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Steamy French lit, art colonies & weekend escapism.

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ALEXANDRE TAVERNIER
April 04, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

It’s Ella Fitzgerald’s favourite month in the city – April in Paris – but it feels like we’ve skipped into early summer already. Race you to the lost floating pools of Paris!

Love is in the air bien sûr, and it got me thinking – the best way to improve our French is to make the learning process more fun, right? Alors, new (but old) to the Cabinet: my collection of vintage French erotic books! Have a browse of the naughty top shelf in my curiosity cabinet here. 

Speaking of French nudes, who needs all those terrible headlines when you’ve got a lost Parisian 1930s nudist summer camp to go in search of this weekend.

And if you’re currently experiencing life at a speed of 15 WTF’s per hour, know that you’re not alone. But that’s what I’m here for, some of that internet escapism we all need. 

Stock market crashing? In my opinion, the trading floor would be better off as a girls club anyway. And when the world is spiralling? Make more art of course! (And more art colonies). 

And if you’re in Paris this Sunday, we’re hosting another artist in residence for a day at the Cabinet. Paris-based Ukrainian sculptor and teacher of curious ceramics, Nastia Claca will be here all afternoon working on her incredible creations. Meet the artist from 12-6pm April 6th and check out her pieces here in this weekend’s 13 Things. 

And one last cherry on top of your weekly distractions, join me for a chat with the hardest-working American journalist in Paris, Lindsey Tramuta, for her podcast The New Paris. We do a bit of a deep dive on the Messy Nessy story, you can find it in the number 13 spot of your escapism roundup. 

Stay curious,

Nessy

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. 735)

2. Carl Linnaeus’s Flower Clock to measure time in bloom.

www.messynessychic.com/2025/04/03/13-things-9

The Lost Floating Pools of Paris

Once upon a time, the banks of the river Seine were lined with giant floating swimming pools. In the 19th century, one could take swimming lessons next to the Pont Neuf and in the 1970s, sunbathe topless on the upper deck of the Piscine Deligny, which was moored in the 7th arrondissement right in fr

www.messynessychic.com/2019/04/26/the-lost-floating-pools-of-paris

Wet Hot Parisian Summer: A Lost 1930s Nudist Utopia

In Physiopolis, life was better in the buff. Or at least in a bikini, which was as close as one could legally get to public nudity in 1930s Paris. It was here, on an isolated sun-baked island on the Seine, that a titillating new naturiste-nudiste (natura

www.messynessychic.com/2019/05/10/wet-hot-parisian-summer-a-lost-1930s-nudist-utopia

Deep in Italy, One Man's Surrealist Mini-City Sleeps

It's a labyrinthine citadel more surreal than even the weirdest of Fellini sets. "La Scarzuola" is a modern wannabe-Utopian estate imagined by one man and built amongst the pointy trees of Italy's Montegabbione in the 1950s. This esoteric wonderland and its elaborate surreali

www.messynessychic.com/2018/07/25/move-over-dali-he-made-his-mind-a-mini-city-and-its-a-fairytale-into-the-woods-italys-sleeping-surrealist-castle

But Where are the Women of Wall Street?

Do we still have to ask where we are with gender equity on Wall Street? Let's take stock…

www.messynessychic.com/2021/01/29/where-are-the-women-of-wall-street

Wish You Were Here: Saugatuck Art Colony, 1949

I'm currently yearning for the itching of grass on my bare legs, for that awful predicament of having nothing to do but lounge around in the sun all day until I think to myself: "maybe I could take up painting for the summer". This photostory I found buried in the LIFE Archives, labelled "Saugatuck

www.messynessychic.com/2017/01/27/wish-you-were-here-saugatuck-art-colony-1949

Crate Digging for the Forgotten Sound of Zambia’s Rock Revolution

In the copper-mined heart of late 1960s Zambia, a new sound was brewing — raw, electrifying, and entirely unexpected, channeled the sounds of Hendrix, Sabbath, and Cream through the lens of life in a newly independent African nation. It was called Zamrock, a genre that fused the fuzzed-out guitars a

www.messynessychic.com/2025/04/03/crate-digging-for-the-forgotten-sound-of-zambias-rock-revolution