Not on the Itinerary August 8, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Air Tickets, Cars, Destination, Hotels, Moscow, New York, Round The World, Russia, Sightseeing, Tickets, Tour, Travel Clinic , 5commentsAlthough my churchgoing is confined usually to weddings and funerals, there are times when I am certain that one guardian angel at least has been detailed to watch over my welfare.
Such an occasion occurred halfway through my holiday in Russia. I had taken a package tour to Moscow and Leningrad primarily for the White Nights Festival of the Arts in June — an annual event of Soviet cultural life when the sun hardly sets for a fortnight and old men sit in the public gardens for half the night playing speed-chess. (more…)
Aboard the Trans—Siberian Express July 25, 2008
Posted by dodo in : China, Embassy, England, Moscow, Rail Pass, Restaurant, Russia, Sightseeing, Tickets, Tour, Trails, Travelling Bag, Trip , 3commentsShe started sobbing three hours before the border. The conductress tried to console her with a glass of sweet, strong tea but without much success. She remained in the long druggeted corridor, a crumpled figure in a pink dressing gown watching the forests spinning madly by. The tankard holding the glass depicted a Slavic swordsman defending a child and she held it tight as a keepsake.
It certainly was a crying matter. The birch forests of Siberia, so upright, so elegant in autumn, had been broken by this winter campaign. Brought into perfect arcs by wind and snow, the younger birches littered the track-side like ribs and tusks while the old and brittle, unable to bow before the onslaught, rose into the air like splintered spines. (more…)
Tsarskeo Selo: The magnificent palace of the Empress Catherine the Great continue… May 7, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Air Tickets, England, Flight Schedule, Library, Memorial, Museum, Russia , add a commentThe staircases were decorated by murals — the work of Hubert Robert, the French painter of romantic landscapes with classical ruins. One of these murals represented the Gallery of the Louvre, lit from above, and another the imaginary ruins of the same gallery. The state apartments, which adjoin one another, overlook the main forecourt. First comes the famous Amber Room(iantarnaia komnata) with its walls completely panelled in amber, pale as honey. It had been made specially for the King of Prussia, Friederich Wilhelm I. Peter the Great saw it at Mon- bijou when he was in Berlin in 1717. The sergeant-king agreed to surrender it to him ‘ in exchange for eighty tall recruits’. (more…)
The Winter Palace: A masterpiece by Italian and French architects on Neva May 4, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Beach Resorts, Credit Card, Finland, Health Insurance, Library, Memorial, Moscow, Museum, Russia, Travellers Cheque , 3commentsIt is impossible to talk of the Winter Palace without first conjuring up a picture of the city of St Petersburg, now Leningrad, and of the Neva River. I know of nothing in the world more beautiful than that great expanse of limpid and tremulous water, purified by the filter of the Ladoga Lake, and constantly agitated by tiny iridescent waves, that flow impetuously between the double dam of its magnificent embankments built in the rose granite of Finland. And the powerful stream that moves between the golden needle of the Petropavlovsk Fortress and the long facade of the Winter Palace is but a very small part indeed of the great river. (more…)
The Royal Palace STOCKHOLM: One of the finest examples of French taste outside France Part 2 April 26, 2008
Posted by dodo in : France, Paris, Poland, Russia, Sweden , 4commentsTessin had been much impressed by Italian late-renaissance and baroque buildings during his European tour, and the exterior of his new palace bears witness to this admiration, for it is in rather a severe style, obviously much influenced by such buildings as Caprarola and the Pitti Palace. This severity is relieved by pompous entrances in the south and west facades and should have been further softened by a series of statues which were to have been placed along the top of the otherwise quite uncompromising skyline. By the time the building was ready to receive these statues, however, Charles XI was dead and the dashing young Charles XII was on the throne. (more…)
The Royal Palace STOCKHOLM: One of the finest examples of French taste outside France Part 1 April 26, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Beach Resorts, Denmark, Europe, Finland, Russia, Sweden , add a commentThe Swedes must have felt they were well on the way to becoming a great Continental power at the end of the seventeenth century. Already, during the Thirty Years’ War, Sweden’s small but well-trained armies had distinguished themselves in central Europe under the leadership of their king, the dynamic Gustavus Adolfus. A quarter of a century later, Gustavus X had beaten the Danes by yet another stroke of brilliant generalship. This defeat did not finally settle the long drawn-out quarrel between the two countries, but it forced Denmark to give up the fertile southern part of the Swedish peninsula. (more…)
Tullgarn: A charming lakeside summer-palace of the Swedish monarchy April 25, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Airlines, Beach Resorts, Hotels, Library, Lodges, Memorial, Museum, Russia, Sweden, Travellers Cheque , 3commentsMuch of Sweden is composed of very wild country, and even today one can travel for miles through the rock-strewn, dark pine forests only occasionally seeing a cluster of houses or a gang of wood-cutters or a school bus on its daily round, returning the children from the school-house in some local township. Every now and then one comes to a town which has grown up round the timber industry, but such towns are mostly fairly new and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was nothing but wilderness stretching over most of Sweden — dark, terrifying and, it is easy to imagine, filled with trolls and other supernatural beings. Separated by these vast forests, were the three principal areas of habitation. (more…)
ROCOCO April 4, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Australia, Austria, Brazil, England, Europe, France, Germany, Greece, Hotels, India, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Peru, Portugal, Russia, Spain, The Nile, USA, Wellington , add a commentAfter the great days of Baroque, the High Renaissance, led by Bernini and Borromini, and followed variously by Mansart and le Vau in France, Fischer von Erlach and von Hildebrandt in Austria, Zimmerman in Germany, Churriguera in Spain, and Wren,Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh in England, and before a period of Revivalism, France emerged from the reign of Henri IV (reigned 1589-1610) to establish a wealthy bourgeoisie under the political patronage of high taste in the salons of country chateau and hotels. In the next century, during the transitional period from Louis XIV (1638-1715) to the regency of his great grandson, Louis XV (1710-74), a demand for comfort, intimacy and ornament led to the late Baroque variant of Rococo.
The word Rococo derives from the French word rocaille, meaning sea rocks and shells, and it is applied to the highly ornamental and decorative strain of late Baroque architecture. (more…)
BAROQUE April 4, 2008
Posted by dodo in : England, Europe, France, Greece, Hungary, London, Poland, Russia , add a commentWhile Europe celebrated the dawn of the 17th century with a new Baroque architecture that was to survive for 200 years, Jones followed his mentors, Alberti and Palladio, to Rome, where he studied neoclassical buildings in the company of his patron, the Earl of Arundel. His return to England led to an extraordinary paradox. While Europe had moved from the austerity of Bramante’s classicism, through the French “Fontainebleau style“, to the decorated sensuality of Baroque architecture, England emerged from a stone, timber and brickwork craft tradition to embrace an apparently revolutionary style, which, under Jones’s hand, returned the Renaissance to the rigour and scholarship of the early period.
From 1618 until his death in 1652, Inigo Jones dominated architecture, and he left to the Stuart period of English history a new tradition of classicism or Palladianism, which challenged the Dutch-influenced brick and stone style and established a platform on which Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723) continued to build. After a distinguished career at Oxford University as Professor of Astronomy, Wren was appointed surveyor- general of the King’s Works. He was influenced by the French Baroque, a style that is evident in many of his great buildings, especially those designed after the devastations of the Great Fire of London in 1666. (more…)
