How we slept on that first night on the Isle de France!. For that is what Mauritius was known as by the French who had to give up this serendipitous island after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo and where the inhabitants speak a quaint creole French patois but can understand and speak continental French too.

It’s only two hours difference between Italy and Mauritius but a night spent on a plane did not give us much thought for sleep and the two films we watched on the in-flight entertainment ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’ didn’t help. Moreover, we were delayed by over two hours attempting to land at Dubai where an angry storm was raging. Yes, it sometimes rains there too and when it does it’s a veritable deluge.

(Since writing this we found out how lucky we were to get out of Dubai when we did just as dark clouds were enveloping the gulf. The heaviest rainfall for over seventy five years produced mass flooding, over twenty deaths and thousands of air travellers grounded at the international airport for over twenty hours without food because of the unprecedented situation the country found itself in).

It’s amazing how much digital technology has helped expand the variety of sounds and sights on a plane. In the music selection, for example, there was even a section dedicated to Renaissance music.

We were met at the international airport and driven to our hotel, the Causarina resort and spa. In the descending twilight I could just make out the extraordinary dragon’s teeth silhouettes of Mauritius’ central mountain range.

This first morning we were delighted to see how low-rise, indeed picturesque our hotel is. We were temporarily accommodated in a rustic bungalow pending a definite location.

As we were told that in the afternoon our stay room would be sorted we decided to go to a nearby beach where we could turtle-watch on a glass bottomed boat.

We set off with a family from France and two other couples. Would we see these adorable creatures of the deep?

Yes! And here is one of them.

My wife took some better pictures but they will need to be downloaded. We even managed to get into the incredibly turquoise sea and follow these ancient and very large reptiles.

We returned to our hotel walking along the coast road and admiring the flora flanking it.

We are now in accomodation which we will be able to keep for the rest of our stay.

We are very happy with our first day on the island and look forwards to more adventures in this amazing part of the world. It’s truly a melting pot of east and west and we have already been able to use three of the languages we speak: English, French and Hindi ,to communicate with the locals who we have found out to be very courteous and helpful.

‘Hair’ is the title of a sixties tribal love-rock musical on the theme of the hippie counter-society and the subject of much discussion in an era when caftans took over from sports jackets and menthol cigarettes were superceded by three-rizla paper joints.

Hair wasn’t just a question of styles, of dyeing it, of plaiting it or anything remotely like that. For girls it wasn’t even a question of length, so wrapped up were they with back-combed and beehive helmets and those ghastly perms which made them look like premature grannies. But for boys hair was a real issue. So used to short-back-and-sides with, at most, a ‘boston back’, to let one’s hair grow even just a half inch more than the accustomed allowance would arouse astonishment. ‘Sheepdog’ was the word my Latin master threw at me. At zebra crossing it would be ‘queer’ shouted by lorry drivers. At home it was a constant ‘get your hair cut’ dirge from my mum – my dad had given up the subject some time previously.

What was it about even the most modest length of one’s hair that created such disfavour, even antagonism, among the older generations of the nineteen sixties? After all, looking at photos of the Victorian age the hirsuteness of males was striking. Beards and moustaches of the wildest of styles accompanied hair which even among the most respectable classes could be grown quite long.
Clearly time in the army and national service, which didn’t stop until 1963, influenced what was deemed suitable for males.

Today – happily – it is a different hair world for both sexes. From skin heads to the longest of locks hair length no longer arouses anxiety or distress except to the most mildew-laden conservatives. Hair is just part of a person’s style like the clothes they wear or the subjects that interest them or the music they listen to.

And yet! To think that I and so many of my contemporaries were daily subject to constant attack from member of society and, most rigorously of all, from our own parents. In an office situation long hair had to be hidden. For a visit to relatives we were immediately told to go to the barbers. And so forth. The basic equation was long hair = bad character. I even had long-haired friends shooed from our family house. Long hair was inevitably associated among the older generations with delinquency, moral depravity, even sexual vice.

Of course, this hairy problem no longer affects me today…and not just because I’ve lost most of my hair. It just doesn’t have the importance it used to have in those benighted post-war years when brillcream dispensers were to be found in in every public bath.

I still like to cast an eye upon those few photos of my teenage years when I was physically able to disport a Byronic head of hair. Oh! How I had to fight in those days to keep my natural right to have my hair the way I wanted it!

We began with a walk across a windy Waterloo bridge with Kitty at the end of it:

This beautiful bridge, designed by the architect of Liverpool Anglican cathedral, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, is also known as the Lady’s bridge as it was built largely by women during the Second World War since so much of the male labour force was involved in military service.

A passageway at the end of the bridge leads to Somerset House’s river terrace. This noble edifice, designed by Royal Academician Sir William Chambers as a riposte to criticism that London lacked a contemporary building worthy of its status, was formerly a government office but is now happily given over to cultural and social pursuits.

In the House’s expansive Italianate cortile a part was occupied by Zheng Bo’s bamboo installation. Coming from an area of the world (Bagni di Lucca) where bamboo groves abound what I saw seemed a little underwhelming but nevertheless it was pleasant to sit among the plants and do what the artist has asked visitors to do: take a piece of paper and a pen (both supplied), draw bamboo leaves and chill out.

Somerset House contains one of the world’s great private art collections: the Courtauld gallery. Here we were able to view an immensely powerful series of largely charcoal portraits by Frank Auerbach. Now well into his nineties the artist was one of those lucky children of Jewish decent who managed to escape the concentration camp by being smuggled out via Kinder transport. Many great artists seem to wage an apocalyptic battle with their medium. Beethoven with his last wonderful quartets and Michaelangelo with his titanic sculptures come to mind. Auerbach fights too, stabbing his paper with the charcoal, then patching things up, then obliterating what was drawn. It’s a cosmic struggle to get into the heart of his subjects, some of whom had to fight just to survive the dark forces of the war years.

Impressionists at the Courtauld are the glory of the collection. How that lucky family, who once lived near us at Eltham Palace, managed to find such amazing examples is anyone’s guess. I particularly like the Pisarro showing the train stopping at the former station of Lordship Lane. At the top of the hill to the right, since built upon, is the house where I once lived.

The Courtauld gallery also contains a marvellous collection of paintings ranging from Italian primitives to Goya.

Some of the gallery’s ceilings have elegant decorations by Gianbattista Cipriani, my wife’s ancestor.

We exited from Somerset House onto a fully pedestrianised Strand. It was a very pleasant surprise! It’s so much better when cars are banned from some of our city streets. Here it works really well. St-Mary-le-Strand, the elegant church by eighteenth century architect Gibbs, so long regarded as a mere traffic roundabout now fully emerges as the flower it is. An absolutely appropriate transformation!

Our evening of ballet at Covent Garden’s Opera house was preceded by a walk round the former fruit and veg market, now a lively promenade with its shops and street performers who continue a tradition going back centuries. Here, for instance, Samuel Pepys recorded the first Punch and Judy show he’d ever seen.

It was a triple at the Garden celebrating that doyen of coreographers Kenneth Macmillan, son of a Scottish labourer. First were the Dances Concertantes set to some of Stravinsky’s wittiest music. This was followed by ”Different Drummers’, a harrowing tale based on Buchner’s ‘Wozzeck’ and with music by Webern and Schoenberg from their earliest and most palatable period. The conclusion was ‘Requiem’ set to Faure’s own wonderful Requiem mass.

i would have been happy to have heard just one item from the evening’s programme. I wish I had the emotional strength to have fully appreciated all three. It was just too much! I felt sad that I could not have concentrated more on the supreme movements of this finest of ballet corps but at the end of a day, the warmest London day so far this year, already filled with emotion, I found I was sinking fast in a tristanesque swoon. All the same, what a great day out!

There was a time when ‘Punch’, now sadly defunct, was a very popular periodical and one to be reckoned with. Also known as the ‘London Charivari’ it contained articles aimed at a rising middle class and became famous for its cartoons and satirical insights. Edward Linley Sambourne, a superb draughtsman, contributed much to make Punch’s cartoons well-known. Starting as an embellisher of textual capital letters he continued to produce good-humoured caricatures of both famous and notorious personalities in late Victorian England. Sambourne’s technique was immaculate and he became one of the first to use photographs – he was also an accomplished photographer -. to develop his art. Sambourne’s masterpiece is perhaps his design for the Fisheries exhibition diploma which took him over nine months to complete:

Linley was also an excellent book illustrator.; some of his best are for Kingsley’s ‘Water Babies’.

Through his profession Sambourne got to know many of the rich and famous who formed society at the height of the British imperial era. It was natural for him to find his own place to live in the pleasanter parts of London. In the 1870’s the area round Holland Park was being developed with terraces built in Italianate style for the expanding well-to-do middle classes. One of these houses is no. 18 Stafford terrace. Consisting of three floors and a basement, this house, through luck and devotion, remained in the same family until 1980 when it was gifted to the former GLC and subsequently taken over by Kensington Borough. We thus have the opportunity to visit a rare survival of a late Victorian and Edwardian interior. Thankfully, the whole area has largely been spared the worst ‘development’ and so the house Sambourne bought with the money he earned from his work with ‘Punch’ is happily enmeshed within some lovely streets.

Each of the rooms in Sambourne’s house is well documented with guides explaining furniture and pictures they contain. Clearly tastes have changed but for for many who wish to re-create interiors from the ‘belle-epoque’ places like these are invaluable. For example, scenes from films like ‘A Room with a View’ and other period dramas have been created here.

It was fascinating to wander through the house where we were luckily virtually alone. Our volunteer guide was most personable and we soon engaged in topics on architecture and such-like. I almost seemed to hear conversations from a past era and wondered what these characters from an age, where everything seemed so secure, would have thought about the present pandemonium in our world.

Sambourne’s house spilled into an even plusher neighbourhood – the artists’ colony centred around Lord Leighton’s place around the corner in Melbury Place – in two respects. In the astonishingly evocative place Leighton built for himself – a dwelling I consider to be perhaps his highest artistic achievement – we visited two exhibitions directly related to the Punch cartoonist. But first let’s wander through Leighton’s house built up over the years of his very productive artistry – an art which sadly plunged in estimation after Leighton’s death until people like Webber regretted they could have picked up ‘Flaming June’ for £50 if his mum had lent him the money….

First were the photograph Linley took in Paris’s streets at the turn of the century. By this time cameras had become smaller and more portable and thus more spontaneous shots could be taken., And these certainly were:

Second was the exhibition there ‘Out Shopping: The Dresses of Marion and Maud Sambourne (1880-1910)

Marion Sambourne was Linley’s wife. Their daughter, Maud, shared an artistic flair which she abandoned in pursuit of a prosperous marriage with Leonard Messel.

The exhibition featured a selection of dresses they wore for special moments and social occasions, many of them rare surviving examples by leading designers of the era .

.Recently meticulously restored they again offer a unique insight into an age which felt it could have lasted for ever were it not for something that happened in Sarajevo in 1914.

As ever nature’s greenery is never far in London and we enjoyed a well-earned rest from our wanderings in Lord Leighton’s lovely garden.

Easter seems so far away now. Perhaps because it came early this year. Anyway, here are some snippets from our Easter lunch including my wife’s lasagne.

Our Easter egg which would put any Cadbury ‘creme’ to shame. The ‘sorpresa’ inside it was a pack of cards suitable for playing poker. Let’s hope they are lucky ones.

Since the start of April there has been a considerable climatic change with the first wave of ‘gran caldo’ to hit Italy. A few daffodil stragglers are left in the garden and several new flowers have appeared. Amazingly the geraniums have started to blossom. The wisteria is like a gigantic floral waterfall!

.It’s all very colourful … and worrying at the same time. We do not recollect such early bloomers as this year. When should we migrate to colder climes again I wonder?

We have now…to an area of the word over ten degrees colder! Anyway, here we are in time for a visit to some interesting sights in the Great Wenn…and more, including a Greggs sausage roll.

There are so many places of interest on one’s journey from Lucca to Florence! Could one dare to miss them on the way to the birthplace of the Renaissance? I’ve mentioned some of these places in my post at https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2017/04/02/make-it-an-interesting-journey-from-bdl-to-florence/ which includes a description of that picturesque Arno valley gorge known as ‘La Gonfalina’.

Quite apart from the major towns of Prato and Pistoia, so full of some of the country’s finest cultural and artistic heritage, there are the smaller centres of San Miniato al Tedesco (made famous by the Taviani brothers’ film ‘La Notte di San Lorenzo’), Empoli with composer Busoni’s house (see my post at https://longoio3.com/2023/04/29/empathic-empoli/), Vinci, the birthplace of that greatest of universal men, Leonardo, (see my post athttps://longoio3.com/2019/05/24/where-leonardo-da-vinci-was-born/ ), Ponte a Cappiano, the centre of Tuscany’s old canal system (see my post at https://longoio3.com/2020/09/16/ponte-a-cappianos-canal/) and many other exquisite places.

In mediaeval times meals would be served on wooden boards called ‘tagliere’. Indeed, they still serve that way for snacks consisting of cheese, olives and salami in local bars and restaurants. However, crockery changed all that in the fifteenth century and potteries sprang up to supply plates for the new fashion in presenting one’s meals.

Among these places is Montelupo, between Signa and Empoli. It reached its apex of production in the sixteenth century and, although somewhat less industrious today, remains notable for its fine production which would turn any kitchen into a mini art gallery.

Towards the end of the last century archaeological investigations there led to the discovery of a large pit into which broken or discarded pots were thrown. These have been examined, classified and restored. A selection of them form the Montelupo ceramics museum.

We first visited this museum in 1994 when it was combined with the town’s archaeological museum in an old palace. Our photos dating from that year also show samples from local ceramic workshops.

Since 2005 the two museums have been separated with the archeological museum moved to the former asylum for the criminally insane housed in the Medicean villa called the Ambrogiana and the ceramic museum rearranged in the old secondary school. (I do not know where the criminally insane have been moved to).

The Ceramics Museum of Montelupo Fiorentino, presents on two floors a collection of ceramic works ranging from the 14th to the 18th century . Both floors offer a chronological reconstruction of the history of ceramic art and a path for the blind with tactile tiles and captions in the Braille alphabet. The eight rooms deal with specific themes such as medieval and Renaissance cellars and kitchen, the potter’s workshop, collecting, exports, clients, health and wellbeing. There’s s section dealing with the pharmacy and there’s an animal-and-flower-design themed room.

Among the most prestigious finds there’s the famous “Rosso di Montelupo”, a majolica basin decorated with grotesques, dated 1509 and signed on the back with the mark LO which means that it came from the workshop of Lorenzo Pietro Sartori. This wonderful plate, which is named after the rare red pigment used in it, was once owned by the Rothschilds and was added to the museum in 2002 after an auction bid of Euro180,000.

The museum is equipped with interactive activities and deepens one’s knowledge of ancient manufacturing traditions. Workshops and educational activities are also organized for children and adults. It’s indeed what a museum should be: not a musty collection of artefacts for learned hacks but one open to all ages and where knowledge can be acquired in a spirit of discovery.

Here are some of the wonderful plates we viewed. I wish we had a few if them in our kitchen..they would wake me up for breakfast ..or at any time!