A Visit to Dominica continue… September 1, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Africa, Dominican Republic, London, Restaurant, Tour , 3commentsSome way below the garden a man stood quietly washing himself in the hot water from the spring; it was channelled down there in a homemade aqueduct of halved bamboo stalks resting on forked twigs. ‘For every improvement to the guest-house, I make something for the local people,’ Anne said. ‘It’s their island.’
I wanted to see the rainforest I’d read about, a place where vast trunks rise up like the pillars of a gloomy cathedral, where lianas hang down, where bright parrots chatter in the sunlight of the tree canopy. (more…)
The Renaissance April 4, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Dominican Republic, England, France, Italy , add a commentThe 14th century saw a new spirit of intellectual inquiry, which was democratized by the invention of printing and radicalized by the Reformation in religion and a Renaissance, first in literature and, afterwards, in architecture. In England the new wealth of the laity led to the development of domestic architecture, which was encouraged by Henry dissolution of the monasteries. In Italy, the seat of Roman antiquity, the scholarship of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Petrarch (1304-74) and Boccaccio (1313-75) was celebrated by a national interest in classic literature, which paved the way for a revolt against medieval art.
The fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 led to an influx of Greek scholars to Italy, especially to Florence, a city of great military and political power. Florence had conquered Pisa in 1406 to gain a valuable seaport, and had gone on to take Milan and Lucca, becoming a powerful republic, the centre of European Renaissance art and a place of religious intrigue, from where the pious and indefatigable Dominican friar Savonarola (1452-98) simultaneously challenged the papal authority of Alexander VI and the tyranny of the powerful Medicis. Rome meanwhile awoke from the poverty of medieval feudalism to welcome the return of the popes from Avignon. Nicholas V (144755), Julius II (1503 - 13) and LeoX (151322) became great patrons of the arts. (more…)
