How Vienna got ransomed by 8 of its alternative faces

The first time I have visited Vienna, years ago, the mercury coloumn of the thermometer was over 40° C.
I swear.
It was my birthday and I really really wanted to celebrate it with a slice of authentic Sachertorte, but temperatures had stolen any desire for chocolate from me. Which is like saying Winnie the Pooh doesn't want honey anymore, or Bugs Bunny becoming disgusted by carrots.
So figure it out.
What I remember about Vienna, then, are only the trees (where we were desperately looking for some shelter and refreshment), ice creams (which were our only source of nourishment) and the smell of horses' poop (that the heat had amplified, giving me the impression that, from the Stefansdom area, where the carriages take romantically around tourists, it had got diffused all over the city).
But how come - I've kept on telling myself for years - Vienna, for goodness!!
Sissi, valzer, the beautiful blue Danube, the Klimt's kiss, the '800s atmospheare, the austere and elegant architecture, the cobbled roads...
Billy Joel even dedicated a song to it, come on!!
It's just not possible that my main thought about it can be horse's poop.
I really have to give it a second chance.

[My Top 10] Bergen: fjords, salmon and wooden houses

For as much as I might be into making Top 10 lists like the "High fidelity" protagonist, if somebody might ask me to do a Top 10 of my very favourite cities I would be in serious trouble.
Same thing would happen with an absolute Top 10 of my favourite books or movies.
It's just a too big and wide field, I prefer focusing on a niche.
But Bergen would surely enter quite many Top 10's.
It would feature in my Top 10 cities where I'd like to live. In my Top 10 places that can make you feel in another time. In the Top 10 cities which have positively surprised me the most.
And perhaps also in the absolute one, pretty much for sure.
I've been here in 2009, together with Ginger Cat, and we've spent 5 very pleasant days in this fjords capital, steep, wooden, silent but not gloomy, colorful but introvert, that smells of smoked salmon and that in just a couple of steps makes you dive into a wild and awesome nature.
So here is what I would recommend you to see, if you'd happen to pass from there...
But, actually, I'd say that the very first thing I'd recommend you would be not to "happen" to pass from there: plan & decide to go there, it's totally worth it!

Villaggio Leumann, a corner of Switzerland near Turin

If you happen to go along the infinite Corso Francia with its many streetlights, travelling from Rivoli towards Torino, you won't help but noticing it.
The small houses of the Villaggio Leumann village of Collegno are a mixture between a Swiss town and Art Nouveau, as if someone had shaken up and mixed elements from the two styles: if buildings could actually procreate and reproduce themselves, with a random chromosomical recombination, like it happens for living beings, the result would be like this.
There are some trellis houses, some flamboyant element, wooden fences that demilit small gardens in bloom and pedestrian cobbled alleys, which represent a remarkable contrast with the ten-floors buildings and the asphalt surrounding them.
It's a bit like seeing a cow in a cement jungle.

Cologne - Gothic cathedrals and chocolate

Even if I had never been there, Cologne belongs to my childhood.
During those years Cologne was for me a snowglobe with the cathedral and several wooden toys coming from a shop that no longer exists.
Cologne has been one of the first and most frequent work travels of my dad - and, at 8, I used to kinda boast about it, about the fact that my father was going to Germany for work. It was something somehow special, even if then I was missing him.
And then I remember that, when he was coming back home after some days away, it was almost a kind of celebration; and I also remember the small plastic bags containing butter sandwiches and gummy bears that Lufthansa used to give to the travellers in the waiting room. The '80s used to be another era for airlines.
Since he's retired, almost 7 years ago, he's been kept on telling that he wanted to take us to see this Rheinan city that, to my mum & me, was almost like a sort of mythological tale - and to him some kind of travel along the memory lane.
So, last Sunday, for his 64th birthday, the promise has come true.

Paris - Day 2 ... the whines of a Grumpy Cat

Might it be that being tired makes me whiny like a baby who needs to sleep - and I confess that, maybe age is beginning to overwhelm me, but after exploring a large slice of Paris relying solely on the energy of my feet, I  DO feel very tired ...
In any case, I decided to spend the day today to talk a bit about some negative sides this time.
Yeah, I know that I had made ​​a boy (girl? cat?) scout promise to to force myself to focus always primarily on the positive ones, and actually to always go pick them, to look proactively for them. I think I almost always succeed doing it, and believe me, it was not easy to discipline and self-form me in this, since I am not born nor I have been educated to do so.
Well, but now my digression sounds a bit too much mélo: after all the negative sides of a vacation in Paris cannot be so dark and hard to bear!
Anyway I think that a little bit of healthy criticism every now and then can be just as useful as enumerating what is beautiful and pleasant.

Salem - as I am a black cat, after all...

Salem is a pretty and cosy city.
It has beautiful Georgian wooden houses, pebbled alleys and a fané allure that makes it feel as it's been preserved since the Pilgrims times.
So it could be actually a quite well known touristic spot even just for this, for being almost a sort of open-air museum of the American colonies of the 17th century, but without any kind of stiff or fake impression.
And it could have belonged anyway to history for its sea commerce with the Far East.
There are still plenty of evidences around about this: the vessel Friendship moored at the harbour, for example, or the Peabody Essex Museum that hosts art works, crafts and peculiar stuff collected by the local traders during their voyages in those lands.

Meet mr Peabody Essex!!

Or it could be famous just for having given birth to the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, and attract people just to witness that the House of the Seven Gables described in one of his novels actually exists, and that it reflects indeed the gloomy puritan atmosphere by which the society of those times was haunted...
But the real reason for which it is world-wide famous, for which Stephen King has decided to dedicate to it one of his most famous novels, for which quite some movies and TV series have been set here - and for which, I admit, Tabby Cat & me had decided to inclued it as a "must" visit during our last summer's trip along the East Coast, is quite another.

Cinema Museum in Turin - a Mole full of dreams

Mole Antonelliana is a peculiar building.
It makes Turin's skyline pretty unique, and, when you see it for the first time, it makes you wonder what the heck it is.
It should have been a Jewish synagogue, but, for its shape and its mass, it doesn't really look like a synagogue.
Well, it doesn't actually look like any other kind of building in the world.
Alessandro Antonelli, the architect who designed it, was a sort of crazy genius, and it would have been really interesting to take a peek in his head and find out what he was wondering about when he conceived his masterpiece.

10 Museums in Turin you shouldn't miss out

What's the best way to spend a rainy and cold morning when your heating is not even working properly?
Going to visit some museums, of course, exp. one that has recently opened (in 2009) and that I've always been rather curious about.

10 ways London has managed to surprise me

Cities are like people.
When they have well defined personalities and lots of interests going on, they will always hang you up in interesting conversations, no matter how often you meet them.
Then, with cities this gets on an even bigger scale, since anyway their lives are much longer than those of humans, and they are way much more multitasking - with a lot of activities and events going on in every single corner of them, with millions of single minds thinking ideas, millions of hands making them real and millions of single lives summing up and giving breath to the soul of the city.
And London definitely belongs to this category.
We meet almost every year, since our first rendez-vous in 1998, and, although there are some good oldies of it that, just like favourite subjects in a conversation, I never manage to miss, every single time I've been there I've managed to discover something new - a different side of its personality, a place, an experience.
Something that makes me definitely agree with Samuel Johnson when he was claiming "A man who is tired of London is tired of life".

10 reasons to love Turin (part 1)

I love Turin.
Might sound easy, since it's my hometown, but it hasn't really something to do with that: I mean, it's not much that I'm born here, but it's more like I couldn't have been born anywhere else. No, not even UK. I would want to be born in UK - but I am born in Turin, and I belong to it.
And Turin is like a cat.
It's elegant, in a natural way that might look sober for most of the time, but that can surprise you with sudden swirls and sparkles that have their own amazing harmony and grace.
It's indipendent: it doesn't really look like the typical Italian city, it has a sort of more Mid-European allure, with maybe a tiny bit of Britishness. It's out of any cliché and has its own personality - like it or not. It's Italian when it likes to be Italian, French when it likes to be French; it struggles between being cosmopolitan and staying pent-up in its withdrawal between the Alps - but you can tell it's just 100% Turin all the time.
Like a cat, it doesn't always reveal its best side to anyone: it can scratch or it can purr - depends on its mood and how much you click with it. But for those who know how to take it and that can guess the right way to caress it, the effort is totally worth it.
Don't worry, anyway: it's getting a more and more friendly and sociable cat within the latest years, and expecially since the Winter Olympic Games of 2006 when it finally decided to reveal itself to the world, wearing its best dress.
Turin wasn't much considered from tourism before 2006 - basically because tourism wasn't considered by Turin, then. But then one day it woke up and got tired to be considered an Ugly Duckling while instead it was a swan: Lonely Planet writes that "It's the most beautiful among the less known Italian cities - or, if you prefer, the less known of the most beautiful Italian cities" - and I find it a very fitting definition.

The magic of Harry Potter

Did you know that Hogwarts actually exist? That Diagon Alley, Hogsmeade and the Ministery of Magic do exist and that, even if you are a Muggle, you can visit them?
Now that the filming of the Harry Potter's movies is over, just dismantling all the scenographies and/or donating them to cinema museums would have been quite a pity; so Warner Bros Studios has decided to transform the whole Leavesden assembly where the filming of the 8 episodes took place in a huge museum.
And not only the idea itself has been brilliant, but it has also been put in practice in a brilliant way.
If, like me and my friend Ginger Cat, you are a fan, you can't help but feeling in awe while walking around and seeing in front of you all the places, creatures and props that you know very well from the movies (and the books... and your own daydreaming).