beagles out of sight.

My kingdom is under consideration, eyes closed, legs twitching.

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Road signs in Italy are made for people who don’t need them. Locals are born with an innate sense of direction that no algorithm can replicate. They enter roundabouts with the aplomb of joining a family dinner and leave just as decisively when they’ve had their share, oblivious to the frustration of those desperately looking for clues to get out. Like me.

I’m doing another full circle while the map on my phone spins in place, trying to keep up but losing the plot. If there had been a sculpture at the center of the roundabout, I’d be able to draw every angle of it from memory by now. But I assume the town ran out of money for art after installing the kilometers of triple-height guardrails that line every single turnoff.

If you want to make money in Italy, start a guardrail business.

Italian road signage is conjecture stamped in sheet metal. Depending on the mood of the land surveyor’s wife the day he put up the sign, you may have to slam on the brakes to cleanly take an exit that was supposed to appear in 500 meters, or be grateful you don’t have to walk the distance. The local road crew’s football team must have lost the game the day before they cleaned up the construction site, because they left the 50-kilometer signs behind in frustration.

Every road trip in Italy doubles as a case study in behaviorism.

My vanguard claustrophobia evaporated the moment I floored the accelerator onto the A24. The first snow of the season caught the morning sun on the peaks of the Gran Sasso, while clouds—dense as meringue—still lay packed in the valleys. Father and son Verardini were waiting at the Centro Assistenza Porsche Classic in Padova for the engine’s first oil change, ready to rescue us from the mobile sauna the car had become after the air conditioning decided our aging bones needed full-blast heat, all the time. Four days in Venice would be a sensible antidote to eighteen hundred kilometers on McAdam’s tarry invention.

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As the A24 gave way to the Adriatic coast and we drove past Ancona, memories of the meat trade emerged. I can’t remember when I first met Umberto. I do remember his eyes darting all over the place on either side of a nose that must have looked different before his years in the ring, and ears that bore the brutal impact of too many punches. His ever-present smile disguised a lethal shrewdness for profitable deals; under the shaved stubble on his balding head, his brain seemed to work in permanent overdrive. He eventually became our Italian distribution partner, but only after I’d turned down his proposal to make us the leading television sponsor of the national boxing championships. I suppose I dodged his hook.

Over the years, there were many more I had to dodge and a few I didn’t see coming.

Having a former boxing champion as your Italian partner in the early 90s regularly became an engaging conversation topic at dinner parties. Especially once Maurizio—even stockier than Umberto but without the smile—stopped leaving his side, and Umberto’s new Mercedes 560SEL seemed to sit quite a bit lower on its springs.

The meat business is concluded at the table of a good restaurant, not in an office. Lunch was at a trattoria in the farmlands near Jesi. There was more tartufo than tagliatelle on the plate. The coniglio in porchetta tasted like proof that evolution has a sense of humor; only Italian chefs know how to monetize it. The second bottle of Rosso Conero served as the deal closer for the day.

We returned to the office happily, Umberto driving the big Merc along the winding country roads, Maurizio riding shotgun, his head working like a metronome: left—center—right, left—center—right. Never pausing, never missing a beat. Not nervous. Not rushed. Just methodical, as if he were sweeping the landscape for movement the way a lighthouse sweeps the sea. I sank into the black leather in the back, hand out the window, fingers lazily hooked over the rain gutter.

Foreign languages have a strange trait: words come easily when they’re of no use but remain concealed when you most need them. When Umberto hit the button to close the rear door window on my fingers, the Italian for “window” and “finger” vanished from my brain. The glass rose with a slow certainty to seal the cabin. No safety sensor kicked in. Instead came pain and a boar-like grunting I’ve never been able to reproduce since.

Whenever you find yourself in an armored vehicle, remember to keep all extremities away from open windows.

If the number of 911 RSs in the Verardinis’ Porsche Classic workshop was anything to go by, our car was guaranteed a deluxe oil change and, with some luck, a drive up north in less tropical conditions, with repaired air conditioning. Despite—or maybe because of—a national strike, the train to Venice was perfectly on time.

Venice is usually at its best early in the Biennale: in May, the light is as sharp as the artists and the palazzos as boisterous. Success befits this impossible city as much as it befits the artists who chase an impossible dream. But it was November, and summer had worn the light threadbare. The works at the architecture Biennale looked in need of restoration, the attendants in need of a more lively job.

There is as much room for melancholy in Venice as there is for exuberance.

But persistence pays. Giorgio Mastinu’s gallery is tiny, splendid, and the kind of place you only find once you stop expecting Venice to perform for you. Its opening hours are as eccentric as his curation. He was showing Inchiostri by Ronan Bouroullec, created with the Murano maestro Simone Cenedese—constructivist vases where weight confronts airiness and color tests transparency. His gallery is in the San Marco that tourists miss: the hidden maze of Casa Yali’s glass, the textiles of Chiarastella Cattana, and the frames of Ottica Manuela. In these alleys, Venice sheds its skin as a museum and becomes a village again. With greetings, not just looks.

There’s a slowness to this city: the pace of water and salt, calibrated for reflection.

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At the Redentore Convent Gardens on the Giudecca, the hours thin out and life is reduced to essentials: an olive grove, a well, and a hortus simplicium of vegetables, herbs, and flowers. The convent’s brick walls hold an intimate simplicity. Beyond them, the lagoon opens wide enough to make you feel the pull that built Venice in the first place: appetite, reach, and the temptation of elsewhere.

Leaving Venice isn’t painful; it’s sobering. The water slaps the hull of the vaporetto as it grinds against the floating pontoon at Ferrovia. Visitors crowd the bow, transfixed, phones clicking and glowing. The marinaio barks at a family wrestling four enormous suitcases on board before the last passengers have stepped off. Like many Venetians, we are turning our backs on the water. We leave for the mountains, seeking terra firma.

I could have driven to Cortina with my eyes closed if it weren’t for one more roundabout lacking any form of signage. According to Google, it didn’t even exist. With just over a hundred days left to the Olympics, the province of Belluno is frantically trying to engineer a fluid passage to town over single-lane mountain roads that have been clogged since we first came to the valley more than twenty years ago.

Italy has a solution for every problem. It’s called confusion. Confusion sends you to Cortina along the Cadore instead of the Boite valley. That’s an hour’s detour but a traffic problem solved for everyone not part of it.

Cortina is expecting. Largo delle Poste is slated for restoration; the Gellner buildings will shine again, and an underground car park will be reserved for residents. Piazza Stazione remains a vast construction site; two more years, they say, before its own underground parking is finished. Franz Kraler and Louis Vuitton are refurbishing. Prada is building a new store. Bar Sport patrons will spill onto Corso Italia for Campari spritzes. Some shoppers will walk into the Coop in fur coats; others will wander in wearing ski boots.

Where the Bob Bar used to be is now the scarred landscape of the Cortina Sliding Center—€118 million carved into the hillside. Its sixteen concrete curves may never be profitable. Profitability isn’t on the Olympic agenda; image is. What does a winter-sports image boost mean in a place that’s snow-reliable only thanks to cannons?

There is more frantic roadwork as we drive north on our way home. The roads widen the moment we cross into Südtirol; they are smooth and perfectly maintained. The engine purrs. The Brenner beckons. There’s an off-camber ninety-degree downhill bend near Innsbruck: tricky when wet, outright dangerous in snow.

By the time we reach the German autobahn, we’ll have driven 2,500 kilometers. The rebuilt engine will be run in.

Time to floor the accelerator and give the modern cars a decent run for their money despite their digital leash.

I’ll grin from ear to ear.

Toujours taré, ce mec.

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Maria hugs like a sunny Athens afternoon in autumn with a warmth I’d like to last. I melt into her arms. Her mezzo rolls out a melodious all-vowel welcome that lands in cutting consonants. Greek: a language that matches the land itself, all waves and rocks.

George is the steadiness to Maria’s fluidity. The confidence of a race car driver, a handshake firm and convincing. Driver’s eyes that assess me like a ninety-degree left-hander, committing to a line, certain in what’s coming. There’s not a spot of oil on the pearl-lacquered floor. The garage breathes high-octane fuel and strong Greek espresso, the cup Maria pressed into my hand. A rebuilt Meissen Blue G-model sits beside a Speed Yellow 964 awaiting bodywork. A Porsche timeline fills the wall behind them like a text balloon in a comic book. Mechanics work silently, tools speaking for them.

We could have gone to Germany to restore our car. A corporate job by IG Metall-unionized mechanics. With a mustachioed manager from Sindelfingen who gives no hugs. There’d be neither big-city chaos nor Athens Riviera laid-back elegance. There’d be weak coffee and less passion than efficiency.

Luke—a young meat trader who made his first money by cleverly double dipping in the farmer support and subsidy schemes of both the European Union and the United Kingdom—is responsible for my passion for cars. I must have been nine years old, spending every free moment devouring books slumped in the lounge area of the 1960s kitchen with its large bay windows and colorful dividers. He wore a suit and tie. A crisp white butcher frock draped over his left arm, and his right hand loosely on the roof of his silver BMW 2002 as he was talking to my father. He roared off, tires crying out, leaving two parallel rubber trails on the concrete.

I was hooked. On cars, business, and elegant attire. The latter two took nearly two decades to manifest. But even then, I knew that later I would drive a sports car: a Porsche 911.

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The first was a 1985 Moss Green G-model Carrera 3.2 I bought in 1992. I was 32 years old, and I used it as my everyday car. Some say it gave the wrong impression for business. I never cared. When I pushed it to 190 km/h, the front became light as a feather. Beyond that, it felt like a countdown to takeoff. Sometimes it frightened the shit out of me. I was young and reckless; it didn’t stop me from driving fast.

I traded it for a low-mileage all-black 964 in 1995. Porsche had accumulated massive losses in the early 1990s, spending heaps on the development of the 959 supercar and straightening out its production inefficiencies. There was talk of bankruptcy. But the 964 was a hit. Despite the German engineers’ mulling over how they could best confuse the drivers by hiding yet another rocker switch under the dash.

When it was launched, the 964 was a modern sports car that seemed glued to the road. Until one day the back snapped out brutally when I wasn’t expecting it. A full 360 on the wet Brussels cobblestones in front of the Royal Palace with both kids in the back on their way to school. I still hear the youngest—even today the most outspoken of the two—comment, “Il est taré, ce mec.”

Our parental guidance apparently never really stuck to HJ. Ce mec was me.

I love this car and never sold it. I smile whenever I’m behind the wheel. Which was very rare over the last twenty years or so. It was mainly parked at the house of a friend of mine, an absolute Porsche fanatic, in plain view from his living room until I had it trucked to Athens for restoration.

We picked it up eight months later. The day before, we dropped off a set of four new winter tires that we checked in as luggage on our flight. Traveling with a full set of tires, packed in Moroccan polypropylene zipper bags with a tartan design in distinctive Christmas colors, felt like an exotic last-minute solution for tire sizes nobody feels the need to sell in Greece. What should have been our first exciting drive with the now properly shod car ended after thirty minutes with a smell of burnt oil, an engine that needed to be taken out and fixed, and the hardship of having to spend five more gorgeous autumn days along the Athens Riviera in Glyfada and in the pine resin hills of Kifissia.

Elegant suburbs where the chaos of the city center made way for a gentler, more sophisticated Mediterranean life while the mechanics down the road put the engine together again.

The leisurely five-hour hop to the Brindisi-bound ferry in Igoumenitsa became a hard run on pitch-black tarmac through Greece’s northern pines—no traffic, no margin, and a car we hadn’t properly test-driven since its rebuild. An act of faith in Greek wrenching, measured in shallow breaths that matched Epirus’s dark emptiness. Every sense up: we chased down each shudder, counted every tappet’s clack, and watched the oil-temp needle creep, ready to pull over into nothingness and surrender to the disposition of a random passerby with a decent grasp of English.

Then the floodlit port took the fear out of it: a diminutive 911 slotted among triple-axled Albanian artics, stretched Romanian vans, and oversized SUVs, waiting for stevedores with traffic wands in fluorescent windbreakers. Diesel hung heavy under sodium; generators thumped; a death rattle whined from a winch on bad bearings. We took our place on the greasy, ribbed deck, toeing past scuffed steel and bare anchor points while lashing chains clacked to life on a lower deck. By morning we were all the same—drivers, truckers, tourists—blinking into new air as gulls screeched us down the stern ramp in single file.

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The Salento has every right to its article. Puglia per eccellenza. The easygoing peninsula deserves more than a hit-and-run lunch and a November sun soak. We backed out of an Ionian dip the moment some surfers showed up in wetsuits. Bravery postponed.

Abruzzo was a pin on the map between Salento and Venice. The E55 along the Adriatic was dead-straight tedium: speed-camera gantries, lane closures, and phantom roadworks. Night had settled by the time we turned into the Aterno Valley, unsure if the black mass to the north was cloud or mountain. Up SS153 the answer arrived: my idiot grin; second gear singing in tune; weight loading before every turn-in. SP98 to Santo Stefano di Sessanio was hairpin after hairpin, the rear squatting as I fed the throttle through each apex.

I only had one more wish: a light dusting of snow to test the Hankook winter tires.

And maybe also a good meal.

Santo Stefano is stones, fog, and warmth. Stones marked by hands—roughly hewn, slowly worn, carefully restored. Reflections on wet limestone; wood smoke in the alleys; traces of ordinary lives, hardship, festivities, abandonment, and regeneration. We found the reception near the village square and recognized the warmth of mountain villages: unquestioned generosity behind few words and spare gestures. We felt folded into the village, temporarily locals living the mountain’s simpler rhythm. Contributors, not exploiters.

But it is through its recipes that you really get to know a region. And that’s where Sextantio Albergo Diffuso excels. Dino Como, for ten years the right hand of Niko Romito at the three-Michelin-star restaurant Reale, lets the land speak through its ingredients at Sextantio Cucina, the hotel restaurant. Lentils with pork rind and bay leaves; black cabbage, apple, and horseradish; and orange, capers, and tarragon were among the finest courses we’ve had in Italy. Researchers from the Museo delle Genti d’Abruzzo collected popular local recipes passed down by word of mouth. Dino turned them into quiet, precise plates that feel and taste both traditional and contemporary. This is not cucina povera; it is the self-sufficient cuisine that applies rigor and sensitivity to local ingredients within a natural calendar.

Food true to season and place enjoyed in a centuries-old wool dyeing building at candlelit wooden tables with cane-seated chairs. In a brochure it might have looked fake. Here it was a perfect fit.

There was frost when we left for Venice. The Hankooks did their job in the cold.

We got lost on a roundabout near L’Aquila—only in Italy. A battered BMW 2002 took it with flair. The aging driver’s flat cap looked as seasoned as his car.

As I drove onto the motorway, I wondered if Luke was still alive and if he’d still be in meat without the double dipping.

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Our son is still mad at us about Peralta. Even after more than twenty years. Because we left him in an Italian hospital, just out of recovery from an emergency appendix operation, groggy, bewildered, and alone.

He was eleven.

We were starving. The trattoria down the road was irresistible.

Parenting doesn’t always look exemplary in hindsight. But that moment is how Peralta entered our family story. As irreversible as the scar on his side.

Peralta lies at the end of the road, literally. You drive inland from Forte dei Marmi toward Lucca, then turn off at Pieve. The road narrows, curling upward in switchbacks better suited to coughing Ape three-wheelers and battered Cinquecentos than to SUVs. At one bend, you squeeze through with centimeters to spare: a raised granite threshold on one side, a medieval wall on the other. The doorstep is on Google Maps: a light-gray triangle sticking out into the Via di Agliano Peralla.

Most people stop there.

Don’t. Another kilometer up, the road ends at the hamlet of Peralta, hidden among olive and lemon trees, smelling of citrus and resin. Accidental, like you’ve wandered into someone’s hideout.

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It was nearly lost. Castruccio Castracani built a castello on the ridge in the 14th century; the foundations still brood above the hamlet. By the mid-20th century, the families who’d lived off olives, sheep, and chestnuts had left for lives with a future. Roofs collapsed, floors gave way, and brambles swallowed entire buildings. When the sculptor Fiore de Henriquez followed the goat paths up in 1967, only two houses were inhabited. She saw ruin and beauty.

We stayed there in the spring of 2004, a few months before she died. By then the buildings had long been restored by local craftsmen who hauled materials up by mule and celebrated each hard-won milestone with copious food and enough wine to make the walk home along the mountain paths a life-threatening affair.

She kept the medieval austerity but eventually conceded bougainvillea and jasmine. Herbs came first: rosemary, sage, and thyme. And lemons for the oil to slick across her ice-cold gin martinis, the fruit plucked minutes before serving. A pool was blasted into an olive terrace and winched up piece by piece: a blue cut of sky overlooking the Camaiore valley.

Born in Trieste in 1921 to a noble family, Fiore de Henriquez was a globe-trotting sculptor who became a British citizen. She worked between Italy, the U.K., and the U.S., known for expressive forms and celebrated portrait busts, among them J.F.K., Margot Fonteyn, Laurence Olivier, and the Queen Mother. Peralta was her “other work of art.” It was shaped by the eye, not plans. Built by hands, not machines.

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Her sculptures are dotted around the property, unobtrusively positioned just where they should be, as if they grew out of the rock they stand on. Enigmatic, just like her. Many of the works are conjoined or have paired heads, echoing her intersex identity—which she acknowledged long before gender was discussed widely. The rough texture of the Arabian Phoenix on one of the terraces is in striking contrast to a life-sized sculpture of a woman, blending tenderness with fertility. One ready to soar, the other firmly grounded.

We were preparing dinner at Fiore’s Studio, our house for the week, when HJ, our youngest son, said he wasn’t hungry. That’s a red flag. Eleven-year-olds are always hungry. He didn’t eat. The next morning he skipped breakfast. That’s a siren blaring.

I popped into Fiore’s house and asked her for the nearest doctor. She suggested going straight to the hospital in Camaiore. An hour later, he was being prepped for surgery, disinfectant sharp in the air.

Around lunchtime, we found him in a double room, groggy and bewildered. There was an Italian boy his age in the bed next to him. And his mother, his father, what looked like four grandparents and two aunts fussing over his pillows, toys that would fill an entire aisle of a then-still-existing Toys “R” Us, and a folding bed propped up in the corner, still in its plastic wrapping.

We brought his book. Gave him a quick peck on the cheek. And left for lunch.

If looks could kill, we’d have been mincemeat. Parenting in Italy is a family business.

We went back to Peralta recently and spent a few more days at Fiore’s Studio. The granite doorstep hadn't moved, even as cars got wider. The property smelled of jasmine and thyme. The sculptures were more compelling than ever, more Houseago than we remembered. Clouds drifted up from the valley before it started to pour. Then the light returned: slates shimmering, puddles everywhere.

Peralta reset.

Only Fiore was missing, with a cigar in one hand and a whisky in the other, scowling. All woman and half a man. 1

Oh, about our son. He’s 33 now. Standing at six-foot-five. In perfect health. With an eight-centimeter scar on his abdomen.

And inspiring views on parenting.

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Boundless, autocratic imperialism—Mr Watson’s sidewalks. He’s taken over the neighborhood, block by block. Intruders—from Chihuahuas to Ridgebacks—are stared down, then sniffed at every orifice, especially the secreting ones. A formal canine handshake. Females are welcome. Neutered males too. For everyone else, malicious obedience—dispensed by a diminutive creature with an oversized ego—awaits. Dog rules are simple. I watch and learn. So does he. —H

H is going potty, I tell you. With some luck he’ll hold out a couple more years, until I catch up. Then we can get lost together within two blocks of home, arguing about which lamppost we’ve already peed against.

People on the terraces will watch with the kind of compassion that used to be envy. They knew us when we had a spark in our eyes. Meat on our bones.

And shipshape cortices.

H loves animals. Everything with four legs and a tail. Still trying to get him to reconsider cats. Cows I can live with. Some even look like super-sized me—just without the brains, plus a big, unsightly sack of milk dangling between their hind legs. I can feel the trots just thinking about it. I’ve always wondered what the four handles are for. Humans only have two hands. Bulls have none.

Now he’s taken a fancy to birds. Ever since a robin—a misshapen creature with a brake light down its front—started harvesting god-knows-what from his broom while H scrubbed the deck. The next day the bloody bird was sitting on the butcher’s block in the kitchen. As if it owned the place. Migrating from Sweden to Brussels. Probably flew business class on SAS to get here. They still serve liquor on the morning flight. A robin on juice.

It’s taken up residence, picking at whatever’s left of the sweet T-bone on my block.

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H named it Olav.

Then he went to the supermarket: packets of peanuts and fat balls stuffed into half a coconut. So now I share my garden with Olav, a family of pied wagtails respectfully waiting their turn for the peanuts, the odd jay, and a pigeon so old I don’t even bother to bark at it.

He looks more like Saint Francis by the day. Birds swarming around his head. Me at his feet, doing the groundwork.

I should have known. Rome was the rehearsal. He had already started cooing over the seagull chicks on the roof opposite the flat we rented a few years ago. He even wrote about it in the book he co-authored with R, weirdly meandering between screeches and aperitivi.

Know what? The aperitivi are far more interesting.

Back in Rome, on our way south, I feel like Olav migrating. The cobblestones are still there. So are the tourists, trundling their wheelie bags so loudly I clamp my tail between my legs, nuts mashed against my thighs. Ouch. Glad I’m not a cow. There’d be milk all over Via Giulia.

But it’s the churches I like most. They’re cool and silent. And forbidden. R smuggles me in from time to time, tucked under her arm. Says I’m one of God’s creatures, so I have every right to be there. I try to make her use the word “unique” in front of creatures, but she’s already looking through the lens of her Leica, squeezing me so hard that I nearly wet myself within sight of the rows of marble pillars waiting to be baptized.

I keep the faith: sit, stay, don’t pee.

Or does religion affect the expulsion of bodily fluids?

For a moment I thought Saint Peter’s Square would be the place I’d drown. An old man had died the week before we arrived. And suddenly there were all these people dressed in robes like him—his was fancy, but theirs were drab frocks in brown, black, or white—suffering from a collective infection of the lacrimal glands. Except the man in the blood-red cassock and zucchetto, who seemed to have taken the same drops that H used on my eyes when they watered.

I yanked the leash to get nearer. My survival depended on the clarity of his vision.

I guess the church’s too: procreate to survive.

Where do I sign up?

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A lot of men already have. I see them walking the streets of Rome behind futuristic four-wheeled contraptions that require an MSc to set up and a PhD to strap their baby in. Modern men. The ones dispatched by their partners to parade the offspring. I’d resist. I restrict my contribution to the survival of the canine species to insemination. That’s hard enough for a sire. I’m sure you’ve heard the stories of getting brutally separated, buckets of cold water, and the like. Rather sobering and soaking wet.

And now you realize where post coitum animal triste comes from.

But not these millennial males in their thirties. They promenade in brand-new Veja trainers alongside their stroller like true elites, left arm stretched sideways, a single hand on the handlebar. An iPhone in the other. In case they get lost. H walks me like that when he’s scooped up one of my smellier poops in a green plastic bag, keeping it at arm’s length and as far from my nose as possible until we reach the first garbage bin.

Babies smell of digested mothers’ milk. What’s wrong with that?

Perambulate, pontificate, and procreate. I could get used to Rome.

Olav wouldn’t stand a chance: a flapping seagull snack. Forget the peanuts and greasy coconuts.

And me, a migrating Jack Russell: pomp and circumstance in a scarlet cassock.

For vision and survival. What else?

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Living in a good house is like wearing your favorite winter coat. You may have overspent on it, but you feel elegant and proud. Enveloped in snugness every single day.

We’ve stayed in many houses that felt just like that. Architect’s homes where nothing screams but everything makes sense. Simplicity that succeeds. Historic houses that have easily stood the test of time. Places perfectly in sync with their owners’ personalities and accumulated treasures.

Each of them left its mark on us.

But sometimes, we can only visit them; houses whose cultural importance has eclipsed their domestic life. Like Villa Cavrois.

So overwhelming in scale and intent that it’s the details—the fixtures, the finishes, the quiet precision—that make it human again.

Koru. Launchpad. Dragonfly.

If the names don’t resonate, you’re unlikely to ever set foot on board.

These are the gigayachts of Messrs. Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Brin: floating fortresses, each among the most expensive assets a human can own. Vast technological marvels, designed as private sanctuaries of excess, vanishing from public life into the anonymity of oceans. Or hovering just offshore, in view yet out of reach, unmoored from any shared cultural fabric.

There was a time when fortunes didn’t dissolve at sea but reshaped the skylines of cities and the landscapes of regions.

At the turn of the 20th century, the industrial north of France was a panorama of smokestacks and looms, where rapid fortunes rose from textile mills and dye works. Families like the Cavrois became emblems of this prosperity. With industry as their engine, they accumulated not only capital but also the cultural ambition to root their legacy in architecture and design.

Like today’s moguls, they measured themselves against rivals, but their stage was not the open sea. It was the built landscape.

It was in this climate of competitive display that Paul Cavrois, heir to a textile empire, turned to Robert Mallet-Stevens, one of France’s most avant-garde architects. What he commissioned was no nostalgic château but a modern manifesto: Villa Cavrois, completed in 1932, a bold gesture toward progress, streamlined, functional, and meticulously detailed. Every line, material, and proportion declared a belief that wealth could—and should—shape the future.

The difference with today’s fortunes lies not in scale, but in what their wealth was used to build.

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Villa Cavrois endures because vision, not vanity, transformed capital into a work of modernist art. Paul and Lucie Cavrois granted Mallet-Stevens full creative freedom, with only the budget as a limit. The result was a modern château: a sixty-meter façade, 2,800 square meters of living space, and a symmetrical plan that nodded to aristocratic tradition while reimagining it for the machine age.

Ornament was stripped away, terraces spread across the flat roofs, and interiors gleamed with innovations: central heating, electric lighting, telephones, even an elevator. Glass, steel, and metal—industrial materials—became instruments of elegance.

True to his vision of the œuvre totale, Mallet-Stevens orchestrated not only the architecture but the entire interior world. Furniture, lighting, color harmonies, even the perspectives framed by windows and the reflections in the long water mirror outside were part of his design. He called on collaborators—Jean Prouvé and Jacques Le Chevalier—but directed the whole with the precision of a film set designer, a métier that shaped his eye.

Each room offered its own atmosphere: Art Deco, Bauhaus, glimpses of De Stijl and Viennese Secession all woven into a coherent whole. Clocks, radiator covers, and built-in fixtures were not embellishments but essential notes in the composition.

Modern living, detail, and daring were fused into a single work of art. One that transcends its time and still speaks with clarity, almost a century later.

It reminds us that true luxury is not possession but permanence, anchored in detail, rooted in place, and vivid with vision.

And Koru, Launchpad, and Dragonfly in a hundred years?

The scrapyard is my best guess.

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If you’re Flemish, languages cling to you like fleas on a dog. Blame the genetics of being ruled by half of Europe since Julius Caesar marched over us in tortoise formation. At least he had the decency to call us the bravest. Since then we've learned to be pragmatic about nearshoring governance. Or was it just opportunism: natural-born pleasers?

My Italian, though, is still a conflict zone. Any Italian who cares for their language needs paracetamol after five minutes with me. I never studied it properly; a chunk comes from six years of Latin in school, another from decades of holidays and work trips. In Italy as in Spain.

I don't speak Italian; I speak Italiol, a language that's painfully brutta.

And absolutely hopeless when it comes to negotiating with the manager of a parcheggio in Siracusa.

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I adore Italian parking garages, especially the old ones. The kind where you drive in, leave your keys in the ignition, and walk away, trusting a wiry 75-year-old in half-moon reading glasses sizing you up with a practiced glance. He'll wedge your car in a space designed for a cinquecento. Unscratched.

Our car doesn't allow for lots of luggage. Its boot fits exactly one and a half Ikea bags, two pairs of loafers, a small bag of Mr. Watson’s kibble, and a bottle of wine. More than enough, if it weren't for my wife's compelling desire to bring half of our silver cutlery collection, starched linen tablecloths and napkins, and at least four champagne glasses. Coupes, not flutes. The bare essentials for traveling in style. Which left the makeshift rear seats piled to the roof with a jumble of carrying bags in every shape and fabric.

Showtime for the parcheggio manager. A performer about to screw you over. With a smile. And me? I got my hackles up. Which blocked my Italian vocabulary. Spanish too. My brain—stripped of grammar and politeness alike—gave up. Assertively backed by my wife's rationale, it instructed me to unload the car and create a colorful tapestry of bags, enough to provision a small refugee camp, at the luggage depot next door. Also run, of course, by the parcheggio guy.

Miracolosamente.

Equally miraculous, the mood lifted as soon as our luggage pile was abandoned in the empty storage room. Linda was at the front door with Swiss precision, at five o’clock sharp. The last market stalls were taken down with the enthusiasm of a dentist's appointment, while a few American tourists, already eager for their 6 pm dinner, sipped their Day-Glo Aperol spritzes on the corner terrace, commenting on the peeling paint of the 18th-century baroque palazzi, one of which would be our home for the next few days.

Italians are discreet. Ovid said it over two thousand years ago: bene vixit qui bene latuit—he who lived unnoticed, lived well. It hasn't changed. It's what's behind the facade, away from the empty crates that still litter the market, that's of significance. It's what we found the moment Linda opened the door to the apartment.

Living in the heart of the market, it's only normal that you make the kitchen the center of your house. At Casa Sabir, dining is taken seriously, with a walk-in wine cellar carrying a selection of Sicilian wines, most of them natural, chosen with care. It's an artist's home, not renovated, but restored with the eye of an aesthete. Luca, the owner, kept what mattered: the height of the ceilings, the original colorful tiles, and the faded frescoes and friezes that must have appeared from under layers of paint and wallpaper. Signs of a life once lived differently, more elegantly than now.

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It's the details that make this house stand out. You discover them by accident. You smile and think, "Shit, he even thought of that." Putting ventilation holes in the cupboard doors that match the flower motif on the tiles. Stencilled relief patterns in the shower wall. A patch of wall in lime plaster, tinted a pale blue just to match one of his artworks. It's renovation with passion. The work of someone who lives art.

And if the pastel-colored apartment is as restrained and elegant as Ortigia itself, the market underneath its terraces, with blue and red canopies—some faded, some vibrant—is its cheerful offset, fresh as a bouquet that is pressed unexpectedly under your nose. It's there when you wake up. Vendors debating meloni. That's politics, not fruit. The smell of simmering caponata drifts up. Tuna ventresca, marbled with fat and cut with ruthless precision. Gamberoni Imperiale, as red as the lava from Mount Etna, piled high on melting ice.

Cooking is not a solitary activity at Casa Sabir. The market is cheering you on as you cover the artichokes, stems up, with baking paper over medium heat. As you rinse the salt off the capers from Pantelleria. As you open a bottle of Alberelli di Giodo Carricante. You are cooking with the city, not in it.

And you know your wife was right (as usual) to bring the linen tablecloth and the silver cutlery.

You live well at Casa Sabir.

And quite unnoticed.

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“I’m working on paintings that are supposed to represent nothing. I’m nowhere yet. In doing so, I wonder if anything is harder than painting nothingness.”
—Thierry De Cordier, for NADA, Fondazione Prada, Milan

Maybe the best art is this: architecture of nothingness.

Inside the Cisterna’s three post-industrial volumes—spaces that read like ritual—Thierry De Cordier’s NADA works hang like a monochrome tide: ten vast canvases, heavier than paint, weighted with ambience. They do not depict; they subtract. Christ disappears, the cross recedes, and what remains is a rigorously sustained void.

In Ghent in 2012, a Gran Nada hung in the sanctuary of Sint-Baafs Cathedral. Draped in sacrality, it imposed reverence. We felt small, fragile, and mortal in front of it. Religion dictated our reading and hid the painter’s intent. The painting proclaimed divinity rather than its erasure.

Not so in Milan. Here, the paintings don’t speak. They enforce silence and patience.

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De Cordier began these canvases as a symbolic obliteration of the crucifixion image. Over time, the gesture thickened into something else: revelation instead of negation, rigor instead of rebellion. NADA slides into the place where INRI once sat—a subtle, seismic substitution. Here, standing before Gran Nada, you feel time stretch; vision hesitates; the painting shows nothing and, in doing so, reveals the condition of seeing itself. In a world of relentless display, De Cordier proposes an ethics of opacity.

Step back outside, and the city continues its sentence.

Milan embodies austerity and excess, stone and sparkle. The rigor inside Fondazione Prada doesn’t end at the door; it reverberates in the city’s own habit of restraint, its black-clad confidence, and its talent for making space around what matters.

Perhaps that is the promise of NADA here: not an ending, but a threshold. From the unadorned rooms of the Cisterna, Milan opens like a second canvas, one that trades images for intervals and noise for cadence. The tableau begins in black, but it travels outward, into streets that practice their own liturgy of form and measure.

And restraint.

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Because without it, elegance would cease. And Milan is all about elegance.

It speaks in meter: a strict stanza of stone where repetition becomes grace. Geometric precision in the evening sun sets the buildings aglow. The rigorous backdrop of a diamond-stuccoed wall counterpoints the anticipation of another bustling dinner among business partners or friends. Dining and masonry are moral stances.

And in its boutiques, the ritual simply changes its object and stages a choreography where bodies, garments, and glances know their marks. Outfits are edited, not amassed. A practiced silence is designed to make looking feel like consent. It’s not spectacle but ceremony, the city’s ethic of measure applied to desire. If De Cordier subtracts image to enhance presence, fashion retail subtracts clutter to grant attention.

Milan edits itself in real time: it reveals by withholding; it signifies by dimming.

Trattenere is the verb that best describes the city—to hold back. That’s why it’s a perfect fit for NADA: an urban ethos of selective opacity, a habit of self-control that lets form—and people—keep their depth.

“While painting, I don’t think at all. After painting, I think about something else.” —Thierry De Cordier

In front of NADA, you don’t think at all. You feel.

Afterwards, there’s just Milan.

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First there was Krabbe, a huge white tomcat that wanted in from his nightly prowl. Then Mazout, a kitten brought in to catch the mice in our Antwerp flat. She was efficient. I found them in the cubbyhole behind my left knee. Dead.

Carlo, our first Jack Russell, needed eighteen months to work his way up from the basement to the bed. James did it in six. Mr. Watson in three.

Sleeping between my legs, gazing up occasionally, changes your worldview. A life-altering trauma, really. The least I can do is hear them out.

I made it. It took me just over six years to make it to the front row. To first class. The sharp end.

Six years of my best behavior before my humans—forget the hooman doggolingo nonsense; I converse in correct multisyllabic words and the occasional alliteration, words as sharp as the needle of the rabies vaccination that the vet subcutaneously planted smack in between my shoulder blades, barely out of reach of my gleaming choppers that would have loved trimming his pinkie into a bloody stump—deemed me worthy of an upgrade.

As if they hadn’t tallied the countless miles I’ve clocked at their side, paw in hand.

But in Paris, I felt like I made it. Little did I know it was just a stopover in R & H's grand travel scheme. Riding front seat in a cargo bike on a summer's day. H pedaling like crazy because the bike rental people didn't fit the bike with its required battery control panel. (He should have known; they were Dutch—no hills there, no frills either). R going full electric, and me soaking up the ride, ears flapping in the wind like the luffing sails of a tack gone wrong, and the thousand smells of Paris' sidewalks—stained to exquisite perfection by papillons, bassets, griffons, and poodles incarnating the existentialist promiscuity of Simone de Beauvoir—all up my nose.

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My British ancestors would have loved me for it: replicating the entente cordiale, doggy style. Not sure H & R would have approved, though.

So why did they drag my shapely hindquarters to Palermo? A city where the sidewalks smell less like existentialist poodles and more like an ashtray laced with the scraps of yesterday’s swordfish lunch. That's when you're lucky to find a sidewalk at all. With slobbering cane corsos strutting their bulk as if they own the place. Their skin so loose and wrinkled, it looks as if they're wearing a grandmother's fur coat, two sizes too large. Imagine H trying to wedge one of those brutes into a Parisian cargo bike. He’d collapse before his first cannolo.

Palermo. Honestly.

And the traffic. I was so scared that I buried my head into R's lap, so deep I nearly suffocated. The entire Fiat catalogue of the last thirty years, every model dented, came rushing at us from angles you didn't know even existed, over cratered roads big enough to swallow them whole. Drivers who treat the brake pedal as an urban legend. Because braking is for sissies. Conigli; good only for a Sunday stew in autumn. And in between these tiny beaters, accelerating for all they're worth with the suicidal determination of engines past their prime, the traffic miraculously opens to shiny, unscratched SUVs like the Red Sea parting for Moses. Laws unseen, but absolute.

Not ours.

If it weren't for the villa we were staying at, I would have gone on a hunger strike. No, scrap that. Food is holy, my red line. I'd have stood in front of R & H, whimpering. Giving them the sad puppy-dog eye, honed to perfection. Straight up in their face. Scratched their legs with my front paws. I would have rounded my back and tucked my tail—my magic wand, my compelling baton of affection, desire, and despair—between my legs. I'd have broken their hearts. Again. They would have given in. They always do.

But I didn't. I let them stay. I guess they deserve a holiday from time to time. So do I.

I worked on my tan. Salt and sun make my coat whiter than sheets on the bleaching green. Practiced my fetching: tennis balls on the terraces and sticks in the garden. Those are my rules. Spent time with H when he was writing and with R when she was designing. I'm their muse, flourishing their creativity by my mere presence. Their Apple Watch too: 11:50 and 17:40 are when they should get up and play with me. It's their health I'm protecting. And my return home. I run the show. They just log the data.

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But no more Palermo, please. Once is plenty.

Give me Forte dei Marmi instead. Three days on our way home. With hotel staff crouching on the marble floors to say hello and caress me behind the ears. With the soft white sand on the beach to dig myself a cool little cubbyhole, spreading my pheromones along the shoreline behind me. With the cerulean wall-to-wall carpet at Miu Miu that always triggers an irresistible burst of zoomy energy to circle a display of the shortest skirts in history—not tacky, but elegant—and wishing R were 25 years younger to show off her still-sexy legs, and me at her side. With the rickety Chinese bikes to ride Forte's leafy streets, me in a wicker basket on the handlebars.

Up front, of course.

Where else?

Read more about the architecture of Capo Zafferano in our previous post: The Exquisite Daytime Lunacy of a Saffron Rock

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I guess it must have been the early nineties, when New York was still rough. Anything above 97th Street felt dodgy. Not that we went there; we were recommended to avoid it. There were carcasses hanging on rails dripping blood and fat on Chelsea pavements. Of course we went there. Now we don't. And SoHo was filled with artist studios and galleries rather than luxury brands. But we still go there.

And there was something new: coffee.

Not the drip coffee made hours ago and still sitting on a hotplate, tasting like the worn-out Goodyears on the builder's two-tone Ford Bronco. But the real espresso, brewed on a La Marzocco in steel-columned lofts with soaring stuccoed ceilings. Served from marble-top counters. Coffee that tasted like Italy. Sipped among dazzling patrons in bars that oozed Reagan's new-money optimism.

Jonathan Morr Espresso Bar on Greene Street was our coffee hangout.

Every morning, after swimming, I still drink a large, French-pressed coffee from a mug we bought there. Its logo—designed like a Sator Square and still brutally contemporary—stares me boldly in the face. It's not their cappuccinos that I remember. Nor the overheard conversations of downtown artists talking about video art and the World Wide Web.

It's a horse.

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Or rather, Susan Rothenberg's oversized painting of it. Black contours brushed over thick layers of matte white acrylic paint. Overpowering the entire space from the back wall, mingling with the smell of ground beans. There's something about Rothenberg's horse paintings. They are strangely abstract, devoid of emotion, yet full of life, movement, and feeling. Frozen in motion like Muybridge's photos. Framed by geometric outlines like Bacon's triptychs.

Painterly horses. Archetypes of poise.

Rothenberg isn't well-known in Europe. There is some early work of hers at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Tate Modern in London. So when we found out that there was a retrospective at the Kunsthalle in Krems an der Donau, we didn't hesitate. Visiting Vienna would be our excuse to see her work again.

It wasn't our first encounter with Vienna. I remember roaring along the German motorway at 180 kilometers per hour in a Golf GTI, heading for Vienna in the early 80s. There was the Spanish Riding School with its Lipizzaner stallions and my favorite smell of all: a horse's sweat on waxed leather. Don't judge me by my eccentric tastes. There was Hofburg baking in the summer sun. The city felt overwhelming and languid.

I also remember staying at the Sacher hotel for a single night somewhere in the 90s with a business meeting the next day. It felt stuffy and boring. Around 2010, I met with Do & Co, Austria's main catering company. I was trying to sell them chocolates. It felt like selling sand to the Sahara. I've never shied away from impossible challenges.

It's fair to say that Vienna hasn't been a town on our radar until Rothenberg's horses called us back.

The city's still overwhelming. It's splendidly imperial, built on generations of ecclesiastical and aristocratic wealth. It exudes power through grandeur: an oversized city in a diminutive country, like an older man in a suit, tailor-made for his more vigorous and bulkier days. I've seen a few around, one with skinny legs in a 2500-euro pair of lederhosen and a loden janker.

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It's no longer languid. It's full of tourists. Asian group tours, bussed in for the day. Passengers from Danube cruise ships, marching through the same rounds, seeing the same sights, sipping a melange in cafés that once had a soul. We walked in and out of landmark cafés that looked like sterile film sets past counters filled with overpriced pastries produced by the same industrial bakery company. With waiters that still looked the part but lost the vibe, even when addressed in fluent German.

But you can still get lost in the city's alleyways and come across some truly quaint authenticity. The shop—recognizable only because the front door was open—where a young couple was tailoring lederhosen. A 90-year-old unlit cocktail bar with a list of unacceptable activities that was longer than its menu. An antique silver dealer with a 240-piece Art Nouveau cutlery set, priced at 48,000 euro. Two women running a store that only sells men's underwear, socks, and ties because a man's cachet truly shows once he undresses.

And Café Bräunerhof, the one that lured us in because it felt like how a café should be: cozy, lived-in, and just shabby enough to make it cool. With a Stammtisch and waiters that vet you as you walk in.

Because it's the guest who adjusts to the locale, not the other way around.

I suspect this goes for Vienna too. To really understand the city, act like a Wiener.

And keep your tie on when you undress. For cachet.

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I swear I saw her silhouetted in the rock.

She was there as the sun broke through the leaden sky, rare light for the season. A woman saxophone player hunched over her instrument—intimately, the way women seem to coax sound from a saxophone, not force it, hips fluid rather than thrust forward. Long, curly hair veiled her face. Slender, magnetic; a figure born of shadow and sound. An image in grisaille that would fit the sleeve of the '70s psychedelic jazz album that was playing in a forgotten bar, in a forgotten city, on a business trip long ago. Only months later did I find it, buried in the back of a local record shop.

I played the record once. I never saw her image in the rock again. Singularity is beauty’s quirk. Its way of keeping us exploring.

All that remained of her was 227 meters of limestone rising from the Mediterranean: a gatekeeper for the fishermen's villages in its shadow, a safe haven for the seagulls that nestle in its crevices. Capo Zafferano towers over the house we're staying in, protective more than menacing, intruding into every moment that you spend in it.

Armando Barraja didn't design Villa Capo Zafferano to compete with nature. The house is a concrete and travertine block jutting from the limestone, facing sea and sky, an altar in honor of nature. It's one of three similar buildings he constructed into the cliffs between Porticello and Aspra, set within an oasis of evergreen shrubs and cacti, beginning to flower just as we arrived. The last waves of a spring storm crash on the rocks 30 meters below in a curtain of white spray, etching the line between azure and indigo waters.

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80 steps take you down to the sea. They have been laid in the rough pebble-infused concrete that I scraped my knees on when I was a kid, wearing the bloody crusts that I picked off long before I should have, memories of forgotten falls on a slab that was poured to be sturdy, to last a lifetime, just like the tiny scars they left behind.

The villa blends brutalism and postmodernism in a collection of lines, straight and curved, that juxtapose man-made symmetry against nature's chaos of rocks and flora. Rhythmic iron guardrails line the vast terraces, casting a shadow trellis on the walls in the early morning light. Rough-hewn limestone joins concrete and travertine to form intimate enclosures, behind which guest bedrooms are tucked. Concealed passageways guide circulation, intersecting the gardens with unexpected sea views. The brutal Mediterranean sun plays its game of light and shadow, changing through the day, inviting you to inhabit every part of the house and its terraces.

I’m writing this on Giancarlo Piretti’s green Plana Folding Table, produced by Castelli in the 1970s—Italy’s golden age of design, when plastic furniture was still beautifully innovative. In the corner is Breuer's canvas Wassily armchair. Vintage lamps from the 1960s and 1970s cast a warm, lived-in glow across the living room at night. Many of them are prize-winning designs once reviewed in Ottagono Magazine, a stack of which now sits on the shelves behind the desk.

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Barraja is an aesthetic perfectionist: not a single welding seam marks the lengthy handrail that wraps the terraces. The iron grills on the porthole windows protrude like Pugs' eyes. A long, sloping alley runs the width of the property behind the house, seemingly designed for the sheer beauty of its perspective: the villa framed against the sea from an unexpected angle.

He's well into his 80s now and still occupies the house from time to time. He no longer descends the stairs to have a swim along the rocky shore. But I'm sure he still notices the fisherman who sputters into view around eight in the morning and cuts the engine in the shade of the rock, in front of the house. He throws a line into the water, fits the oars into the locks, and rows just enough to draw the line taut. As he brings it in, a smaller figure at the stern unhooks the fish, throws some of them back into the water, and tosses the larger ones in the dory. When the line is in, they repeat the process. Soundlessly. Every day until they have their catch.

The light shifts, and the rock changes. Just before sunset, it takes on the color of saffron. The saxophone player never returned. I suppose she was never really there—a figment of my imagination, a mild form of exquisite daytime lunacy, so sought-after.

Travelers. Creators. Architects. We're all just dreamers, aren't we?

Even fishermen, once they have their catch.

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‘Gamberi. GAMBERI. Ultimo kilo. 20 Euro’

He yelled into the cabin of the jetfoil, his shoulder resting against the ship's metal bulkhead as he waved a plastic bag at eye level with his left arm, shaking it just enough to suggest the shrimps were alive. The gangplank screeched—metal against metal—as the ship rocked into the waves. The local butcher dropped a case of meat onto the luggage rack at the back of the cabin, careful not to smear the seats with his blood-stained apron. A steward amicably put an arm around his shoulders where the apron was still clean.

On the quay, a young woman in a Liberty Lines uniform observed the mercantile activity with practiced disinterest. Her navy cargo pants fit just a little too tightly, and the buttons of her white shirt strained at the seams. Seasonal indulgence was on display.

Italian uniforms have a single purpose: to impress.

A graying man in a padded gilet over a houndstooth jacket approached the shrimp vendor, shook the bag, peered inside, then fished a 20-euro note from his pocket. A group of American tourists, flaunting cheap plastic headphones, had followed the entire performance with rapt attention—exalted to witness a fragment of “real life” in Sicily, meticulously conjured on the travel agent’s website. They had temporarily bought into it. Their guide never stopped jabbering.

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Getting to Stromboli is a rewarding journey. It’s an effort that requires motivation, patience, and a patchwork of transport modes that may even include a ride in the back of a spluttering APE. You don’t just arrive on Stromboli; you have to work to win it over.

We’ve been to Stromboli before.

It was a family Easter holiday, long ago. From the terrace of the house we had rented on Panarea, we watched the volcano spit red magma into the night. Stromboli’s lure was irresistible. A slow ferry carried us there and back, five hours later. The beach was black and empty. The fishermen tough and weathered.

We imagined Ingrid Bergman walking ahead of us in Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950), confused, along the same paths, past the same houses, barely changed. La terra dura—hard as the people who live there. Hard as igneous rock, cooled in the rhythm of the volcano’s regular heartbeat.

Stromboli hit a raw nerve. We vowed to be back. It took us 25 years.

There’s nothing like arriving by boat. The slow sway of a bare-metal hull reeking of gasoline builds anticipation for the arrival on firm land that's always busy and slightly unmoored. There are people waiting on the quay. Golf carts and APEs. The odd vendor approaching tourists. Everyone seems to know where to go, except us.

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'Dove vai?' A blond young man asks. He's tanned and barefoot behind the wheel of a golf cart. You'd expect him on the beaches of Malibu or Ericeira, not here on Stromboli. Next to him, a man clutches a Rimowa suitcase between his knees, already hanging on with both hands. 'I'll drop you off,' he says when we give him the name of the owner from whom we rented the house. We hop into the back seats, facing backwards, as the cart races through streets that feel even narrower than we remembered. The houses have been restored and painted. The island seems friendlier now, but perhaps we’re the ones who’ve softened.

The first time, all we noticed was Stromboli’s hardness. But when you stay longer—and surrender to its slowness—you begin to sense its fluidity. When the rhythmic whoosh of the blowholes underneath the terrace reminds you of the sea's constant commotion.

When the deep rumble of the volcano tells you that the planet is fiercely alive. Not for you. Not against you. Just alive. In Stromboli, it's oddly reassuring to understand that in the grander scheme of things, we are just a temporary speck.

You start to meet the same people—specks like you—over again as the island’s intimate rituals begin to include you.

La Libreria sits underneath what is probably the largest tree on the island. The sun filters through the canopy onto the six decked tables in the garden as we're having Sunday lunch among the island's locals. Rosa, la nonna, joins the table where her daughter and son-in-law are already enjoying a bottle of white wine, their son, Max, in tow. Rosa is all dressed in yellow. We saw her on the boat when we arrived. Porters in Milazzo carried her purchases as she boarded, and an APE waited for her on the other side. With fiery red lipstick, rings on every finger, earrings, and a prominent Roman nose, she looks very much like my mother.

Old chapels needs decoration, my mother used to say, and I am sure that Rosa would agree.

So would the film director at the other table. He's having lunch with some of his team. We noticed him the moment we arrived: mid-fifties, graying, unassumingly sophisticated, radiating with the charisma of someone who achieves greatness through natural authority rather than dominance. He wears sunglasses and smokes tiny cigars between courses.

We're all visitors confronted by our mortality in this place: specks enjoying our lunch in the early summer sun on a volcano in the Mediterranean.

Some shine brighter than others. But one is simply fluorescent.

La Grande Bellezza.

The film opens with a quote from Louis Ferdinand Céline: "Travel is useful; it exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue."

I guess he's been here before.

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The air clings to your skin like a reused food wrapper, heavy with sea brine, gasoline, and something metallic you can't quite name. The light is harsh, and the noise unceasing. A fruit vendor shouting, the screech of tires, a bus's diesel engine coughing, cellphones ringing, a fragment of birdsong.

Mumbai is a soundscape that lacks hierarchy.

Everything is in motion; nothing yields. The city surges forward with the confidence of a destination that has been through too much to bother about a visitor's expectations.

Driving into Colaba feels like launching into a novel halfway through. There’s no beginning, no explanation, just immersion. People everywhere; some rushing, some lingering. Paint peels from colonial facades with a distant kind of dignity. Lawyers in tailored, lightweight suits move past potbellied street vendors in faded T-shirts cooking chaat, both unbothered.

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You remember the Mumbai you left behind in 2013. The version you meet now has multiplied, shimmering with scaffolding and ambition, yet anchored by something older, deeper.

Mumbai moves faster than memory: an ever-churning constellation of construction dust and saffron-hooded taxis. Of incessant hustling and obsolete jobs. Of subsistence and wealth, held together not by plan, but by pulse.

Just like the last time, you’re still unsure whether to love this city or resist it.

And then the volume drops.

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The taxi draws up to the colonnaded entrance of the Taj Mahal Palace, and the city’s relentless percussion softens to a distant murmur, as though someone dropped the curtain on the roadside theatre behind you. Two statuesque Sikh doorkeepers in ivory tunics, turbans, and embroidered cummerbunds stand flanking the entrance. They do not move quickly, nor do they need to. Quiet authority sets the tone. Their namaste comes with measured grace, neither overbearing nor dramatic, as if to say: welcome to a version of India where time behaves with consideration.

The air inside is cool and scented faintly with polish, citrus, and flowers. Not perfumed, but precise. The marble gleams in discipline. Floors that have borne the footsteps of statesmen, film stars, and diplomats shine with an undeterred kind of pride. Here, no detail calls attention to itself, yet nothing is overlooked.

After the city’s relentless improvisation, the Taj is a carefully composed score—measured, refined, and intentional.

A young man welcomes you into the Palace Lounge with confident grace, a subtle inclination of the head, and a perfectly measured smile. If the lobby holds the city at bay, the lounge leaves it behind entirely. It feels suspended in a thinner kind of time, one measured in servings of tea and softened conversation. The filtered light makes the room feel both spacious and intimate. Chairs are deep. Even the hush seems curated: the audible confidence of money, old habits, and deals brokered with discretion.

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The waitstaff move with a choreography that suggests they've always known which century they belong to. The men wear white trousers with a razor crease and two-tone spectator shoes that you've always admired but never dared to buy. Their navy blazers are piped in white, a polka-dotted day cravat knotted inside a crisp collar. Anywhere else, it might feel theatrical. Here, it feels inevitable. Mumbai—in all its contradictions—has a way of reminding you that elegance still matters.

You sit down in the kind of stillness you don’t notice until you’re inside it. Outside, the city continues its restless monologue, but here, time gathers in the seasoned upholstery and along the polished wainscoting. This space asks nothing of you except your presence. For a moment, you're not a guest. You're simply here, quietly calibrated to the room’s gentler tempo, relieved that such precision still exists.

The hotel hums with guests accustomed to luxury but untouched by its language. Their clothes don’t reject the setting; they ignore it altogether. They are dressed according to some kind of globalized neutrality that flattens the setting to a collection of clues, a décor. You find yourself wondering when aesthetics stopped requiring response. When beauty became an Instagrammable background. When presence became an option.

Not long ago, you couldn’t enter the Taj Mahal Palace without a jacket. Elegance was a shared language between guest and host. That language seems to have dissolved. The staff still speak it fluently; the walls still remember. But many guests no longer know the words. For those who understand, the experience turns intimate: it's not in what you see, but in how much you feel.

And isn't that precisely the emotion that draws you to this city—time and again?

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My mother's subdued reaction to all things emotional—except irritation, that is—genetically dominates my father's readily abundant tactility. And age doesn't help either; decades of intense travel seem to have formed a callus thick enough to dull even the most passionate experiences.

Once, in a club in Ibiza—dragged there by the boys (the alternative being to wait in the car like a tired chauffeur)—some kids came over and asked if I was the manager. I suppose you get the point. And it’s not just about my sensational moves.

So I never expected a weekday lunch in Thessaloniki to deliver a punch that still has me feeling lyrical.

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I had my first exposure to gastronomy in the early ’80s. Even now, I can’t quite explain what prompted the meat trader at the Nice wholesale market to summon his wife—decked out in a red vinyl Courrèges ensemble—and invite me to lunch at Chantecler in the Negresco. Its chef, Jacques Maximin, had just earned his second Michelin star, making it the first two-star hotel restaurant in the world.

I’d driven to the south of France in a tiny, gold-colored, second-hand Fiat 127 Top to attend meetings with meat distributors in Lyon, Marseille, and Nice. My old Volkswagen Beetle had been stolen a few weeks earlier in Amsterdam. I still suspect the German squatters on the ground floor of the house R lived in at the time used it to haul a load of weed to Berlin and flip it for a profit. Amsterdam's hippie haze had given way to punk and a creeping dose of neoliberalism.

The Fiat was the only Italian car I've ever owned. The further south I drove, the better it handled. On the way back north, it broke down on the Périphérique in Paris. All my cars since have been German, Swedish, or English. Restrained temperament over immediate arousal, perhaps. They handled well in every cardinal direction and never stalled on the Périphérique.

Neither my car nor my French at the time could have impressed the meat trader—whose name I can’t remember. And my business acumen—if I ever had any—was still embryonic. We never did go into business.

If entering the Negresco under Rigaud's portrait of Louis XIV and the glares of Niki de Saint Phalle's voluptuous sculptures was nothing less than spectacular, Maximin’s nouvelle cuisine lunch didn’t leave a lasting impression on a 23-year-old who’d skipped breakfast in Marseille to make it to Nice in time.

I’ve always felt that good food requires generosity.

The monkfish fillets, cooked to perfection, rested on a bed of dried grasses from tidal meadows. Four baby carrots and two perfectly matched potatoes—so uniform they looked cloned—lined up beside a crescent of vibrant, basil-infused olive oil. So awe-inspiring a plate I felt like whispering, if it weren't for Mrs. Meat Trader, whose glamorous presence alone made up for the diminutive size of the meal.

You don’t whisper at Olympos Naoussa, the iconic restaurant in Thessaloniki that recently reopened as part of the ON Residence. You grin, you wow, you share, you discuss, and you enjoy. Because good food is about conviviality.

Dimitris Tasioulas, Olympos Naoussa’s chef, brings creativity and modernism to traditional Greek recipes: authentic aromas, perfectly combined; local ingredients, many of them vegetables, beautifully plated. Greek food is generous. It’s meant to be shared over long conversations with friends and family. It’s meant to bring people together.

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And that’s exactly what we felt, sharing four courses over a bottle of Kir-Yianni Sauvignon Blanc. We were so moved, in fact, that we changed our travel plans to return for one more lunch before flying out—a risky thing to do when you’ve just had a near-perfect meal three days earlier.

We shared another round of four dishes—this time with a bottle of 'Ghi Kai ‘Uranos Terre et Ciel’ Xinomavro. Enough to fly home happily, amazed that some chefs have the knack to turn a simple beetroot into a taste explosion, grilled vegetables into plated sculpture, or a beef cheek served atop begendi—a smoky aubergine purée—into something as tender and fragrant as Turkish delight.

Greece is evolving at breakneck speed after a deep economic crisis that left its mark on every level of society. Young creatives don’t overthink the future; they push forward, driving a cultural momentum that now outpaces many other European nations. You see this energy in stores, hotels, and restaurants where Greek traditions are reimagined and reinterpreted. It's present in Michelin-starred restaurants like Delta, Hervé, or Soil—on par with their French fine dining counterparts.

But it’s in places like Olympos Naoussa and Mavri Thalassa in Thessaloniki, or Linou Soumpasis, Annie, and Okio in Athens, where gastronomy truly meets Greek generosity and conviviality.

And they’re all worth a detour—whatever car you’re driving.

Just before leaving Athens for Thessaloniki, I’d spotted a gold-colored Fiat 127 Top parked outside the Prada store. It still had a bit of a vibe to it, with its three-spoke wooden steering wheel and velour seats. I suppose forty years ago it wouldn’t have looked out of place in front of the Negresco—less so than stalled in the right-hand lane of the Périphérique.

The old car got it right; if you're looking to move forward, go south.

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Abhijith was breathing hard as he massaged the oil into my body from my feet to my hands, using elegant, elongated movements as if he were conducting a symphonic orchestra. The last rays of the afternoon sun drew chevrons across my upper arms through the wooden slats of the window blinds. In the background, a playlist of eerie voices and sitar beamed from an iPhone to a set of Bose speakers—only pierced from time to time by the single electronic beep of the induction plate upon which the oil was heated to precisely the right temperature.

Every hair on my arm stood up, glistening with a droplet of oil, just long enough for his huge hands to press them down again as he stretched to reach my fingertips. He scooped up another handful of oil and expertly drizzled it onto my shoulder, not spilling a single drop, until the dark medicinal herbs oozed from between his fingers. I submitted to the sensation and closed my eyes.

He thumped the hot potli—an herb-filled poultice—onto my back, shoulders, and legs. I felt the tenseness in every muscle of my body disappear after this morning’s session of extreme stretching at the Restoration Lab. If this is the life of elite athletes, I picked the wrong profession, I realized. If only I had the genetic pedigree.

I’ve never been much of a therapy enthusiast, let alone one to let go and do as instructed. But the very first day at Dharana was enough for me to surrender and meekly lean into well-being and the Ayurvedic treatments that were tailored to heal the imbalances I wasn’t even aware of having.

I gave in without the slightest qualm, and simply relished the experience.

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The de Souza brothers were visionaries. When William and Denzil de Souza purchased a 2,500-acre mountain property in the Western Ghats between Mumbai and Pune in 1985, they didn’t see the barren land that had been scarred by years of slash-and-burn millet farming. Instead, they saw a challenge: to return the area to its historical beauty as a dense forest teeming with endemic fauna and flora.

Forty years later, the one million or more seedlings planted under the supervision of conservationists and landscape designers have grown to maturity. The ecosystem has been restored from the ground up. One hundred and fifty mostly native bird species feed on insects. Mongooses thrive on snakes that keep the rodent population in check. Leopards hunt wild boar and deer. Black-footed gray langur monkeys and bonnet macaques feed on nuts and fruits. You hear them bark and chatter.

Dharana, the family’s well-being retreat, sits in the middle of this native forest. Its 99 architectural villas lie dispersed over 350 acres of tropical park that combines designed gardens with sections of lush forest, an organic vegetable and herb farm supplying the three restaurants, and a nursery. The retreat is largely self-sufficient. A solar farm provides the energy for the villas, the service buildings, and the fleet of EVs that carry guests to their villas and the different ‘houses’ for healing, learning, gathering, or meditating.

A zen-like feeling of acute awareness permeates the entire property.

We arrived utterly unprepared. A last-minute dash to India, squeezed in between two trips to Greece. Massage is something our neighbors love; wellness, for us, means 15 minutes in the sauna or hamam after our morning swim. A physiotherapist is a practitioner you go to when you pull a muscle or sprain an ankle; Ayurveda, a traditional healing method in India we’d heard about. Total novices—if ever there were some—arriving with more than a healthy dose of skepticism toward complementary and alternative healing techniques.

It may have been the jet lag, but the explanation of the principles of Ayurvedic medicine left us unconvinced, even if they sounded very plausible. But as we went through the consultations—combining traditional pulse diagnosis with spectrophotometry, bioenergy analysis, and bioelectrical impedance analysis—a pattern emerged that mirrored the results of our recent "Western" medical checkup and blood testing. Just as importantly, they also matched how we were feeling about our health.

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Based on these results, the medical team created our dinacharya, the structured daily routines to help us find our natural rhythm and balance: yoga and meditation, therapeutic massages, physical restoration sessions, and immersions in nature and the local culture. A team of nutritionists created a personalized dietary plan for every single meal.

It didn't take us long to understand that Dharana is not just a wellness retreat; it's a proper holistic experience based on age-old Ayurvedic principles, underpinned by data from state-of-the-art medical equipment. Its modern architecture and landscaping, set in a vast rewilded ecosystem, enhance the experience—which I can only describe with the French term dépaysant.

Sometimes, you have to be dragged out of your ordinary environment to be able to embrace a new one.

Nowhere was this holistic experience more tangible than during our visit to the Bedse Caves—Buddhist monuments carved from basalt cliffs near the property. The purest of minimal aesthetics, created over two thousand years ago. A place to contemplate.

Dharana works in harmony with the communities of the Shillim Valley. The Shillim Institute at Dharana is a not-for-profit cross-fertilization platform that is dedicated to conservation and sustainable development. Deeply rooted in the local culture, artists, academics, policymakers, and business people from around the world learn, share, and co-create towards sustainable communities. It’s where classical Indian dance meets hip hop, where Western textile artists learn about natural dyes from village women, and where classical musicians discover age-old Indian instruments.

“How do you and ma'am feel, sir?” Abhijith asked as he accompanied me back to the House of Healing after the last session of our stay: a tan lepa, a four-handed massage followed by a steam bath and an herbal body wrap.

Glowing would have been my typical wisecrack reply, but I bit my tongue.

“We've learned a lot this week,” I said. “But there’s so much more to learn. Guess what? We’ve got our lives ahead of us.”

At least what’s left of it.

So we’d better live it right. We may even get to yoga and meditation before it ends.

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Unless they're hung over.

She looked American and distinctly sober.

"What is that white cube?" she asked.

Whenever I hear an Australian accent, I half-expect AC/DC's Thunderstruck to start playing—the soundtrack to a dust-trailing road train speeding past Angus Young duckwalking in his schoolboy uniform. Maybe my imagination is too boyish. Just add a koala, and you’ve got the full Aussie cliché.

I also exhibit an uncontrollable impulse to answer rhetorical questions.

Tramezzini, I told her, figuring that it was the sandwiches she was puzzled about. The breakfast staff are like mothers to their guests; they cut the crusts off.

The women of Quattro Fontane, like the hotel itself, exude an easy warmth—habitual, unforced, as if woven into the walls.

There’s an easiness to them. They don't seem to work in this hotel; they belong to it. Some have been here for decades, passing through the hotel’s sun-dappled halls as naturally as the afternoon breeze through the pines in its garden. The hotel’s character is built on their humble acts—crustless sandwiches, a morning greeting that lingers longer than expected, a cappuccino arriving at your breakfast table before you asked for it.

These aren't gestures from a hotel management's playbook; they are personal expressions of hospitality, worn in over the years.

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Quattro Fontane is a time capsule. It is not the grandest nor the most opulent of Lido di Venezia’s lodgings. But it has something that all others lack: a refusal to conform and a pride in displaying eccentricity. Built in the early 20th century, it carries the remnants of the Belle Époque, when Lido was the playground of European aristocracy. Unlike the larger hotels that have modernized into sleek anonymity, Quattro Fontane has kept its strange collection of artifacts—a comtoise clock ticking assuredly in the hall, ceramic plates with faces staring out from the walls, an air of subdued theatricality. You visualize the ravishing Florinda Bolkan to have walked in straight off a shoot of The Anonymous Venetian, just in time for aperitivo.

That sense of cultivated oddity is no accident. The Bevilacqua family, who have owned and run the hotel since 1954, have shaped Quattro Fontane into an intimate, lived-in labyrinth of curiosities. Bente Bevilacqua, an architect by training, infused the place with a collector’s eye, filling its spaces with relics from across the world, each object finding its own peculiar place in the hotel's grand mosaic. The result is a property that feels less like a business and more like a family’s sprawling, ever-expanding cabinet of wonders. Its rooms are a layering of history: coat hooks that seem to come straight off a mountain hut, French Freemason aprons, saffron-painted woodwork, Neoclassical columns, and the occasional Danish touch—a nod to Bente’s heritage.

Lido di Venezia itself is an island of contrasts. Most of the year, it remains suspended between its glamorous past and its sleepy present, a place where the ghosts of the 1920s still haunt the halls of hotels like Quattro Fontane. It is a place of bicycles and quiet streets. A place to sit outside cafés with an espresso and watch the world move to the rhythm of the Adriatic breeze.

But in September, the island transforms with the Venice Film Festival; security crews block the streets around the Palazzo del Cinema, the air is dense with chic and elegance, and film stars and directors bring a different kind of spectacle. If big-budget productions fill the Excelsior, Quattro Fontane's nonconformity is the hangout for the indies to sip their negronis until late under its pine trees.

The Australian woman picked up a few tramezzini and took them to her table. She seemed out of place, slumped on the flaming red high-backed chair in the dining room. I wondered what she made of it all. The unfamiliarity of the food, the odd collection of objects around her, the way the hotel felt both charming and slightly surreal. She picked up a tramezzino gingerly, as though it might come alive when she took it to her mouth.

She turned toward me.

"Not bad. Just very… white."

A new cappuccino appeared at my table.

The woman took another bite. A slow nod. Approval. Then she left—lost in her thoughts. Like everyone who checks out from here, but never fully lets go.

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Mr. Watson once ruled his home, his perfectly calibrated domain, where every sofa cushion bore the imprint of his hard-earned naps. Then came a tiny, wobbly creature. Everyone coos. Everyone fawns. He stares up, bewildered, as she chews his ear with reckless abandon.

A dog's-eye view of treason. Here we go.

Betrayal. Pure and simple. Disruption at its worst.

My well-organized canine life has been uprooted. On account of my human family. Can you imagine? I give them my unconditional love, loyalty, and attention, and what do I get back?

A sister!

She's called Patek. Funny name, I know. But that's what you can expect from a funny family. I'm probably the most serious of them all. Patek, like the fancy watch brand. Sounds male, really. Still, I swear, she's my sister. My nose can detect the gender of any living being from a mile's distance with the exception of a hermaphrodite sea bass.

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The vet's nose isn't as good as mine. Her eyes neither. She must have had a bad hair day when she looked at the newborn pup and mistook what remained of the umbilical cord for a penis. Shit happens. Small penises too. Probably more to vets than ordinary people—I'm not talking about penises here—that's why they wear plastic gloves all the way up to their shoulders.

I may have spots that look like theirs, but—holy Pooch—am I glad not to be a cow pushed into the corner of a stable when the vet walks in wearing one of these.