LOS ANGELES

It has been a long, fun, hot summer... with few posts.  We had a couple more trips away, to Maine, upstate, Cape Cod, and were lucky enough to get to end the summer in the sunniest of places, Los Angeles.

It is official: I love LA.  I like the weather, the architecture, the landscape, the food, the proximity to family, even the driving.  While I hatch my plan to get back to California, from whence I came, enjoy the highlights of my week of in our future place of residence:

First of all, Joans on Third is reason enough to want to move.  Above, the cheese counter.  This is where I would eat lunch every day if I lived out there.

Second: the Santa Monica Farmer's Market.  It makes the Union Square market look like a supermarket in 1970's Stalingrad.

Third, and most important... proximity to my family.  I spent a couple days down in San Clemente as well.

HISTORICAL MAPS

Most people who know me know I am obsessed with both history and geography.  I have found a site that combines these two special things: The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection.  The site allows you to zoom in on each map and see an impressive level of detail.  I have spent, and will no doubt spend many more, hours pouring over the 18th and 19th century maps of California and New York.  One of the most interesting finds was viewing this 1844 map of New York Harbor and comparing it with a very similar harbor map from 1866.  You can see how quickly Manhattan grew, and Brooklyn too, in just 22 years.  

The natural features of the harbor and shoreline are detailed beautifully in both maps.  There were so many creeks and swamps and estuaries before it was all paved over and industrialized! A fascinating exhibit currently showing at MoMA outlines urban planning and design solutions for returning a level of natural interface between land and sea here in New York.  I highly recommend seeing it before it closes in the fall.

First map image via Swaen.com

MAINE WEEKEND

Here are some shots from our 4th of July/ jam-band festival trip up to Maine... moody, saturated photos courtesy of my new favorite invention: the shake-it app.  It's been a hot summer so far and I am already dreaming and planning for Cape Cod!

VILLA NECCHI CAMPIGLIO

I just saw Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love, staring Tilda Swinton. An Italian melodrama full of passion, haute cuisine, chic fashion and Milanese architecture, the film features the Villa Necchi Campiglio, an imposing home built between 1932-35 in an art deco meets rationalist (also known as fascist) style. The movie was fantastic, for many reasons, but the production design by Francesca Di Mottola is utterly phenomenal.

Di Mottola and Guadagnino show Milan in all it's sharp, aloof grayness. The house is a brick an mortar incarnation of the strange, intensely private and intensely privileged lives of the industrial elite in northern Italy. Everything that feels vaguely depressing and oppressive about the city seems honed into a glossy marble slab in the film. The house is currently a museum open to the public, but for filming was made into a rich, luxurious series rooms that, one after another, each seem to invent yet another shade of brown. I can't get it out of my head!

I cannot wait to visit the house the next time I am in Milan, and I will most definitely be seeing the movie again to soak up the visuals a second time. For more images and information, check out the T magazine article written by Armand Limnander.

Images via travelpod and habituallychic.blogspot.com

SPAIN, PART II

After Barcelona we headed out into the Catalan countryside, to the little town of St. Julia de Llor. Lots of sun, swimming, grilling and reading.

And lots of pork. As much Jamón Ibérico as I could get my hands on.

St. Julia is near the Catalan city of Girona. Girona was first Gerunda, the main city of the pre-Roman Ausetani people. The area was conquered first by the Romans, and then the Visigoths and then the Moors, and then by Charlemagne, by the Moors again for a brief time, eventually becoming part of the countship (then duchy) of Barcelona... one of the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain. Girona was an important center of medieval Judaism until the Inquisition drove them out in 1492. The old center of town is one of the best preserved medieval Jewish ghettos of Europe, and contains some of the better examples of Spanish Gothic architecture on the continent.

All that history hasn't stopped a bit of modern architecture from popping up. Here is an interesting door to an architecture firm's offices in the center of the old part of town.

A rented 17th Century farmhouse.

We also took a day trip to the Costa Brava. Here is the town of Begur, another Roman then medieval town that is now a major tourist attraction.

One of the quiet little bays near Begur where we swam and had a picnic lunch.

We had lunch one day at Restaurant de la Riera in the little village of Saint Marti Vell. The food was slightly better than average, but the presentation was beautiful (see below) and the scenery and drive to the village was pure Spanish fantasy. I actually saw an old broke-down windmill surrounded by fields of wheat. Must go back to Spain.

The restaurant's patio.

And the meal:

Image of River Ter, Girona via skyscraper city forum