Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Researching Venice for my next time travel book exposed some peculiar surprises about my favorite Italian city. Tourist hordes, floods and exorbitant prices aside, it endures as a spectacular living museum, but some due diligence revealed that, like its patron St. Mark, some of Venice’s more famous artworks didn’t arrive willingly. Like most empire-builders, the Venetians were notoriously light-fingered. In 828, with its archrival Rome boasting St. Peter’s tomb, Venice decided its patron saint, Theodore of Amasea, didn’t carry enough clout. Seeking someone more prestigious, and with the remains of Jesus’s disciples being a limited commodity, they went after Mark’s relics in Alexandria. Thieves masquerading as merchants sailed for Egypt, snatched the body...
Read More“Let him who wishes continue.”
Louisiana abounds with tales of antebellum sugar kings and their baronial estates. For extravagance and tragedy, few eclipse Valcour Aimé, the “Louis XIV of Louisiana” and his home, Petit Versailles. Wondering what remained, I drove up the Great River Road some years back and found lush cane fields crowding the bones of what had been the grandest private garden in the Americas. The big house had been lost to a fire in 1920, but old photos and journals gave a glimpse of the grandeur that was. François-Gabriel “Valcour” Aimé was born into wealth in St. Charles Parish in 1798 but never rested on his lofty laurels. After buying a string of sugar plantations, he experimented with refining methods and developed a vacuum pan system revolutionizing the...
Read MoreYou Can’t Go Home Again
In my only one-sentence blog, I pay homage to Thomas Wolfe’s eponymous classic and offer proof that a picture is indeed worth a thousand words.
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