There is a difference between visiting a place and being taught by it. Tourism gives you impressions. Fieldwork—the kind that involves returning in different seasons, taking measurements, sitting alone in churches until the silence becomes uncomfortable—gives you something harder to name and more difficult to acquire: an understanding of how a place works upon a […]
Five Things Cortona Taught Me About Writing Sense of Place Read More »
I can offer no other explanation: I close my eyes and travel. The ancient Mediterranean worlds of the tales I write lie some 9,600 kilometers from my writing desk in Rio de Janeiro, and yet, in the solitude of the working hours—the cell phone on mute, the tropical city going about its business beyond the
Rio de Janeiro and the Bronze Age: Writing Ancient Worlds from a Modern City Read More »
I first became aware of Cortona as a teenager, poring over the history of the Etruscans, those singular people who were neighbors of the ancient Romans. Their art held me fast from the start. I remember dreaming of their magnificent bronze casting of the Chimera and of the feasting scenes painted on the walls of
Cortona: The City That Calls to Me Read More »
There is a grave irony embedded in the Church of San Francesco of Cortona. The man who built it, who brought its most precious relic from Constantinople, who wished with all his heart to be buried there—and was—that man died outside the order that bore his master’s name, expelled, excommunicated, and unredeemed by any Franciscan
Brother Elias, Sinner, the Man Who Built San Francesco of Cortona Read More »
There is a mountain that watches over the plain of Neméa from the north—flat-topped, unmistakable, rising above the valley with the quiet authority of a place that has been looked at for a very long time. I first saw it in April 2019, at the end of forty kilometers on a bicycle, with the Temple
Perseus and the Altar on Mount Apesas Read More »
Novelist Edmond Thornfield explains why literary travel is essential to writing historical fiction, from Knossos and Mycenae to Florence and Cortona. There is a question I am sometimes asked, usually by readers who have noticed something in the novels that feels too precise to be invented. How did you know what the road from Knossos
Literary Travel as Research: Why I Must Go There Read More »
An exploration of Donatello’s revolutionary contribution to Renaissance sculpture, psychological realism, and the rediscovery of the human form in fifteenth-century Florence. IN THE LONG HISTORY OF WESTERN ART, THERE ARE PERHAPS A DOZEN MOMENTS WHEN A SINGLE ARTIST SO FUNDAMENTALLY altered the way human beings see that the world before and after their work are,
Donatello: The Sculptor Who Awakened the Modern Eye Read More »
