At around 7am we wake in a haze on board our traveling bedroom. The night was rough, full of noisy juddering stops, wriggling children, badly gauged air conditioning, and too narrow beds. But when we ping up the blind on the enormous picture frame of a window and look out across the Puglian countryside illuminated […]
“The principal task of civilization is to defend us against nature”, wrote Sigmund Freud. Today, it is nature that needs defending against civilization. From its conceptions it’s [civilization] been a conceited and dishonest term. The connotations of civilization include moral decency and it suggests that nature in general and wilderness in particular lack that quality. […]
Bologna, like many of Italy’s ancient cities, is fringed by a bombilating ring road with eleven enormous Roman portas (doorways) dotted around its edge. Once you manage to cross this heaving artery, you enter an ancient maze of portico-covered walkways (Bologna has an incredible 28 miles of them, including the world’s longest at 666 arches), […]
We eat our takeaway-train breakfast at 6am around our new kitchen table in Bologna. And after golloping down 6 slices of yellow, plasticky Austrian cheese, a tub of chocolate spread, two pots of yoghurt, and four cartons of orange juice, we go back to sleep for an hour in our new beds. This is an […]
This evening we leave Austria for Italy on a sleeper train. The children have been counting down the nights with unprecedented excitement; when bedtime comes around there’ll be bunk beds and locomotives, all together in one rocking place. But before we pack up and leave, we’ve time to see a little more of Vienna. We […]
