Waves

In Malibu, waves rule over everything. You realise it immediately. Their rhythm influences every movement, as powerful as a mantra. You lay your beach towel on the hot sand, fine and dense, then sit down and take the ocean in as it curls up and melts on the shore. Again and again, relentlessly, but with sudden mood changes. After a while, your breathing is not the same anymore. It matches the waves’ breathing. The same happens to the kids’ running among the splashes of water, to seagulls flying and to dolphins, whose fins keep coming into sight and disappearing again in the foreground on the horizon. It is an hypnotic movement that does not spare any gesture. Sometimes a song on a close radio brings you back home, but only for a few moments. If you get there for breakfast or stay for dinner, sit on one of the wooden benches of Malibu Farm Pier Café, at the end of the narrow pier, and have a look at the bazaar opposite to find some inspired souvenirs.

The Meridian Sun

It all starts with a harvest, it always does. The herbs in Rosi Rainer’s garden are fragrant, generous and graceful. We cut some rosemary and alehoof, then take them to the small wooden laboratory. Once they are bottled in alcohol, it takes four weeks for herbs to release perfumes and benefits. When this time has passed, honey, olive oil, pure alcohol and lavender essential oil will be added. The result is a cosmetic cream with refreshing and relaxing properties. We are in Maria Alm, an idyllic Hochkönig village in this bucolic Austrian corner where beautiful alpine valleys and hills alternate. Rosi Rainer is an expert on officinal plants and a talented artisan, who welcomes tourists to share her knowledge with them. Her production is exclusively handmade with local raw materials. For instance, she makes syrups with herbs and flowers (stinging nettle, lavender, lemon balm), jams, lip balms and cosmetics.

Meeting Rosi Rainer is part of this journey, a leg of the ‘Culinary pathway for herb lovers’. On the same day, we meet also Silvia Weiser, a specialist in wild herbs and flowers. She teaches us how to identify spontaneous herbs along the paths that take to Malga Mussbachalm. We learn how to use our harvest to make tisanes, and then sip them while eating bread, jams and homemade cheese.

The Meridian Sun

It all starts with a harvest, it always does. The herbs in Rosi Rainer’s garden are fragrant, generous and graceful. We cut some rosemary and alehoof, then take them to the small wooden laboratory. Once they are bottled in alcohol, it takes four weeks for herbs to release perfumes and benefits. When this time has passed, honey, olive oil, pure alcohol and lavender essential oil will be added. The result is a cosmetic cream with refreshing and relaxing properties. We are in Maria Alm, an idyllic Hochkönig village in this bucolic Austrian corner where beautiful alpine valleys and hills alternate. Rosi Rainer is an expert on officinal plants and a talented artisan, who welcomes tourists to share her knowledge with them. Her production is exclusively handmade with local raw materials. For instance, she makes syrups with herbs and flowers (stinging nettle, lavender, lemon balm), jams, lip balms and cosmetics.

Meeting Rosi Rainer is part of this journey, a leg of the ‘Culinary pathway for herb lovers’. On the same day, we meet also Silvia Weiser, a specialist in wild herbs and flowers. She teaches us how to identify spontaneous herbs along the paths that take to Malga Mussbachalm. We learn how to use our harvest to make tisanes, and then sip them while eating bread, jams and homemade cheese.

ATHENS

“Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” Ibn Battuta

A Life In The Day

Filmed on May 30, 2016, a mostly first-person chronicle of the day’s events.

CASA OLIVA AND GELSOMINO

Casa Oliva and Casa Gelsomino are the summary of so much beauty. Bucolic, airy, sweet. Fresh, well kept, pure. Mediterranean. They will be loved by adults who look for an unknown Sicily, by adolescents who are ready to take endless baths and to start daily adventures among the reed thickets, or by children who delight in playing barefoot on the soft grass and meeting pink flamingos, herons and storks for the first time.

1512 hectares of pure natural beauty, called “birds’ house” because of the many species of birds living there. The buen retiro of our dreams for an insular summer.

The Italic Mountains

When she reached the first hills of the Italic Mountains, she had a last view back on the skyline of her hometown Bookmarksgrove, the headline of Alphabet Village and the subline of her own road, the Line Lane. Pityful a rethoric question ran over her cheek, then she continued her way. On her way she met a copy.

PAGE

Your Arizona begins from the sky. You land at Page, in the stage centre of an amphitheatre made of pink mountains – Glen Canyon, Navajo Mountains and Vermillion Cliffs. Built in the 1950s, on the occasion of the construction of Glen Canyon Dam, Page is a strategic leg to visit Grand Canyon National Park and to make excursions along Colorado River or Lake Powell. You can reach Shash Diné – an authentic and spartan glamping in the middle of a prairie in Navajo Nation – by following roads as straight as rulers, roads you had sensed among the rocks from above.