Architecture – ARUNDHATI BASU

On the Trail of Bonny River Towns

Summer has come in with a show of jazz hands. The days are hot, and the nights so lovely and soft, filled with breezes of pure delight and fireflies that twinkle and dim like their very lives depend upon it. The gentle warmth in the air has as if unlocked the ridiculously sweet fragrance of the Sweetgum trees in the park. Every night as I walk through the maze of tall trees, a strong scent cocoons the senses in the quiet of the night. A skunk skulks around in the dark and I look warily at its quivering fan of a tail. Would not do to spoil the peace of the night.

Which reminds me of the other evening when a friend accompanied me on my nightly walks. She shrieked hard at the sight of a skunk. I do not know who was more startled – the skunk or I.

Summer is the time to potter around and we have been doing so on weekends — seeking the solitude of the small towns that flank the mighty Delaware. The river that the Lenape Indians called Lenapewihittuk. It means rapid river of the Lenapes. But I have found it to be a remarkably serene river for the most part. To pick your way slowly along the Delaware is to pave the way for bluish green hills and rolling farmlands (how they make me sick for the British countryside) which land you in the middle of surprisingly photogenic towns nesting along the river. Perhaps you remember Lambertville (there’s a separate photo op on it here) and New Hope. They are of the Delaware river town tribe that set us off on this trail.

Imagine here, towns with historic vibes, all part of the Lenape belt where the Algonquin speaking Native Americans lived. That is till colonisation took place and the settlers came in, hopping around, renaming places and rivers. Delaware, for instance, was named after a British politician, Baron De La Warr. Along with some heritage, throw in generous dollops of old architecture, art galleries, antique centres, decor boutiques, bookshops, and friendly folk — and you know it’s gonna be something special.

It turns out that the Raritan River, which is connected to the Delaware River via a canal, has its share of pretty townships. Like Clinton, a town in Hunterdon County in New Jersey, where we ended up in our quest for placid weekend rambles.

The main protagonist of Clinton is a red mill. The rest of the town is cobbled together with old houses built in ornate architectural styles. Plenty of balusters, gables, pilasters and porches there. During the 1800s, travelling theater companies would make stops in Clinton because of its banging music hall. But all footsteps now lead to a couple of old mills there that straddle the South Branch of the Raritan River. I have a weak spot for barns and mills. The older, the better (but of course).

Under the sufficient glare of a June sun, we trod across the rusted grid of the truss bridge. On one side of it stood two picture-perfect mills, facing each other across the smooth spill of a man-made waterfall. A small flock of geese drifted around the waters and everything around was somnolent in the heat, like a picture playing out in slow motion. On the other side of the bridge, we watched an angler, submerged in knee-deep water, cast a fly rod into the mossy green waters. I wonder if he struck lucky. Meanwhile, people sat on garden chairs of some café that lined the pavement along the river – and I would like to think that they took cooling chugs of heady drinks to stave off the heat shimmering around us.

Now the Red Mill is the kind of place you walk into and get lost for the better part of an hour. The men behind its conservation must have put in enough thought to engage the visitor, for it is mighty easy to induce a snooze fest with so many details. It is when you recreate the lives and stories of people who worked and lived around the mill that it can spark off the imagination. The mind then latches onto the recreation of a lifestyle that was the only one the people of the age knew and lived. Several universes away from this modern world of ours where man has contrived to make life as divested of effort as possible.

A one-house schoolroom with its coal burner, small wooden chairs and slate-boards, the blacksmith’s quarters, the quarries where Irish immigrants must have slaved away to earn their daily bread, corn cribs and herb gardens, … life would have been tough and yet rewarding for the settlers who made a living off their surroundings. Just for those moments when I was peering into the schoolroom, sheds, quarries and log cabins, I was whisked back in time to the Smoky Mountains where the legacies of the settlers are everywhere, even in the mid of dense forests. Come with me into Clinton and have a peek?

2019-06-15 10.06.06 3.jpg — Main Street in Clinton

2019-06-27 12.00.45 2.jpg — Historic properties line the roads of Clinton

2019-06-27 12.02.47 2.jpg — A lane that turned out to be not Dickensian in the least but filled with vintage guitars, bearable Thai food and friendly locals.

2019-06-27 12.00.46 2.jpg — Maine Coons of Clinton on the prowl

2019-06-27 12.00.46 1.jpg — They have great personality, like you can well make out from the visage of this whiskered beauty.

2019-06-15 10.06.02 1.jpg — Candy pink and white ice-cream parlours

2019-06-15 10.06.06 1.jpg — The bootery in town

2019-06-15 10.06.04 1.jpg — Graffiti showcasing the Red Mill and the adjoining quarries

2019-06-27 12.00.40 2.jpg — The old truss bridge

2019-06-27 12.00.36 1.jpg — The stone mill on the South Branch of the Raritan River, known formerly as the Dunham-Parry Mill. Nowadays it goes by the name of the Hunterdon Art Museum. It was a grist mill before it was repurposed to serve as a space for art lovers. Before this particular stone mill came up, on this site stood another mill that is said to have been used by George Washington’s army to grind wheat in the mid-1700s.

20190615_151742-01 — The Red Mill. A Mr. Ralph Hunt owned both the Red Mill and the Dunham-Parry Mill in the 1800s so that the town was naturally called Hunt’s Mills. However, his use of the Red Mill as a wool producing one ran into severe losses and he had to let go of it. The mill changed several hands over the decades. The subsequent merchant owners decided to rename the town from Hunt’s Mills to Clinton, after the New York Governor of the time, DeWitt Clinton.

Processed with VSCO with a6 preset — Fly fishing on somnolent days in the South Branch of the Raritan.

2019-06-27 12.00.39 3.jpg — The Red Mill went into operation around the early 1800s and has had many epithets since. First was Hunt’s Mill, as you well know by now. Then it was dubbed the Black Mill. You see, one of the new owners turned from making grist to graphite. Greasy black dust issued forth from the mill. The same owner decided to switch next to the production of talc. So the next local name for it was the White Mill. And now, as you see, it is the Red Mill.

2019-06-27 12.00.31 1.jpg — Willows and an old pick-up made for good friends

2019-06-27 12.00.34 2.jpg — The look of the mill has changed with each ownership. The mill I saw that day with Adi was the result of centuries of tweaks.

2019-06-26 11.18.18 2.jpg — In the same county as Clinton, roughly 10 miles away, is the town of Alexandria where this one-room schoolhouse called Bunker Hill School House once stood. It was the Old Church School then and began life as a log building in the 1700s that was revised to give way to this 1860-frame. In use till the early 1920s, it was retired and used as a chicken coop and pig house before it was moved in the ’70s to its current location within the compound of the Red Mill.

2019-06-26 11.18.18 3.jpg — Students from the year 1891. They would have studied by the light of kerosene lamps and the sexes would have sat separately in the room. Girls to the left, boys to the right. The ‘good’ students would have been awarded the privilege of stoking the fire in the coal stove that heated the classroom. Students who were poor at studies would have got the dunce cap and high corner stool treatment. Loos were outdoors and these little men and women would have made do with corn cobs and catalogue pages as toilet paper.

2019-06-26 11.18.18 1.jpg — Parsing the school room as it was. Windows came with generous frames as you can see, to allow the room maximum exposure to natural light, there being no electricity at the time. The children had sand tables at the front of the classroom to practise writing and on a shelf at the rear of this room there used to be pails in which the students carried their lunches.

2019-06-26 11.18.14 2.jpg — Old school paraphernalia. No laptops here, mind you.

2019-06-26 11.18.20 2.jpg — The Tenant’s House for quarry workers. It had a parlour and kitchen on the first floor and two bedrooms on the second. The unit was first built by an Eli Bosenbury in the 19th century for the sum of $38. Life was notoriously simple. There was no electricity till the 1940s, so it was lived in the light of kerosene lamps, water had to be lugged to the kitchen in 8-quart buckets from a spigot located outside since there was no plumbing, children slept on the floor on mattresses, and stacked their clothes on the floor, there being no dressers at their disposal.

2019-06-26 11.18.21 1.jpg — One of the quarry workers who lived in the Tenant’s House starting 1860 was Peter Dalrymple. He was a day labourer who paid up $25 annually as rent for this house. He had a large family that included his wife and 8 children. From the expression of their faces on this snippet, they look quite contented to me despite the hardships they must have faced in their daily lives.

2019-06-15 10.08.22 1.jpg — The replica log cabin, modelled on the early 18th-century childhood home of local Revolutionary War General, Daniel Morgan. Here is a typical way the original colonial settlers lived when they occupied this new land.

2019-06-15 10.11.46 1.jpg — The log cabin originally had a sod roof which had to be watered during dry spells. Log cabins usually had these small rooms because trees that were used were seldom more than 30 feet in length. Plus smaller rooms could be heated more efficiently by the open fires on which one cooked as well.

2019-06-15 10.11.46 2.jpg — Windows were small and few to prevent the loss of heat, and more than often they had no glass, but were covered by a loose fabric. Roofs were pitched low and there was normally just enough headroom to allow a sleeping loft for children because it was warmer near the chimney.

2019-07-10 06.35.07 1.jpg — Essentially your kitchen garden

2019-06-26 11.18.12 2.jpg — Corn crib where corn was dried and stored

2019-06-15 10.08.25 1.jpg — The quarry was named the Mulligan Quarry after the Irish Mulligan brothers from Cavan County in Ireland who worked at the quarry and later bought it.

2019-06-15 10.08.20 2.jpg — Clinton was rich in dolomite limestone, a kind of calcite rock. After a great fire in the town in the 1800s, Mulligan stone was used to rebuild the town.

2019-06-27 12.00.32 1.jpg — The Stone Crusher and Screen House stands adjacent to the quarry. Limestone was dynamited and loaded here. Large chunks were pulverised and the screen sorted them out into four sizes that would then be led into chutes to be loaded onto wagons that would wait at the bottom of the building.

2019-06-15 10.11.47 1.jpg — An impressive 19th century carriage shed

2019-06-26 11.18.21 2.jpg — Kayaking on the South Branch of the Raritan

2019-06-27 12.00.39 1.jpg — Because one cannot have enough of such views.

Jul 11, 2019

Arundhati Basu49 Comments

Salem

Way before we drove into Salem, part of the hyphenated metropolis of Winston-Salem, my mind had travelled before my body. It had daydreamed about The Salem of the witch trials. The prospect of chancing upon stories of witchcraft, swirled in my thoughts, of the detail being in the devil just as in the case of the Pendle Hill witches of Lancaster. Could the famed Lancastrian occultists have given their Salem counterparts a run for their money, who knows (it’s such tosh anyway).

In Salem the absence of the bad girls were notable. Where were they? Adi shrugged, saying: “I was hardly interested in the history of any place before you came into life, was I?” Yeah Watson, we should have headed to New England.You might be an an ace at the memory game, but my mind is a sieve, dear reader. On an important aside, there are 26 Salems in the US.

Salem of North Carolina did not have the witches of its Massachusetts namesake, but it had the Moravians. Good old people of the faith with a solid moral compass, whose single men and women lived in the Single Brothers House and the Single Sisters House, respectively. The staid nature of their lives must have been challenged by the wilderness of North Carolina in which they found themselves when they arrived here in 1766, all the way from Pennsylvania. I think of them as adventurers who built a town from nothing, because there was no Winston then. It was just Salem.

After we had left behind the tall official buildings in Winston and its modern high street along with its brick town hall, it was as if we crossed an invisible wall into another time. Old clapboard houses, brick and dark timber-framed houses turned up along a leafy street, signs of tradesmen hanging from the eaves of some.

All of this linked to an event from the early 1400s. Years before Martin Luther, there was Jan Hus in Bohemia who daring to challenge the practices of the Roman Catholic Church was naturally burnt at the stake. His followers, who called themselves the Unity of Brethren, left the land and travelled to Saxony (Germany). Some took off to England. The rest of the Moravians, as they were called in England, moved to the New World.

Now the pity is that we had to vamoose. Our end game was a secluded cabin up in the Great Smoky Mountains. Tennessee was a four-hour drive from Winston-Salem, including stops. More if you slept in a McDonald’s car park after the torpor induced by a locally brewed ale from Salem (we are hard-pressed to pass up on liquid gold). As a result, we did not have time to wander into the living history museum of Old Salem, where they have tradesmen going about their various trades, for the sake of the curious visitor. Bakers, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, gunsmiths, carpenters operate within the walls of Old Salem, in a bid to forget the modern world.

What we had instead was a gander at the charming architecture around us, thinking that this was the kind of town we should have seen bathed in the warm glow of gas lamps. Met a woman sauntering down the road in her old Germanic dress of embroidered bodice and waistcoat, long skirt and pinafore, her hair masked in a white cap. Somewhere from afar the clip-clop clip-clop sounds of a horse carriage reaching our ears in the tranquility of the night.

However, it was not too bad, what we ended up with. Actually no, it was nothing less than an esoteric triumph. Pumpkin muffins (oh yes, I have had my headstart on autumn) slathered (a touch too) greedily with honey butter, and a scrummy pecan pie, following Adi’s un-Moravian meal of beef burger and mine of a traditional chicken pie smothered in a thick broth. All ravished at a historic tavern where George Washington had dined during his tour of the Southern states in the spring of 1791.

Sep 14, 2018

Arundhati Basu60 Comments

DC En Couleur

The need to craft words about the city falls away, for once you walk its wide open boulevards, there is no escaping the aura of power that envelopes it. Tangibly at that. Classic row houses lined up on broad, leafy avenues, impressive buildings of embassies and trade unions, grand hotels and saloons, followed by resplendent federal buildings and museums with their decided partiality for classical architecture, the many Ionic column, the mythological figures carved upon the facades… oh, but our senses were awash with these visions of grandeur. And all this, the conception of a Frenchman who in the late 1700s came upon a rolling landscape of hills and plantations, forests and marshes, at the confluence of two rivers. Together with the first president of the United States, Pierre Charles L’Enfant laid out an architectural groundwork for the city, imparting it with unequivocal majesty, but died without receiving payment and recognition.

It’s been a long-drawn-out two hundred years and more, Monsieur L’Enfant, but maybe, just maybe, you would strut its streets with pleasure, pronouncing it Ç’est Magnifique, even as you cock an eyebrow at the girl who walks past you with her mane of flaming brilliance and air of nonchalance.

Processed with VSCO with a5 preset — Again, in colour. Do you prefer the monochromatic version of it more?

2018-08-14 09.55.32 1.jpg — Colour, in DC

2018-08-14 09.49.28 1.jpg — The Commissary

2018-08-14 09.55.19 1.jpg — Samuel Hahnemann Monument. In memory of the German physician who founded the branch of alternative medicine called Homeopathy.

2018-08-14 09.55.17 1.jpg — The Omani cultural center in DC

2018-08-14 09.55.14 1.jpg — Old Catholic churches

2018-08-14 09.55.04 1.jpg — The White House

2018-08-14 09.55.05 1.jpg — Trump and his admirers. Seen outside The White House.

2018-08-14 09.53.23 1.jpg — High-wheel bicycle for men. The Columbia Light Roadster, 1886. Spotted at The National Museum of American History.

2018-08-14 09.53.22 1.jpg — Apple Macintosh. The first box that arrived with flair in 1984 for the sum of $2,500. What a long way we have come!

2018-08-14 09.53.19 1.jpg — First Lady Caroline Harrison’s modest velvet-satin evening gown in burgundy and grey

2018-08-14 09.53.21 1.jpg — A New York dressmaker fashioned this gold damask and cream satin gown for Lucy Hayes, the first First Lady to boast of a college degree.

2018-08-14 09.53.18 1.jpg — First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s state dinner dress by Oleg Cassini in yellow silk, with an overlay of crepe chiffon, and her costume pearl necklace.

2018-08-14 09.53.15 1.jpg — Another Oleg Cassini grey brocade silk ensemble for Jackie Kennedy

2018-08-14 09.53.06 1.jpg — Curious stranger

2018-08-14 09.52.58 1.jpg — Capitol Hill

2018-08-14 09.51.32 1.jpg — Library of Congress

2018-08-14 09.51.21 1.jpg — Shots from within the Library

2018-08-14 09.49.52 1.jpg — Minerva at the Library of Congress

2018-08-14 09.49.33 1.jpg — Feeling fizzy at Fiola Mare

2018-08-14 09.49.29 1.jpg — Lusciously grilled octopus, branzino, langoustine and lobster

2018-08-14 09.49.31 1.jpg — Raviolo Carbonara with black truffles and Beech mushrooms

2018-08-14 09.49.39 1.jpg — The National Monument

2018-08-14 09.49.43 1.jpg — Granite and marble come together in this imperial memorial to Thomas Jefferson

2018-08-14 09.49.36 1.jpg — National Monument through the columns of Jefferson Memorial

2018-08-14 09.49.44 1.jpg — Twilight on the Potomac

Aug 27, 2018

Arundhati Basu52 Comments

The Bridges of Delaware County

In Upstate New York, there is a town called Delhi. This we did not know about and this I can tell you with not enough emphasis that a Delhi we did not expect in the middle of Delaware County. But it is in the unfolding nature of a drive in the countryside that it shall throw your way places that are unforgettable, sometimes by virtue of their outlandish names. There is the congested city of Delhi in India with countless pockets of heritage left behind by the Rajputs, the Tughluks, the Mughals and the British, tucked in within its urban sprawl, and then there is this, its little doppelgänger in the quiet reaches of the Delaware River.

A Delhi in another continent, to be found where the hills roll into each other in a chain of thickening foliage, where the blue of the skies deepen before they touch upon the vibrant green of the hills as barns and silos turn up from time to time to relieve the monotony, where beauteous horses and calves roam the pastures in quiet bonhomie. That is till you step into the picture. Then the calves stare at you, the startle showing through their great big eyes of bovine beauty. And they hold still for a few minutes, before they scuttle behind the horses for shelter.

Pronounced Del-high, as opposed to the original Del-ee, the outré Delhi of Delaware County came to be around the late 1700s. It was named for the man who founded it, a judge called Ebenezer Foote. He must have lived a lavish lifestyle, for he was referred to as The Great Mogul. Thus the name of the town, which includes the hamlets of East Delhi and West Delhi.

Now Judge Foote had a rival, General Erastus Root. He who rooted for the name ‘Mapleton’ and reacted to the announcement of the town’s new title with the words: ‘Del-hi-hel-high! Better call if Foote-high!’

In Foote and Root’s day, Delhi would have been different. Just over a hundred residents lived around the valley of the River Delaware with its pine and hemlock woods. Eighteenth-century accounts say that Indians traversed through it with prisoners and their scalps at the time. If one of those Indians arrive in present-day Delhi through a wormhole, imagine his face. From the hundreds, the numbers of residents have swelled to a few thousands. Delhi is a vision of small-town utopia, with its line-up of diners, cafes, and the village square, where I can see in the mind’s eye, locals gathering at fairs and harvest fest.

It is just fitting in the scheme of things that Delhi should be home to a covered bridge. You know, those structures of sublime architectural beauty that span rivers, simple and yet commanding, evoking in the onlooker the twin feelings of thrill and romance, because well that book of Robert James Waller did spoil us all with its sentimental talk of the ‘songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads’.

Covered wooden bridges were built all over the country during the early 1800s to allow horses a semblance of quiet as they crossed gushing rivers, with carriages and caravans in their wake. The cool dark of these bridges are a great respite from the heat of summers and they naturally inspire romance. Kissing Bridges, they call them too. The landscape around each of them is of extraordinary pastoral beauty. The sight makes you want to be an artist, whip out a canvas, start splashing it with brilliant colours and introduce a note of balance through the muted shades of wood.

The trail of covered bridges took us from Fitch’s Bridge in Delhi to Hamden, a canvas of small-town living, where the bridge spanned the West Branch of the Delaware River. The drives were filled with the freshness of colour that nature is suffused with at the onset of summer. We watched fawns leap across the roads with the grace of lithe ballerinas, whooped with delight, and came upon a turkey buzzard of the bald red heads and disproportionately large bodies feeding upon a dead animal. There was no whooping then, but scenes of inimitable pastoral beauty washed over us.

When we arrived upon the last in the trail for us, the Downsville Covered Bridge, we were overwhelmed by the tranquility of its location. The entire length of this bridge designed by a Scottish immigrant was reflected in the still waters. As we walked around the greens with its pergola, suggestive of happy unions, it fit in smoothly, the thought that this was the kind of place where you get married.

A bucolic romance fest cobbled together with bridges and hamlets and barns and silos later, we crossed the last of our covered bridges, Adi gliding the car through its timbered darkness, for what do they say?

‘Five dollars fee for driving faster than a WALK on the bridge.’

Scenes from Delhi

Processed with VSCO with preset — Fitch’s Covered Bridge. Built originally in 1870 in the village of Delhi for the sum of $1,900. Fifteen years later, it was moved a mile away to its present location.

2018-06-17 11.41.07 1.jpg — On a November day from 1977, the introductory lines of an NYT piece on Delhi read: ‘The big issue in the election here tomorrow is whether to go dry.’ We know which way the people leant.

2018-06-17 11.41.09 1_1.jpg — Gutted by a fire, the shire pub that is back in business

2018-06-17 11.37.43 1_1.jpg — Craftsman-style houses and Victorian-style farmhouses showed up

2018-06-17 11.37.38 1_1.jpg — Barns and silos, chock-full of character

A letter of Ebenezer Foote’s. Sourced from oneonta.edu. Note how he talks about the pure air of Arbor Hill, where he built his house in Delhi. The list of goods he sent to the receiver of the letter, including the cigar meant for a ‘social puff’, is engaging.

Scenes from around the rolling hills

2018-06-17 11.35.12 1.jpg — ‘Now now, why is she yammering?’

2018-06-17 11.35.22 1.jpg — Bales of hay in the Catskills

2018-06-17 11.35.16 1.jpg — Mendicant in the Catskills

2018-06-17 11.35.27 1.jpg — Working barns

2018-06-17 11.37.05 2.jpg — Who said you should not pit yourself against the sun? Chuck rules.

2018-06-17 11.37.01 1.jpg — Cross-section of a rustic barn. The fingers itch to transform one of these into a cosy nest.

Hamden

2018-06-17 11.37.19 1_1.jpg — The Hamden Covered Bridge, built in the mid-1800s, for a sum of $1000 by Robert Murray. It straddles the West Branch of the Delaware River.

Downsville

2018-06-17 11.26.00 1.jpg — Adi’s favourite bridge was this, Downsville Covered Bridge. Built by Robert Murray in the mid-1800s at a cost of $1,700.

2018-06-17 11.25.56 1.jpg — *‘Analysis destroys wholes. Some things, magic things, are meant to stay whole. If you look at their pieces, they go away.’* Robert James Waller.

2018-06-17 11.26.08 1.jpg — *‘The reality is not exactly what the song started out to be, but it’s not a bad song.’* Robert James Waller.

Jun 22, 2018

Arundhati Basu48 Comments

Colours of the Night in Florence

Now wait, did you think I was done with Florence? You do know my proclivity for banging on about one place till I have flayed it to its core, right? Because the mind finds itself wedged between the atmospheric alleys of an old city, it refuses to let go of memories acquired under the half-light of twilight.

The old towns of Europe, they come alive under the warm yellow lighting ensconced within the vintage street lamps as you trod upon uneven cobblestones coating those old roads. You walk down narrow alleys charmed by everything you set your eyes upon because is it not all a living fairy tale? A pastel pink leather bag bagged within the leather shops where the smell of animal skin is pungent and thwacks the olfactory senses, looking into bookshops where tattered tomes line shelves in a language you sadly have no knowledge of except for the bits and bobs of local phrases you spritz your conversations with, let dusk turn frigid. Beat the sting of the evening air by pottering around the Christmas market that sprawls itself in front of the Gothic basilica. The Basilica of Santa Croce.

Nibble on potato cutlets smeared with hot melted cheese, slices of smoky speck ham, chomp on churros doused in chocolate sauce and then some piping hot bratwurst…take a breath from eating…listen to the man singing out his soul with a rendition of Cohen’s Hallelujah and then stare at colourful rows of candied fruit and precious old porcelain tea cups and dishes. If only you had space enough to lug them back home.

Gawking at the tall Christmas trees peppering the piazza around the colossal personality of the Duomo, a shy Cocker Spaniel pup hiding behind her master in his tweed coat and flat cap, the cathedral, campanile and baptistery lit up subtly because such extreme beauty of those reliefs carved out from coloured stones should shine only under nebulous lighting.

That is how we let it come to a grand end, in the shadow of the Duomo, you and I, humans humbled by the sheer superbness of it. Before we sit on the train that whisks us back to Rome.

Jan 9, 2018

Arundhati Basu82 Comments

Romanced by Florence

I saw Florence once again through the eyes of my love. In it, I found inordinate pleasure.

That was another time it seemed when I had caught the train from Milan to Florence in the spring of 2016. Though it was not quite long ago. I had set out on a walking tour with a middle-aged artist with a long, gaunt face, dishevelled hair covered by a tweed flat cap, his ample girth covered by a capacious coat that had seen better times. He had drawled about the finer points of Florence which could not be missed by the most absent-minded person that ever existed. Mouths gaped open then at the sight of the Renaissance magnificence that reared its head in a cluster upon the Piazza del Duomo.

The wonders wrought by the compilation of bands of serpentine green, red and white stones by Renaissance architects Brunelleschi and Giotto. Sculptors of the likes of Ghiberti and Pisano whose doors retain their arresting quality so that Michaelangelo declared Ghiberti’s doors of bronze to be the ‘gates of paradise’. Those gates lead inside the Baptistery of St. John where the mosaic clad dome blinded me momentarily with its flamboyance in gold. So that when I had stepped outside and one of those street artists, a pot-bellied jocular Italian, had grabbed my hand while streaming out words in Italian, I remember feeling bewildered, amused and seized by the urge to swat his hands off mine. My blank expression made him break out into bits of English and the mixture of persistence and perseverance was difficult to escape.

But this was now and Florence had acquired an added sheen of romance. Adi’s jaws dropped visibly as we walked into the Piazza del Duomo just like mine had. Soon his face wore a hangdog look as he followed me up Giotto’s Campanile. A steady stream of climbers made sure that we had to keep climbing. By the end of it, legs reduced to a jelly consistency, my darling flatly refused to subject himself to the same torture up the Duomo. His excuse was the 5pm ticket slot we had. ‘It will be dark by the time we are up on the Duomo,’ he insisted. I felt benevolent. I relented. You have got to choose your battles after all. There was a long walk ahead. I had planned to make him walk up the hills that climb above the city. We lunched at a cutting-edge seafood restaurant where the salted codfish made me want to trill. The dopey fellow who took our orders and messed it up did not however make me want to trill. Balance was achieved.

We were soon wandering around the Uffizi, staring at the imposing Palazzo Vecchio guarded by the copy of Michaelangelo’s David and Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus. We stood at the spot where the Renaissance preacher Girolamo Savonarola had been hanged and burnt, shivered at the thought, and Adi wondered aloud at the Rape of the Sabine Women. You see, when the first king of Rome, Romulus, came to power, the Romans wanted to marry the Sabine women. But the ancient Italic tribe did not agree and the Romans abducted the Sabine women. There might not have been sexual violation thrown into the fray, yet the event was dubbed so. The plethora of stories upon stories that lie buried within the old walls of Florence makes the mind whirl.

We found curious quiet once we had crossed the Ponte Vecchio, the old bridge populated by rows of jewellery stores spanning the River Arno. A bylane led us up and up and soon we were on cobbled paths lined by elegant old villas and olive groves, an old chiesa, an old man stooping upon a walking stick to pick his way carefully upon the cobbles. The silence of it broken only by the occasional Fiat that swept by us with great speed. The Italians are supersonic on their Vespas and Fiats.

Adi wondered if we were lost. I soldiered on with a determined look that relayed more confidence than I felt. The road not taken was taking its own sweet time. Yet how beautiful it was as it gradually opened up to a road that snaked past the gardens of Boboli and offered up views of Florence below us, framed by an army of green and golden trees. Words are always inadequate to express the beauty of any moment.

Later, after we had watched lovers embracing by the medieval defensive walls of Florence, traipsed through alleys in which leather shoemakers sat crafting hair-raisingly expensive shoes, peeked into shut antique stores and upholstery studios, gobbled up cake and coffee at a charming coffeeshop, watched a couple of men stop in their tracks to gawp at a woman running in shorts, we had a leisurely stroll by the Arno. Dusk descended upon our shoulders in rosy hues and an old man bicycled along the river with his arms entwined about his lover. There it was, that incredible feeling of love and belonging. We were caught in the bubble where nothing else mattered but that we were there together in the midst of the impossible beauty of that ancient city called Firenze.

Adi turns his back on the Renaissance magnificence of the Piazza del Duomo rather grudgingly.

Florence Cathedral and Baptistery of St. John in profile

Salted codfish with onion relish in chickpea puree

Hercules and Cacus by Baccio Bandinelli at the entrance of Palazzo Vecchio. Cacus, the fire-breathing giant, was slayed by Hercules for terrorising Aventine Hill before the founding of Rome.

Chiesa di San Leonardo in Arcetri, an 11th century church from the pulpit of which Dante and Boccaccio had preached sermons.

In the distance stands Torre del Gallo, an ancient castle belonging to the Galli family of Arcetri.

Leather shoemakers off the Tower of San Niccolò

An alley opening up to the Tower of San Niccolò

A slice of chocolate cake to take the sting off incessant walks above Florence

2018-01-04 0971240170..jpg — The Ponte Vecchio on the Arno

Jan 4, 2018

Arundhati Basu60 Comments

The Tall, Taller and Tallest in Manhattan

“You can do what you like, sir, but I’ll tell you this. New York is the true capital of America. Every New Yorker knows it, and by God, we always shall.”

That’s not me spouting off biased and borrowed wisdom in my two days of being here. I am not a New Yorker yet. I do not know if I shall ever be one in my heart. The quote is from ‘New York’, a historical novel by British author Edward Rutherford. If you like the kind of bulky tomes that you can hurl at people (who annoy you) and thereby cause serious injury, Rutherford is your man. If you are the kind of person however with a penchant for useless dreaming, and you also possess the patience of a beaver, then you would rather flip open that tome. Channelling your inner Om.

‘New York’ introduced me to historical layers of a world that I had no idea of. The story of Native Americans who lived on Mannahatta, or ‘the land of many hills’, the name given by ancient tribes to Manhattan that is the city’s historical birthplace. The plot starts thickening once the European settlers trickle in.

Now that busy streak from Manhattan’s past, my friend, has infiltrated the present day in which I found myself walking down the busiest of the five boroughs of New York.

On a noon hedged in by skyscrapers, there we were, two people ultimately new to New York’s glitzy glory, craning our necks to take in the full view of an army of towers. Some tipped with golden spires, others with sombre spires and facades sheathed in glass in which you could catch reflections. Just a vision of tall buildings looming above us, no matter what angle we turned our heads at. Oh, it was a giddy feeling alright.

A series of impressive court houses with their massive pillars achieved the intended effect of imbibing us with the requisite amount of awe. A colonial building in a leafy park turned out to be the city hall where the mayor of New York sits and an old church in red bricks shot its hand out to declare its presence right after.

Walking beneath old gaslights into the leafy City Hall Park that was the place for public executions and recreations in old times, we soon found that we were at the portals of the hallowed St. Paul’s Chapel. Standing outside the oldest church building in Manhattan, where George Washington prayed and which survived the 9/11 attacks, we were in a sense soaking in the colonial heritage of the city.

Then there’s the iconic One World Trade Center, rebuilt upon the old World Trade Center complex, catching reflections of the changing skies above us and… wait, what was that strange building, presenting a strange vision of bifurcating ribs?

A thorn in the taxpayer’s line of vision, as a New Yorker might say. Or The Oculus. But I cannot and shall not complain about this building that was conceived of as a giant dove by a Spanish architect. It might end up looking like giant claws apart from ribs but that is a different matter. Some have even likened it to a dinosaur.

You do feel for the architect. Creativity requires imagination and not everyone can give into your vision, however grand and ambitious it might be. It might not be everyone’s favourite building but The Oculus is a paradigm of space and modern design. Through its ribs the skyline of the city was broken up in a linear manner, which was strangely engrossing as the three pink balloons winking down at us from its elevated spot upon the glass beams.

Dear old Oculus is now one of my closest buds in New York. I shall not try and explain that odd fact away given that you know me by now. You see, I enter the city through The Oculus which is the World Trade Center Transportation Hub. It replaced the old PATH station that was destroyed by the 9/11 attacks. Just to put it in perspective, the PATH decoded is Port Authority Trans-Hudson, the rapid transit system that connects places like Newark, Harrison, Hoboken, and Jersey City in New Jersey to New York City, apart from linking up lower and midtown Manhattan as well.

You can well imagine then why I shall rely upon Oculus dear for emotional support and extensive hand holding during all the times that I shall find myself goofing my way around New York, boarding the wrong trains and finding myself in places unknown.

I know this that Oculus shall always be there for me.

2017-05-28 06.17.03 1.jpg — Gaping at The Oculus. Just a very normal reaction.

2017-05-28 06.16.55 1.jpg — Manhattan skyline through the Oculus

2017-05-28 06.16.52 1.jpg — A hip photographer hugs the ground as he waits for the four to kick their feet into the air

2017-05-28 06.16.53 1.jpg — Imagine all the times they must have fallen on their heads. I am odd anyway. A fall or two might take it to unnecessary levels.

2017-05-29 08.00.06 1.jpg — Approaching the pillars of justice around the bend

2017-05-29 08.00.03 1.jpg — Hefty pillars of governance

2017-05-29 08.00.02 1.jpg — The traffic is incessant

2017-05-29 08.00.01 1.jpg — The wheels of justice. They grind on.

2017-05-29 08.00.00 1.jpg — Sizing up the city

2017-05-29 07.59.48 1.jpg — City Hall. A profile.

2017-05-29 07.59.47 1.jpg — The goodness of two alliums bobbing their pretty heads inside the City Hall Park

2017-05-29 07.59.46 1.jpg — Gaslights and the city

2017-05-29 07.59.41 1.jpg — City Hall Park

2017-05-29 07.59.42 1.jpg — The old and the new stand shoulder to shoulder

2017-05-29 07.59.40 1.jpg — Brownstone buildings of Manhattan

2017-05-29 07.59.37 1.jpg — One World Trade Center

2017-05-28 06.17.04 1.jpg — Mr. Whippy where art thou?

2017-05-28 06.17.14 1.jpg — St. Paul’s Chapel, cross-sectioned

2017-05-28 06.17.12 1.jpg — Spires. Old and new.

2017-05-28 06.17.10 1.jpg — Entering the picture in silhouette

2017-05-28 06.17.05 1.jpg — ‘Show me the glint of light on broken glass.’ What would you have made of this, Mr. Chekhov?

Jun 5, 2017

Arundhati Basu65 Comments

Guide to Gaping: In London’s Financial District

I mean where else might you gape? Though if you’re a gaper like me, you would find fodder for it most anywhere. There’s no harm really, except once in a while midges might make their way in and an odd fly or two. So if you like experimenting with bugs and beetles in Asian food markets, why just keep your mouth open and you can have them for free in your own city.

The husband works in the heart of the City. Right next to the Gherkin. On Friday evening, I sauntered into its shadow to meet him for drinks and dinner. Now, a prime area for gapers is within the bounds of London City, you know the Square Mile, which is supposed to be just 1.12 square miles in London, but as you walk around, it seems substantially larger than that humble number.

But first, whip back your lovely heads. Though I shall not and will not be held responsible for a crick.

2017-04-11 08.53.42 1.jpg — **The Gherkin (aka 30 St. Mary Axe) looms above me.**

2017-04-11 08.53.41 1.jpg — **Standing tall at 591 ft. if contemporary architecture can woo you, The Gherkin gets the job done.**

2017-04-07 04.29.37 1.jpg — **The Walkie-Talkie (20 Fenchurch) stands tall too at 525 ft.**

2017-04-11 10.35.52 2.jpg — **The Shard. The tallest in the hood at 1,016 ft.**

2017-04-11 08.53.40 1.jpg — **Even street installations loom over you.**

2017-04-11 08.53.38 1.jpg — Straight ahead on the right hand side that weird steel structure, with its ducts and lifts sticking out in your face, is the home of insurance. Lloyd’s of London. You can literally see its bowels, the inner workings, so you would get the term ‘Bowellism’ and an example of a strange, modern school of architecture. It was coined by a British architect, Michael Webb, who got it from a lecture delivered by a history of architect in which that man said: *“I saw the other day a design for a building that looked like a series of stomachs sitting on a plate. Or bowels, connected by bits of bristle”*.

**Where Lloyd’s of London stands, there used to be located the ‘Old’ East India House (a late 17th-century Dutch print) which came up in the 1600s.**

This is the ‘New East India House’ that was built by 1729. It was the London headquarters of the East India Company that ruled British India till the government wrested power from its clutches in 1858 and took over the job of governing India.

2017-04-11 08.53.22 1.jpg — **The Cheesegrater (Leadenhall Building) is 737 ft. tall and can you spot those lifts that are moving simultaneously in shades of neon orange and green? It is a fascinating feature.**

2017-04-11 08.53.24 1.jpg — The 387-ft. tall St. Helens on the left, The Gherkin on the right, and in its shadow, bathed in the mellow rays of the setting sun is St. Andrew Undershaft, a 16th century Gothic church, that survived the Great Fire of London and the Blitz.

If you stepped back in time, this was Londinium, a trading port for and by merchants along the mighty Thames. It came up around 47 AD when the Romans ruled Britain and later was sacked by the tribe of Iceni led by their queen Boudica.

2017-04-11 10.35.53 1.jpg — **All hail Boudica.**

Now that I am done waffling, how about a pint or two?

Where to Drink:

Sky Garden at 20 Fenchurch. This is an expensive affair but with a view of London’s skyline. You could be easily looking at £70 per person (totted up for the most expensive items on the menu which include starter, main course and dessert) excluding alcohol. A 5-course tasting menu is priced at £55 and for wine pairing add £42 more. If you are still game, you can book 60 days in advance because people do book it up weeks ahead. P.S.: Dress code is a bummer but there you are, no shorts, flip flops, sports gear, please.

Aqua Shard. Here’s another pricey beauty that will get you when the bill arrives, but hey, the views of the riverside loveliness of the city from the 31st level of The Shard might just make up for it. I would say pop in for a Champagne afternoon tea that starts at £58 per person. Nibble into dainty delicacies while sipping on some bubbly to numb the senses before the bill arrives.

Leadenhall Market: If you are fine with views of the city on the ground level, look no further than Old Tom’s Bar in this market that stands on grounds where trade has been going on since the Roman times. Potter fans, you have seen it in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Yes, I know that you know, yet the need to disperse Potter trivia…

2017-04-07 04.29.31 1.jpg — Follow me into Leadenhall Market? The 19th century Victorian market traces its origins back to the 14th century when it used to be a meat, game and poultry market within the portals of a ‘hall with a lead roof’. It has an ornate roof painted in shades of green, maroon and cream.

2017-04-11 08.53.27 1.jpg — City workers hard at work on Friday evening. They stand in massive columns outside pubs with their pints. Soon those ties shall go askew, shirts protest their way out of trouser waistbands and the hair shall manage to look ruffled even with generous amounts of hair gel in place. For the bald, the last is not a problem.

2017-04-07 04.29.24 1.jpg — **Where the husband leads, I follow.**

2017-04-07 04.29.22 1.jpg — **Next to roll down the stairs of the craft beer pub.**

2017-04-07 04.29.16 1.jpg — **Inside the atmospheric bar.**

2017-04-11 08.53.26 2.jpg — **And find delectable extra mature cheddar cheese that melts like cream in the mouth, paired with sourdough crackers and caramelised onion chutney. That Camden Pale Ale is precious.**

Before I leave you, the shot below is from an obituary published on April 16, 1835 in The Times. The allusion is to Old Tom, a gander who had arrived in the City from Ostend in Belgium. He followed his heart (a wily female of the flock), and even though the rest of his flock became fixtures on dining tables, Old Tom somehow had people indulgently feeding him scraps. He made it to the ripe age of 37 till he died a natural death and was buried in the market. Below is a tribute to the venerable gander.

Apr 11, 2017

Arundhati Basu42 Comments

A Day at Horniman

Sparkling sunny weekends are a rarity in our part of the world. If the week shall go in a sunny, breezy mode, Friday rolls in and the clouds declare their presence, often not in a I-am-billowy-and-pretty-just-like-that way. The weekend did start on a cracking note and the sun did power its way through Sunday. So the British have declared summer. Over the last two days, men have been spotted in speedos atop caravans, women have been noted to drive in bikinis and others have been sitting in barely-there-shorts in the backyards.

On Friday, quite early in the morning I had work in London – which meant I had the whole day to myself after. I made my way to the Horniman Museum. The fact that it was free added a spring to my step. But what I had overestimated was my power to get lost. I Will get lost. No matter how many years I have been living in a country. My teenage years in Calcutta were spent regularly landing up in odd places and an irate father coming to the rescue. Once after a date, I took the wrong bus and reached another part of Calcutta quite late at night. I was invited by an old man to his terrace home – when I look back I am astounded at my calibre for silliness. I did go up to the terrace with him and make an SOS call to the parents (who could not believe their ears). As it happened, it was new year’s eve, and my uncle and his family were visiting us from London. The whole family came to get me back home. Suffice it to say that the evening is etched in my memory.

It took me two hours to get to Forest Hill from Baker’s Street by tube and overground trains (when it should have taken me all of 50 minutes). I do not know where I went wrong except that I did get on and off a few trains and stand at stations where I should not have. In the meantime, the person who was getting steadily worked up through watsapp was the husband. He had visions of massive charges on the card because of all the overground trains I was changing.

But I did reach Horniman. I have proof of meeting the in-house walrus.

2017-04-07 02.43.23 1.jpg — **Walking beneath the cherry blossoms of Forest Hill take away the sting of goofing up.**

2017-04-07 02.43.19 1.jpg — **Beneath bowers of cherry blossoms who can be woeful for long.**

Our Walrus is an unusual taxidermy specimen, it appears stretched and ‘over stuffed’ as it lacks the skin folds characteristic of a walrus in the wild. Over one hundred years ago, only a few people had ever seen a live walrus, so it is hardly surprising that ours does not look true to life.

The name Horniman is owed a great deal to by tea lovers. Today it is owned by Douwe Egberts but the founder of the eponymously named Horniman’s Tea was a trader called John Horniman. He had started the tea trading business in the small but beautiful Isle of Wight in 1826 and had also changed the concept of selling of loose leaf teas which were often adulterated with dust and hedge clippings by unscrupulous sellers (horrendous, right?). He sealed his packages of tea thus ensuring that authentic tea leaves reached the customers sans the extra ingredients. Even our much-touted philosopher of profoundness, Nietzsche, deemed Horniman’s to be his preferred brand of tea. Who likes the great outdoors (apart from the leaves) in his tea? Well, the great majority clearly gave John a thumbs up, so his company did become the largest tea trading company in the world by 1891.

The museum however was not his idea. It was his son Frederick’s brainchild.

Frederick_Horniman_by_Trevor_Haddon_(detail).jpg — **Portrait of Frederick John Horniman**

Thanks to the country’s passion for tea, Frederick had enough moolah to indulge his passion for collecting. Everything from natural history to musical instruments and cultural artefacts. This museum of his has a sum total of about 350,000 objects. As a tea lover how could I not see what tea had wrought?

2017-04-07 02.42.47 1.jpg — **Meet the walrus of Horniman’s. He is a celebrity, okay? He was possibly sourced from the area around Hudson Bay in Canada. Queen Victoria too had visited our tooth-some friend.**

2017-04-07 02.43.07 1.jpg — **If he looks unnaturally fat, blame it on the taxidermist. He/she overstuffed him. So there are no folds on his skin.**

2017-04-07 02.42.49 1.jpg — **Meet the three long-eared owls. I took to them. I mean, just look at them. Especially the look of the third fellow on the extreme right.**

2017-04-07 02.42.52 1.jpg — **Look at that beak of the Crowned Horn Bill. Solid as a curved piece of wood, you think?**

2017-04-07 02.43.12 1.jpg — **Iridiscence. Beetles and bugs.**

2017-04-07 02.42.59 1.jpg — Scarlet Ibis

2017-04-07 02.42.55 1.jpg — A Central American beauty.

2017-04-07 02.42.57 1.jpg — Merman. ‘WHAT’, did you say? In the early 18th-19th centuries, mermen were brought by sailors to Europe. They were believed to be real for centuries, inhabiting the oceans around Asia, till it was discovered that they were indeed products of man’s genius for imagination. They were found to have been the head and torso of a monkey put together with the tail of a fish. Man is a genius. Fraudulent ones, more so.

2017-04-07 02.42.54 2.jpg — Golden-headed Trogon

2017-04-07 02.43.09 1.jpg — **Philosophising orang-utan. He has the stance and stick of a hermit.**

2017-04-07 02.43.08 1.jpg — **Be kind to my special friend, the red-howler monkey. He belongs in the treetops of Brazil. I am sure he thought, ‘Oh no, am I in the Blighty?’ and that priceless expression was thus frozen.**

Lest you think that strange stuffed animals is all you shall get to see, there is also the wonderful park and greenery around you on a fine summer’s day.

2017-04-07 02.42.33 1.jpg — **Horniman gardens**

2017-04-07 02.42.36 1.jpg — **Views of London’s skyline (you can just about make out the silhouette of The Shard on the horizon)**

2017-04-07 02.42.40 1.jpg — **Conservatory at the Horniman Museum**

2017-04-07 02.42.32 1.jpg — **When you leave the museum, you might just be rewarded by a Mr. Whippy.**

So, the question is that if you are in London, should you or should you not head over to Horniman’s. I would say give it a go if you feel like turning into a child all over again. And do remember me if you meet the walrus and the red howler monkey.

Apr 10, 2017

Arundhati Basu29 Comments

Glass for Princes in Murano

A mile north off Venice is the cluster of islands called Murano. We crossed in a vaporetto (water taxi) from Venice to Murano on a day that was joyously sunny. The kinds that come wrapped up in a bow only once during a few miserably cold and foggy winter days spent in Venice. When we got off the boat at Murano, the first sight that greeted me was that of a bearded local dragging a sizeable carton on wheels . He looked like a fisherman, the lines of the years marked out on his weather-beaten face.

A rustic, atmospheric introduction but what lay after was anything but unassuming. Workshops, boutiques and factories cropped up in a row, flanking the grand canal. Stepping inside them, my senses were dazzled by the rich colours of delicately designed glassware — and, may I add sheepishly, the prices.

There we were at the heart of it all – Murano thrives on the art crafted by the glass blowers of the island. They have been at it for centuries. Somewhere towards the end of the 13th century, the Doge ordered the glassmakers to move their factories to Murano. Now there is a bit of dilemma about why he did so. But it sways between two schools of thought – one that the Venetian authorities did not relish the thought of their wooden buildings exploding with the danger of fire at large, and secondly this that they did not want the craftsmen to divulge their secrets to outsiders.

The glassmakers achieved exalted status soon. They could carry swords, evade prosecution by the Venetian state, and by the late 1300s, their daughters could even be wedded into blue-blooded families. The only glitch was that the glassmakers could not leave the Republic. If a glassmaker had plans of setting up shop on lands beyond his own, it would mean two things for the fellow – he would either lose his hands (sounded to me like Shah Jahan’s edict for the workers behind the Taj Mahal had travelled far – the Mughal emperor was supposed to have had their hands lopped off so that they could not replicate the glory of his tribute to his empress), or, he would be killed by the secret police.

We had to watch one of the glassmakers at work. It is quite a touristy thing to do, yes I know, but sometimes I feel that you have got to be a tourist to the hilt. We marched into one of the factories and paid up about 8 euros each to watch a third-generation glassblower go about his job with incredible ease. Within the time that we spent gaping at him twirling a long pole, the tip of it encased in a glowing cone of fiery melted glass, he had moulded a handful of pretty pieces of coloured glass including one of a horse rearing up.

Veneto-Byzantine summer palazzos and cathedrals apart, I was taken in by the iridiscent blue sculpture at Campo Santo Stefano. It was a veritable starburst in glass. I gaped more – by which time Adi was fairly tired of sulking and being ignored while I kept staring at glass. To not have your sulk acknowledged is worse than your partner shopping on the sly. My husband shall confirm both. He does the first, I do the second. At that point of time he had made the transition to Mr. Grumps. He had not been fed gelato on time.

Off we went on a gelato hunt which concluded the visit to the island on a fairly satisfied note. Not to mention the few colourful pieces of suspended, ceiling lamps that we bought before boarding the boat to Burano.

2017-03-21 08.38.53 1.jpg — **Baked and bearded Murano locals**

2017-03-21 08.38.56 1.jpg — **Grand Canal**

2017-03-21 08.38.55 1.jpg — **Boutiques that line the canal**

2017-03-21 08.39.08 1.jpg — **Glass blowing – at the very heart of Murano is this art.**

2017-03-21 08.38.57 1.jpg — **Inside a glassmaker’s workshop**

2017-03-21 08.38.58 1.jpg — **The focal point of this shot being the horse.**

2017-03-21 08.39.02 1.jpg — **Emerald hues of the Grand Canal and cathedral walls looming alongside.**

2017-03-21 08.39.03 1.jpg — **Blue glass sculpture at Campo Santo Stefano, the 19th century clock-tower.**

2017-03-21 08.38.50 1.jpg — **Post mint chocolate chip gelato, all is usually well.**

2017-03-21 08.39.10 1.jpg — **Murano’s lighthouse made of Istrian stone.**

How to Get There: Look out for Vaporetto 41 and 42 from Piazza San Marco in Venice. You can also stop at the cemetery island of San Michele, that lies between Venice and Murano.

Where to Buy Glass: Go with your instinct. We stopped at a shop that was quiet but the owner refused to haggle (which was a bummer) but the relief was that we did not come out with products made in China.

Where to Eat:

La Perla Ai Bisatei. An Italian eatery where I stopped for cappuccino and a spinach puff pastry that delighted my tastebuds with its flakiness. The food is supposed to be good here and the prices reasonable.

Osteria al Duomo (www.osteriaalduomo.com) is a family-run affair and known for the freshness of the locally-sourced food it serves up.

Apr 3, 2017

Arundhati Basu79 Comments