Villa Medicis, Rome (April 18, 2023) – The piano nobile of Villa Medici consists of the former rooms of Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici with three rooms in a row – the Room of the Elements, the Room of the Muses and the Room of the Lovers of Jupiter – with 16th century frescoes by the Mannerist painter Jacopo Zucchi. These rooms, which are open to the public on guided tours throughout the year, are located next to two private rooms from the same period which complete the complex.
As part of the project Reenchanting Villa Medici, the interior refurbishment of these emblematic spaces of Villa Medici has been entrusted to India Mahdavi, an internationally renowned French architect, designer and scenographer, who will be responsible for the artistic direction of the project in association with craftsmen (more information to come). This transformation is being carried out with respect for the period décor and previous architectural interventions, in order to revisit the premises by adding a touch of colour and modernity. The rooms will be equipped by Maison Tréca, a French manufacturer of high quality bedding.
Walk It (Uploaded April 18, 2023): Montreux is a traditional resort town on Lake Geneva. Nestled between steep hills and the lakeside, it’s known for its mild microclimate and the Montreux Jazz Festival, held in July.
Video timeline:00:00 Lake Geneva 01:00 Riverside Montreux 45:08 Castle of Chillon
The town’s promenade is lined with flowers, sculptures, Mediterranean trees and grand Belle Époque buildings. Offshore is a medieval island castle, Château de Chillon, with ramparts, formal halls and a chapel with 14th-century murals.
National Trust (April 18, 2023) – To this day, Virginia Woolf is still known for her novel ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and for her early involvement in the Bloomsbury Group, which was established in the early 1900s in London.
Monk’s House in Sussex was once the place she and her husband Leopold called home, and it’s now being cared for by the National Trust. In this video from the National Trust, you can experience what life was like at Monk’s House first hand. For more than 20 years, Virginia Woolf transformed Monk’s House into a place of beauty, art, creativity and contentment.
Virginia Woolf
From reciting lines in her bathtub to writing books in the tool shed, let this literary pioneer tell you in her own words how she finally found ‘a room of one’s own’. Throughout much of her life, Virginia Woolf experienced bouts of mental illness, and Monk’s House was used as a writing retreat by Virginia and Leopold.
The Sussex landscape captured her imagination, and this came through in much of her writing. She was also engaged in the conservation of the land – a legacy that lives on through the work that National Trust staff and volunteers do to care for this place of history.
Uploaded April 17, 2023: Mamoudzou is the coastal capital city of the French overseas region of Mayotte, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Boats dot its harbor, and the nearby Marché Couvert sells fresh produce and handicrafts.
Local landmarks include Mtsapéré Mosque, with its white minaret, and the 1957 Notre-Dame de Fatima church. Nearby beaches include Trévani, to the north, and the small Plage du Phare, to the south.
Grace Wright’s atmospheric paintings are all-consuming, inviting the viewer into a baroque world of tangled gestures. Markings on the canvas twist and convulse about themselves to build an anarchic structure before unravelling to moments of repose. While Wright’s gestures may be abstract, she views her paintings as representational narratives, evoking the tempestuous rhythm of the natural world, while alluding to 17th-century religious paintings.
Grace Wright, World Receivers, 2023
Deep Symmetry explores a recent evolution of Wright’s practice as a result of her time in Europe in the latter half of 2022. Its title was inspired by the architectural geometries of the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, France, and a quote by writer Karl Ove Knausgaard: “Life is irregularity, death is geometry”.
Wright has been long fascinated with the deeper, universal connections that exist beyond our normal comprehension. Marrying alluring, harmonious colour with visceral imagery to monumental standing, Wright’s paintings are a reflection of this deep connectedness; her coiling energetic brush marks echoing the universal ‘rhythmic, cyclical nature’ forms in our world, to emotion and the force of life itself.
The Traveler (Uploaded April 17, 2023) – Bellagio is a village on a promontory jutting out into Lake Como, in Italy. It’s known for its cobbled lanes, elegant buildings and Villa Serbelloni Park, an 18th-century terraced garden with lake views.
Nearby are the Tower of the Arts, a venue for exhibitions and performances, and the Romanesque San Giacomo Church. Close to rocky Loppia Beach, the Museum of Navigational Instruments displays sundials and compasses.
MemorySeekers (April 16, 2023) – Bergen is a historic city in Norway. We start our trip with a walk around the Bryggen full of colourful wooden buildings dating back hundreds of years. The Bergen to Oslo train ride on the Bergenline is a world-famous train ride and we hitch a ride on an amazing 7-hour train ride across Norway to the Capital, Oslo.
With just a few short hours in Oslo, we’ll see a few of the city highlights. Join us for one of the most amazing train rides in the world, from Bergen to Oslo.
Walk n Explore (Uploaded April 16, 2023) – Saint-Rémy-de-Provence is a beautiful village in the Alpilles region of Provence, Southern France. It has a rich historical and cultural heritage, with ancient Roman monuments, museums, art galleries and festivals.
Saint-Rémy-de-Provence has a strong connection with Vincent Van Gogh, the famous Dutch painter who spent a year in the town from May 1889 to May 1890. He voluntarily admitted himself to the Saint-Paul de Mausole psychiatric hospital, where he was treated by Dr Théophile Peyron.
During his stay, he painted some of his most well-known works, such as The Starry Night, Irises, Self-Portrait and Almond Blossoms. He was inspired by the landscapes, colours and light of Provence, and often depicted the olive groves, cypresses, wheat fields and mountains of the Alpilles region. He also painted scenes from the hospital and its gardens, such as The Garden of Saint-Paul Hospital and The Courtyard of the Hospital at Arles.
Timelab Pro (April 15, 2023) – Our trip to Franz Josef Land was an unforgettable experience, and we were fortunate enough to be on board the mighty famous ship Mikhail Somov for a scientific mission to study the Narwhals in the Arctic.
Franz Josef Land is the northernmost territory of Russia, and one of the least filmed territory in the world. Our shots are truly unique, capturing the beauty of the Arctic landscape and the majestic Narwhals in their natural habitat. As we took our drone to the skies, we searched for days to find these elusive creatures, and finally, we were lucky enough to spot them.
Did you know that Narwhals are the only known species of whale to have a single tusk? And that this tusk, which is actually a protruding tooth, can grow up to 3 meters long? The scientists on board the Mikhail Somov were conducting an important research expedition to prove that Narwhals dwell in the Russian Arctic.
They also took biopsies from the Narwhals to better understand the impact of global climatic changes on these amazing creatures. Our diesel-electric ship, the Mikhail Somov, is a historical ship with a rich history of Arctic exploration. In 1985 the Mikhail Somov became trapped in the ice for 133 days, but the crew was able to survive and eventually free the ship. Despite its modern upgrades, the ship still maintains the charm and spirit of its earlier expeditions.
World Economic Forum (April 15, 2023) – This week’s top stories of the week include:
0:15 China build’s the world’s largest container ship – Mediterranean Tessa is nearly 400 metres long. Her deck area is the size of 4 football pitches. She can carry up to 240,000 tonnes of cargo or more than 24,000 standard containers. The ship is fitted with an air lubrication system. It blows tiny bubbles along the hull to reduce its resistance in the water.This reduces the ship’s CO2 emissions by up to 4% saving around 6,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.
1:36 The first cellphone call was made 50 years ago – On 3 April 1973, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper stood on a Manhattan street and called the landline of a rival who was racing to develop the cellphone, too. This was the world’s first mobile phone call. “I’m calling you on a cellphone,” Cooper said. ‘‘A personal, handheld, portable cellphone” the race was over. Cooper’s prototype became the first commercially available mobile phone. Motorola released the DynaTAC 8000x a decade later, in 1984. It was about the size of a shoebox and cost $11,500 in today’s money. Since then, mobile technology has transformed our lives. Watch to learn more about the first mobile phone call in the world.
3:40 South Korea to pay its citizens to have children – South Korea has the world’s lowest fertility rate. The average South Korean woman will have 0.78 babies in her lifetime. While the average fertility rate in OECD countries is 1.59. South Korea’s population is shrinking as a result. More people die each year than are born. Left unchecked, the country’s working-age population will almost halve by 2070. Globally, the fertility rate is declining it stands at 2.3 today. In 2000 it was 2.7. The UN predicts the global population will peak at 10.4 billion by 2080, but a recent study suggests the peak could be much lower and could arrive much sooner.
5:01 Why sleeper trains are being revived across Europe – The EU has provisionally agreed to call 2021 the European Year of Rail. It says boosting rail travel could help the bloc reach carbon neutrality by 2050.
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