Works in Progress
ITALY:
ART, ARCHITECTURE, RELIGION, FOOD, SEX, LOVE, POLITICS, AND CRIME
Project begun in 2005 and continuing.
Fortuna atop a globe supported by two atlases. The weathervane atop the old customhouse in Venice executed by Bernardo Falcone in 1677. Today the Punta della Dogana houses Francois Pinault's outstanding collection of contemporary art.
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These three volumes — Rome and Environs, Northern Italy, and Southern Italy and Sicily — are the fruits of fourteen explorations of the peninsula and Sicily that I've made since 2005. They began as travelogues written as I systematically explored Italy’s cities and regions. That manuscript ballooned to 632,944 words, about four times bigger than a big book. So I took that manuscript apart, edited it and rearranged it into the present three-volume format of center, north, and south. This structure reflects the geographical, historical, and cultural patterns of the highly varied peninsula, which, after the waning of the Roman Empire, devolved into a patchwork of independent city-states and separate principalities, including the Papal States stretching from Rome to Bologna. Italy has only been a unified nation-state since 1870. The old divisions are still evident in the physiognomies, landscapes, customs, crops, industries, economies, politics, dialects, architecture, art, culinary traditions, subtle variations in Catholicism, and in the relative sway of criminal syndicates in her diverse regions. All of Italy’s provinces have their own strong urban center, enduring cultural capitals of long-lost city-states and principalities, famous or obscure. This book explores and interprets many of the most interesting of them and makes for both leisurely armchair travel and as a guide to places to experience on your first -- or next -- visit to the bel paese.
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ITALY SAMPLE: TABLE OF CONTENTS
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ITALY SAMPLE: ROME & CELIO
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EMERALDS IN A SILVER SEA:
SAN FRANCISCO PARKS AND PLAYGROUNDS, 1839 - 2020
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San Francisco has an astonishing 220 parks and 179 public playgrounds, quite a large number for a city of only 49 square miles. About a fifth of the Golden Gate City is park land — 3,400 dispersed acres. They range from Golden Gate Park, a famous Victorian parkscape, to long ocean beaches and bayside coves, to hilltop parks with sweeping views, to neighborhood parks, to pocket parks, to privately-owned but publicly-accessible mini parks next to skyscrapers. The federal Golden Gate National Recreation Area manages miles of scenic shoreline reservations.
This history began as my doctoral dissertation in history at Harvard. It is best described as an institutional history. For most of the city parks are as man-made as her buildings. They are not places purposely left undisturbed but rather spaces over which people have fought, which they have laboriously shaped and graded, which they have planted and watered, maintained and policed at great expense to generations of taxpayers. San Francisco’s parks are complex, dynamic, political creations with extremely varied individual histories. This history tells all those stories. |
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EMERALDS SAMPLE: TABLE OF CONTENTS
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EMERALDS SAMPLE: EXCERPTS
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