We Came, We Saw, We Enjoyed

Our Roman Holiday began with a rendezvous with cousins Mimi and Robert Miller.  Their cruise ship just happened to spend one night in Rome when we arrived.  We met them at a restaurant right near the Spanish Steps

SPANISH STEPS - Built on the request of Innocent XII and created by Francesco De Sanctis in the eighteenth century, this daring architectural feat with its ramps and stairs that intersect and open out like a fan definitively provided a solution for connecting the square and the Trinità Church above, providing the city with a particularly intriguing attraction that is adored by tourists from all over the world. The sight of the square in spring should not be missed, when the ramps of the staircase are literally covered with flowers and the architecture is playfully lost beneath amagnificent array of colour.

Ron was particularlyenamored with the house of the romantic poets Keats, Shelley and Byron.  We spent an entire morning there, and then he inquired if we could return in the afternoon again.  Keats died in that home at a very young age of an illness and Shelley died shortly thereafter in a boating accident.

When he was asked to enter a comment in the guestbook at the end of our visit, much to my delight he wrote the following (don't tell him I put this in the blog):

We went to an "audience" with the new Jesuit Pope, Francis I, with 30,000 other people.  Ron was disappointed because it had a football game type atmosphere with hundreds of church tour groups all dressed in baseball caps and T-shirts identifying their parish.  When each group's name was announced (it took over 1.5 hours), the group would stand on their folding chairs, jump up and down, holler and wave banners just like a sporting event.  It had none of the reverence Ron had expected.  Even though in the photo below, the Pope looks far away, we were quite close relatively speaking since we arrived 2 hours before the proceedings commenced.  Everything was done 5 times over in 5 different languages.

Something interesting - they have car sharing.  We had seen bicycle sharing in Paris.  Wonder if NY has the same thing.

Amusing street art

Picturesque streetscape

Roman visit continued on next blog posting

You Have a Friend Part 5

We were lucky to have our cousins Merle and Michael Fajans spend time with us in Amboise.  They are peripatetic and were coming from Holland and on their way to Belgium.  They are accustomed to much walking and sports at their home on Lake Tahoe, so the simple jaunts around here were no problem for them.

Bien sûr we were off for an elegant evening of dining at Chateau Noizay.

Naturally, we began with the amuse bouche in the cocktail lounge library

Then on to the main dining room for the meal

Next we had a treasure trove of friends visit:  Beverly and Arthur Liss, Jean and Howard Dubin and Carol and Gene Zamler

We joined them for a 3 hour tour of the Marais district of Paris and observed several memorials to the holocaust victims

A whirlwind ensued in the afternoon stopping at the Pompidou Modern Art Museum, St. Chapelle stained glass windows, and finally at the Nissim Camondo Museum

One of the most sumptuous private homes from the early twentieth century in Paris
Moïse de Camondo, a Parisian banker during the Belle Epoque, was a passionate collector of French furniture and art objects from the eighteenth century, and he amassed a collection of unusual quality. In 1911, he hired architect René Sergent to build a private mansion next to Parc Monceau that would be worthy of this collection and suitable for his family. The design was modeled after that of the Petit Trianon in Versailles, but behind the handsome décor of wood-paneled apartments were hidden the accoutrements of modern life, including kitchens, offices and bathrooms. The home, which is fully preserved in its original condition, offers an opportunity to discover the taste of a great collector and to get a glimpse of the everyday life of an aristocratic home.

A family’s tragic destiny
Comte Moïse de Camondo was born in Istanbul in 1860 into a Sepharadic Jewish family that owned one of the largest banks in the Ottoman Empire, established in France since 1869. Moïse de camondo meant to give his mansion and collection to his only son Nissim. But World War I broke out, and Nissim was killed in an air battle in 1917 defending France. After this tragic loss, he decided to bequeath his property to the “Arts Décoratifs”, in memory of his son. The museum opened the year after Moïse de Camondo died, in 1935. Despite the family's generosity in bequeathing their collections to the French public, during World War II, his daughter, Béatrice, his son-of-law Léon Reinach and their children, Fanny and Bertrand, died in the Nazi camps. The Camondo family ceased to exist.

A new adventure for our American visitors was riding the Metro which is much quicker than sitting in a taxi in traffic

Ron was able to take time to enjoy the outside a bit

We also had a delightful dinner with Devon and Tony O'Neill from san diego, who finally took a vacation after devon finished her Phd