Filmed and Edited by: Frank Desiront
Mallorca (Majorca) is one of Spain’s Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean. It’s known for beach resorts, sheltered coves, limestone mountains and Roman and Moorish remains. Capital Palma has nightlife, the Moorish Almudaina royal palace and 13th-century Santa María Cathedral. Stone-built villages include Pollença, with its art galleries and music festival, and hillside Fornalutx, surrounded by citrus plantations.
ITALY MAGAZINE (Aug 25, 2020): Here, Michelin-star restaurants are hidden behind the secluded gates of family inns and the best wines are served by winemakers on a panoramic terrace using a vine leaf as a coaster while crystal clear waters are just a step away from the hydrofoils. And, though nothing lands in your lap since you have to climb through ferns and craters and puff along steep slopes to reach the most beautiful places and enjoy a magic sunset in the Pollara bay – it remains totally worth it.
Pane cunzatu – literally, seasoned bread, is the most famous Aeolian specialty. It is different from the namesake recipe you can find all over the island, which is more similar to a sandwich. Here a huge, round flat loaf’s base is topped with a generous amount of local delicacies, resembling more a pizza.
Once upon a time Salina was considered the “lesser” of the Aeolian islands despite being the second biggest after Lipari with three different comuni of Santa Marina, Malfa and Leni and six volcanoes scattered around its 10-square mile surface. However, it was a place that silently carved out a very special place in the heart of island lovers. It smartly matched its wild nature and untamed spirit with a relaxed and friendly atmosphere offering a dashing bit of otherworldly hospitality.
Lying on a cliff that descends towards the crystalline sea of Sardinia, in the town of Maracalagonis in the Province of Cagliari, The property is divided into six apartments on four terraced levels, each with a private panoramic terrace, and has a total internal surface area of 680 sqm.
Two splendid panoramic swimming pools dominate over the sea. The prestigious complex is currently divided into five suites that share some spaces and services including swimming pools and magnificent terraces, a heated whirlpool tub, three barbecues and three access doors from which you reach a staircase leading to the cliff below and to the sea. . Fascinating and suggestive, this extraordinary property on the coast of Sardinia offers all the desirable comforts, in a landscape of rare beauty that is an integral part of the villa itself.
Filmed and Edited by: Gabworks
Shot in Beautiful Cities in Morocco:
Casablanca, Asilah, Tangier, Chefchaouen, Fes, Merzouga, Boumalne Dades, Marrakech, Essaouira
Music by Nils Frahm ‘sweet little lie’
Morocco, a North African country bordering the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea, is distinguished by its Berber, Arabian and European cultural influences. Marrakesh’s medina, a mazelike medieval quarter, offers entertainment in its Djemaa el-Fna square and souks (marketplaces) selling ceramics, jewelry and metal lanterns. The capital Rabat’s Kasbah of the Udayas is a 12th-century royal fort overlooking the water.
Perfectly situated on a hill between the craggy cliff tops and the glinting Mediterranean Sea, HVF Villa Franca Positano is romantic Italy at its most ravishing. With the picturesque cobbled piazzas of Positano and two blissful beaches just steps away, this stylish hilltop retreat offers the chance to check out from reality and absorb the glamour and gorgeousness of the ever-enchanting Amalfi Coast. A cool calm envelops this Italian idyll where bewitching coastal beauty dominates the window views and pines and citrus scent the air.
From The Guardian (May 23, 2020):
I first went to Hydra six years ago, when it was simply a beautiful Greek island and not a place I went to commune with its ghosts. I don’t think I was even aware that it was the island Leonard Cohen had lived on, and knew nothing of Charmian Clift, George Johnston and the bohemian community they fostered.
Bloomsbury Publishers: 1960. The world is dancing on the edge of revolution, and nowhere more so than on the Greek island of Hydra, where a circle of poets, painters and musicians live tangled lives, ruled by the writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston, troubled king and queen of bohemia. Forming within this circle is a triangle: its points the magnetic, destructive writer Axel Jensen, his dazzling wife Marianne Ihlen, and a young Canadian poet named Leonard Cohen.
Into their midst arrives teenage Erica, with little more than a bundle of blank notebooks and her grief for her mother. Settling on the periphery of this circle, she watches, entranced and disquieted, as a paradise unravels.
Burning with the heat and light of Greece, A Theatre for Dreamers is a spellbinding novel about utopian dreams and innocence lost – and the wars waged between men and women on the battlegrounds of genius.
Polly Samson is an English novelist, lyricist and journalist. She is married to musician David Gilmour, and has written the lyrics to many of Gilmour’s works, both as a solo artist and with the group Pink Floyd.
From Apollo Magazine article (April 13, 2020):
Minton had gone on to produce a series of spectacularly colourful oil paintings of Corsica on his return to London, exhibiting them at the Lefevre Gallery in 1949. Many of them depicted fruit and fish and other ingredients for Mediterranean cuisine, and so confirmed Minton as the obvious choice for the David commission.
David delightedly recalled that: ‘In the shop windows [Minton’s] brilliant blue Mediterranean bay, his tables spread with white cloths and bright fruit, bowls of pasta and rice, a lobster, pitchers and jugs and bottles of wine, could be seen far down the street.’
Variations on these two images were used for the double-page spread on which the title appeared in David’s second book, French Country Cooking (1951), while the wrap-around image on the dust jacket depicted the interior of a well-stocked kitchen, many of its utensils borrowed from the author to ensure accurate representation.
Francis John Minton (25 December 1917 – 20 January 1957) was an English painter, illustrator, stage designer and teacher. After studying in France, he became a teacher in London, and at the same time maintained a consistently large output of works. In addition to landscapes, portraits and other paintings, some of them on an unusually large scale, he built up a reputation as an illustrator of books.
In the mid-1950s, Minton found himself out of sympathy with the abstract trend that was then becoming fashionable, and felt increasingly sidelined. He suffered psychological problems, self-medicated with alcohol, and in 1957 died by suicide.
From Wikipedia
Overlooking the Aegean Sea, a charming string of coastal neighborhoods form the Athens Riviera, a serene escape from the constant activity in the city’s center. A selection of high-end hotels lines the pristine stretch of beaches down to the southernmost point of the Attica Peninsula.
The revamped Four Seasons Astir Palace, with a history of housing foreign dignitaries and film stars of the 1960s, is the most luxurious hotel in Athens, perhaps even in all of Greece. The night club, Island, is bringing back the glamour and excitement of the twentieth century bouzouki clubs reminiscent of names such as Melina Mercouri and Stavros Niarchos.
Athens is experiencing a revival—in art, night life and design. For a metropolis constantly associated with the past, the modern strides in development and culture are sometimes overlooked in favor of the ruins and artifacts from antiquity. When in fact, the juxtaposition only enhances the beauty of both. Athens Riviera puts the old-world beside the new-world and a deeper understanding of this ancient capital emerges. With one foot in the past and one foot in the future; access to both the electricity of city life and the tranquility of a beach side resort, Athens cannot be defined in simple terms. One just has to experience it for themselves.
Stéphanie Artarit began her career as a journalist, and worked as a psychoanalyst for many years in Tokyo. She then went on to write the novel Variations of the Devil in 2013. Today, she divides her time between homes in Athens and the Cycladic island of Antiparos, where she also operates her boutique, Petit Tipota, and represents several French fashion labels in Greece. In 2018, she began her company, The Gang of Style, which specializes in designing in-house boutiques for luxury hotels all over the world.
From the New York Times (March 26, 2020):
I have seen Naples from his vantage of a ship anchored offshore — one of the most sublime locations in the world, that sweep of coast stacked with apricot, carmine, azure and rose villas; the blue, blue U of the harbor; the emphatic Vesuvius anchoring the view.
In October of 1820, typhus raged in Naples. With his artist friend, Joseph Severn, the British poet John Keats rocked in the city’s harbor for 10 days, not nearly the quaranta giorni — 40 days — that give us our word quarantine.
Before this journey, Keats always felt intense melancholy. In “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time,” he wrote “… mortality / Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep.” (And in the smooth pentameter of “Ode to a Nightingale”: “I have been half in love with easeful death.”) Not a holiday, this voyage out of England was a desperate trip to the sunny climate of Italy. His cough had grown steadily worse. Since the morning he’d seen a splotch of blood on his pillow, he knew he had little chance of surviving the consumption that had invaded his lungs. His last-ditch: Go to Rome. Meanwhile, exile at sea.
Boomers Daily 