I am perhaps just too sad! Joined up a month or so ago. Well worth £60pa. And the online resource is phenomenal and addictive. You can search over 100 years of scanned in back issues of three different horology magazines. And by search, I mean by keyword, it’s all properly scanned. Hours and hours of time eaten up.
Looks good, Ollie, will have to check it out
(Plus suggest it to my friend, who has exhausted the BBC’s supply of classic crime!)
I’ve been vicariously travelling in Italy, following my autumn trip to Genoa and Turin
This book evokes the people and cityscape of Florence, with a sweep back through its history of civic pride, fierce opinions on art, and cutthroat commerce among those stunning buildings
I got pointed towards Lewis’s Florence book by this anthology of writing about the country: by novelists, travellers, poets, residents
Some big beasts too. Charles Dickens lived near Genoa for a while - who knew?
Has generated quite a reading list
Sicily was described so glowingly by several authors that I’m reading this, by an American of Sicilian descent who moved there, writing articles for the paper on local characters and living traditions in remote villages
The streets of Polizzi Generosa:
hanging laundry, handpainted street names
‘so close and intimate that I felt I’d walked into someone’s stone boudoir’
‘In the rain the stones shone like puffed satin pillows - uneven, imperfect, and of humans’
If I can’t get there this year, at least I can bring it to mind :-)
It's the final countdown! PM me before they're all gone!