Halfway to Spring

Your weekly selection of delicious distractions…

Last night I was standing at the counter of our local café on Boulevard Saint Germain, finishing off a last glass of wine after work before heading home for the evening, when I noticed something behind the bar. I thought I must have been reading it wrong (I was on my third glass) because it said in

Shopping in Belle Epoque Paris wasn't exactly ... well, convenient. General stores and grocery stores were still a very novel concept in the latter half of the 19th century, and the few that existed were only catering to the wealthy elite. There was also a French law that restricted merchants from s

A charming Paris 1900 Exposition Universelle commemorative plate featuring the Eiffel Tower at the center of the exhibition grounds. The image is framed by an ornate gilt metal surround with raised floral and scrolling motifs, beautifully patinated with age. A decorative and collectible piece from the Belle Époque, per

In the summer of 1923, an American husband and wife could be credited with two rather surprising things. Their name is seldom remembered in the context of the glamorous 1920s, but the French Riviera became the summer destination it is today thanks to the infectious expatriate couple known as the Murphys. Gerald and Sarah convinced their circle of friends to summer with them in Cap d’Antibes at a time when the fashionable only wintered there, leaving the region abandoned during the high summer months. Their pals included a young Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Cole Porter, Stravinsky, Jean Cocteau and a great number of artists and writers of the Lost Generation who fell into the couple’s orbit.

In a sleepy fishing village on the island of Crete, where Joni Mitchell had found herself a nomadic home inside manmade Neolithic caves carved into the sandstone cliff, she sang her folk songs, “under a starry dome…beneath the Matala Moon.”