“Oh come on, ‘I’ for Italy!” “What’s the problem?” Tomoko asked, buckling her seatbelt and settling in for a drive. “It looks like my recently updated sat nav has maps for all of continental Europe…except Italy.” We were sitting in the rental car lot at Bologna airport. Night was falling. I’d never been to this part of the country before, and we had to get to the town of Faenza that same evening...
There’s a smallish town just outside the Berlin city centre that’s completely encrusted with palaces. It’s only 30 minutes away, at the end of the S7 line, on the River Havel. And it’s the most popular day trip from Berlin. Postdam was originally a Slavonic settlement, founded in the tenth century. But it was the Hohenzollerns who put it on the map. The house of Hohenzollern rose to prominence...
If you want to understand Malta — and the southern Mediterranean in general — then you’ll want to come to grips with the theory of Amoral Familism. As far as I can tell, the term was coined by the anthropologist Edward C. Banfield, who conducted ethnographical research in the town of Chiaromonte in southern Italy in 1955. Banfield wrote that the fundamental rule of amoral familism was, “Maximize...
It’s been ages since I’ve published a blog. I think I’ve only written 3 this year. But I haven’t forgotten you, or vanished in a desert somewhere. It’s just that I haven’t been traveling at all. We moved to Berlin at the start of January, and I haven’t left the city since. To steal an image from Lawrence Durrell, I guess you could say we’re de-barbarizing and re-gilding after life in Malta. I’m...
Palmyra sits far out in the desert, an oasis within what is now the war torn country of Syria. When I went there in 2009 it was a rather forlorn place: a town of date palm plantations existing on the margins of the known world. But from the 1st to 2nd century, this desert oasis stood at the crossroads of civilizations, and the traces which remained preserved an art, architecture and religion...
I learned and experienced many things during my years in Malta, and I wrote around 30 articles about it — most of them were positive, about the places we discovered, from small village streets to the windswept heights of Ras ir-Raheb and the coast of Blata tal-Melh. But some were critical, too. I found the history to be quite fascinating. The present culture not so much. And this past year of...
I moved to the Mediterranean because I wanted to write an island book inspired by Lawrence Durrell. But it had to be a place no one else had written about — at least, not in that way. I found Malta after a brief web search. I knew nothing about the place apart from indirect Dashiell Hammett references and vague notions of Knights battling Turks. That vagueness appealed to me. And so we gave up...
It’s that time again. I typically read about 100 books a year. Everything from travel literature to poetry, history, psychology, fiction and memoir. I love reading lists and recommendations, and I bet a few of you do, too. So at year’s end, I like to take a moment to share my top reads of the past twelve months. It was a really great year for amazing books in my reclusive world. A few were...
The highlight of my Christmas Eve was a last minute drive over to Valletta to see the new Star Wars film. Valletta was in full xmas-mode and it seemed like half the island was out for a stroll. Only 15 people in the entire cinema made it feel like a private screening, and Rogue One did not disappoint. But that’s not the story I wanted to share with you today. As has become my custom when in Malta...
Have you ever dreamed of living in the middle of an artillery firing range? Then Malta in summer is for you. Whereas the military might lob a few shells over for a couple hours a week, here you can be treated to a nonstop bombardment, varying in intensity between dull monotony to cataclysmic barrage, with a brief break between about 1am and 8am. I can still recall my first experience with the...