By SETH KUGEL
Published: April 20, 2008
Correction Appended
SURE, you could visit Europe, but it’s just so darn inconvenient. The exchange rate turns you into a pauper, portions are minuscule, people smoke a lot, good bagels are practically nonexistent. Neither Greyhound nor Amtrak stop there. What kind of a tourist attraction is that?
So consider the advantages of a European weekend in New York. The city is more European than you think: where else could you dine on Bosnian sausage in (the Cevabdzinica) Sarajevo (restaurant), then take a 20-minute train ride to (the) Paris (Theater) for French film? A MetroCard costs a tiny fraction of what a Eurail pass does, but lets you visit most major tourist destinations in Europe (O.K., places named after them) without leaving the city.
First, a hotel: At the London NYC on West 54th Street, where the formal restaurant is called Gordon Ramsay at the London, the London suites start at $399 a night and the London atrium suite is $3,999 a night. Are those prices London enough for you?
Staying there for the Travel section last year, the Times’s restaurant critic Frank Bruni was impressed by the size of the rooms and the “smartly and indulgently up-to-the-minute space” (and the mirrored French doors — a bonus country!). In a separate review, he gave the restaurant two stars.
It’s only a short walk from the London to the Paris, where French movies attract a French and Francophile crowd that knows how to throw around a “formidable” or two and is clearly no stranger to the accent aigu. Now playing is “Flight of the Red Balloon,” which won a gleaming review from the Times’s Manohla Dargis. If you disagree and get bored, slip into the lobby and try to name the French actors (Bardot, Depardieu and the like) pictured there.
From the theater, it’s a pleasant walk along Parque Central to the Shops at Columbus Circle, where you’ll find Face Stockholm, the Swedish cosmetics store, and Davidoff of Geneva, which hawks cigars and even provides a minilounge to smoke them in.
Though it might be tempting to stop by a frankfurter salesman on the street corner, just head down 10th Avenue a few blocks for dinner at Hallo Berlin, an informal beer-guzzling place where the pork chops are tender, the tablecloths are gingham and the beer garden is open. If you don’t like their great beer selection, you can always order from their fun-to-pronounce list of brandies: Kirschwasser, Himbeergeist, Pflumi.
To loosen your tongue after this polysyllabic meal, it’s a quick walk to the Barcelona Bar, an otherwise ordinary watering hole that offers over 100 specialty shots, something like what you might find in Barcelona itself. If you are willing to sacrifice taste to keep the European theme going, try las Ramblas (grenadine, lime and tequila) or the Mussolini (Southern Comfort and Amaretto). Or just have a Peroni beer.
There’s lots more downtown. Cafe de Bruxelles on (bonus) Greenwich Avenue is a mussels-and-fries-with-no-ketchup kind of place in the West Village that attracts a crowd of regulars, including a high ratio of adorable elderly couples who look as if they’d have grown plump on the mayonnaisey dip and the crème brûlée tart.
You’ll no longer be able to visit Provence in Greenwich Village, which is closing Sunday (the owners plan to reopen the restaurant in May as Hundred Acres, serving rustic, farm-focused food). But you can try Régate, a little bistro on the Lower East Side named for France’s Île de Ré. You can try the mouclade de la couarde (mussels with saffron and cream) or the bourride rétaise à la lotte (monkfish), near replicas of the traditional dishes you’d find on the real island. (Or maybe not, but if you make a comment like that, few will be qualified to call you on it.)
If Italy’s more to your taste, you might head to Old Venice, actually Antica Venezia, a restaurant in the far West Village, or Firenze on the Upper East Side.
Afterward, you could check out Dublin 6, a West Village bar with a nice beer selection (little of which is Irish). But for those hankering for the Swiss Alps, there’s Gstaad, where skiers zoom down treacherous slopes (on a video projected on a wall in Chelsea), and the good-looking crowd lounges on minimalist ski-resort furniture.
Finally, for that classic combination of rock music and kielbasa, head to Warsaw, a cavernous club in the Polish National Home in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
If you’re still around on Monday morning, how about one more touch of Italy. The Rome Fastener Corporation showroom on West 25th Street may be short on the farfalle, but you won’t find grommets and eyelets like these on the Adriatic. And you won’t pay in euros, either.
NO EUROS NEEDED (OR ACCEPTED)
Cevabdzinica Sarajevo, 37-18 34th Avenue, Astoria, Queens; (718) 752-9528.
London NYC, 151 West 54th Street; (866) 690-2029; www.londonnyc.com.
Paris Theater, 4 West 58th Street; (212) 688-3800; www.theparistheatre.com; tickets $11.
Face Stockholm, 10 Columbus Circle, Ground Floor; (212) 823-9415; www.facestockholm.com.
Davidoff of Geneva, 10 Columbus Circle, Ground Floor; (212) 823-6383; www.davidoff.com.
Hallo Berlin, 624 10th Avenue at 44th Street; (212) 977-1944; www.halloberlinrestaurant.com.
Barcelona Bar, 923 Eighth Avenue near 55th Street; (212) 245-3212; www.barcelonabarnyc.com.
Cafe de Bruxelles, 118 Greenwich Avenue at 13th Street; (212) 206-1830; www.cafedebruxelles.com.
Régate, 198 Orchard Street at East Houston; (212) 228-8555; www.regate-bistro.com.
Antica Venezia, 396 West Street at 10th Street, (212) 229-0606; www.avnyc.com.
Firenze, 1594 Second Avenue at 82nd Street; (212) 861-9368.
Dublin 6, 575 Hudson Street near West 11th Street; (646) 638-2900; www.dublin6nyc.com.
Gstaad, 43 West 26th; (212) 683-1440; www.gstaadnyc.com.
Warsaw Bar and Bistro, 261 Driggs Avenue, Greenpoint, Brooklyn; (718) 387-0505; www.warsawconcerts.com.
The Rome Fastener Corporation, 24 West 25th Street; (212) 741-9779; www.romefast.com.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 20, 2008
The Weekend in New York column on Page 11 of the Travel section this weekend, about finding places in the city that evoke Europe, carries an outdated reference to the restaurant Provence in Greenwich Village. After the article went to press on Monday, the restaurant announced that it is closing today. (The owners will reopen the restaurant in May as Hundred Acres, with a rustic, farm-focused menu.)
read more here
Showing posts with label rome. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rome. Show all posts
Monday, April 21, 2008
36 Hours: 36 Hours in London
By SARAH LYALL
Published: April 20, 2008
Correction Appended
THERE are many different Londons, and they appeal to people with many different passions: museum lovers, theatergoers, opera buffs, devotees of royalty, students of history, people who like to walk in the rain. But richest of all, perhaps, is the London for book lovers.
Because the city is the star and the backdrop of so much great literature, it is possible to believe you know it intimately — how it looks, how it feels — without ever leaving your home country, or indeed your home. But it is better to visit, if only for the joy of seeing the landscape of your imagination come to life. How thrilling to happen upon Pudding Lane, where a bakery mishap led to the Great Fire of 1666, after reading Pepys’s account in his diaries. Or to wander along Baker Street, where Sherlock Holmes once fictionally solved the unsolvable. Walk across London Bridge and gaze down, toward Southwark Bridge: this is the stretch of the Thames where Dickens’s sinister characters dredged up corpses in “Our Mutual Friend.”
The city is not so foggy as it was in 1952, when Margery Allingham published “The Tiger in the Smoke,” or as socially stratified as it when Marianne Dashwood waited in “Sense afnd Sensibility” for a suitor who never called; or as greedy as it was in the thrusting 1980s of Martin Amis’s “Money.” But it is all of those Londons, an accrual of different descriptions and eras. It is a city made for description — reread the first passages of “Bleak House,” also on the subject of fog, for a moody introduction — and one that so reveres its authors that it buried a number of the best ones in style, in Westminster Abbey.
There are plenty of organized literary-themed excursions around the city, easily found on the Internet. Or you can ramble idiosyncratically on your own, which is more fun. If you take the Tube or the bus, make sure to carry a book.
Friday
6 p.m.
1) WILDE NIGHTS
Check into the Cadogan Hotel (75 Sloane Street SW1; 44-207-235-7141; www.cadogan.com), where Oscar Wilde was arrested and charged with “committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons” in 1895 over his liaison with young Lord Alfred Douglas. Elegant, quiet and also a favorite spot of the actress Lillie Langtry, the hotel is in the heart of Knightsbridge, where there is plenty of shopping to leaven even the most serious intellectual pursuit. Poems to read at the bar: John Betjeman’s “Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel,” which dramatically lays out the scene, and Wilde’s heartbreaking work “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” written after he served the prison sentence that broke and ultimately killed him. A double room is £295, or $581 at $2.01 to the pound.
8 p.m.
2) ELEMENTARY, DEAR HOLMES
The Sherlock Holmes pub (10-11 Northumberland Street WC2; 44-207-930-2644; www.sherlockholmespub.com) may be slightly kitschy, but it has an authentically musty-without-being-dingy ambience, enthusiastic service and generous portions of traditional pub food. Enjoy dishes with names plucked from the works of Holmes’s creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — “The Sign of Four,” for instance, signifies the soup of the day, while “Hounds of the Baskerville” refers to toad in the hole, or sausages in Yorkshire pudding — in an upstairs dining room decorated with pictures of the masterful fictional detective. A three-course meal for two is about £46. The pièce de résistance is a meticulously reconstructed study decorated à la Holmes. It looks as if he has just stepped out for a second, laying down his cup of tea and his violin.
Saturday
10 a.m.
3) LAZY MORNINGS
Have breakfast in bed while reading Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth,” an exuberant hymn to a vibrantly multiracial modern-day London. Or, if you’re motivated, head to the fifth-floor cafe at Harvey Nichols (109-125 Knightsbridge SW1; 44-207-235-5250; www.harveynichols.com) for eggs Benedict and interesting hot chocolate (£12.50).
Noon
4) BOOKS FOR ALL SEASONS
Authors wailed and gnashed their teeth when the history-laden old British Library Reading Room was uprooted from the British Museum and plunked down in a modern brick building on a busy road near St. Pancras and King’s Cross railroad stations (96 Euston Road NW1; 44-870-444-1500). But what the library might lack in atmosphere it more than makes up with the Sir John Ritblat Gallery, where some of the greatest treasures of the written word in fiction and nonfiction are exhibited.
The collection includes much-scribbled-on first drafts of works by authors like James Joyce, and treasures like a 600-or-so-years-old manuscript of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” one of the first illustrated works of literature in the English language. There is also an original copy of Magna Carta, one of four in existence; the crumpled piece of paper on which John Lennon scrawled the first lyrics to the song “Help” (here you learn that the line “I do appreciate your being ‘round” was first written as “I would appreciate your being ‘round”); and the 11th-century will of Aethelstan the Atheling, son of Aethelred the Unready. (He left his worldly goods to, among other people, his friends Aethelweard the Stammerer and Godwine the Driveller.)
3 p.m.
5) A LEXICOGRAPHER’S DELIGHT
As you walk around, you can spot all the blue plaques telling you which writer lived where (there were William Makepeace Thackeray, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, for instance, all living at some point in west London). For a peek inside a writer’s home, go to Dr. Johnson’s house (17 Gough Square EC4; 44-207-353-3745; www.drjohnsonshouse.org), a little gem of a place tucked in a quiet spot near to, but worlds away from, the bustle of Fleet Street. Here Samuel Johnson, critic, essayist and aphorist, worked in the mid-1700s on his famous English dictionary — an effort, he explained in his comma-heavy introduction, to regularize a language that had been “hitherto neglected, suffered to spread, under the direction of chance, into wild exuberance, resigned to the tyranny of time and fashion, and exposed to the corruptions of ignorance, and caprices of innovation.”
How Johnson went about such an imposing undertaking is explained in easy-to-digest room-by-room exhibits, culminating in the attic, where a team of clerks sorted through potential words and their sharp, opinionated meanings. Visitors are allowed to leaf through one of the original dictionaries, published in two volumes in 1755, and find for themselves Johnson’s wry definition of a lexicographer as a “harmless drudge.” (Further investigation shows the truth in the story that Johnson really did define oats as “a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.”)
5 p.m.
6) A WALK OF ONE’S OWN
In Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs. Dalloway,” the well-heeled heroine takes a long, contemplative walk through central London, pondering everything from flowers to life itself. Follow along and take in the changing of the seasons — you can tell what time of year it is not only by the blossoms (or lack of them) on the trees in St. James’s Park, but also by the migratory ducks, and the number of ducklings, on hand at any time. Bring a book — maybe “The Hours,” Michael Cunningham’s reinterpretation of the novel — to read quietly on a bench in the park, near the pelicans.
8 p.m.
7) VANITY FAIR
Treat yourself to dinner at the Wolseley (160 Piccadilly W1; 44-207-499-6996; www.thewolseley.com), a glamorous restaurant near the Ritz Hotel beloved by more social members of the London literati. Housed in a large, high-ceilinged space whose previous incarnations include a bank and car showroom, the restaurant has been meticulously refitted to evoke a sophisticated old-word Viennese cafe. The layout gives a feeling of tête-à-tête intimacy while also providing lots of people-watching opportunities. The menu is impeccable — leave room for the rich, beautiful desserts — and its old-fashioned tenor perfectly suits the setting. A three-course dinner is £50 to £100. Alert diners might well catch a glimpse of, among others, the authors Lady Antonia Fraser and Harold Pinter.
Sunday
10 a.m.
8) ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE
Go south to Shakespeare’s Globe (22 New Globe Walk SE1; 44-207-902-1400; www.shakespeares-globe.org), a loving reconstruction of a real-life Elizabethan theater. The season runs only during the warmer months, but the theater houses a permanent exhibition devoted to the playwright’s life and times that includes a rotating case of archival material, like the famous will in which “Shakespeare” was spelled three different ways, leaving to posterity a permanent spelling conundrum.
12:30 p.m.
9) ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL
It’s only a short walk to lunch at the George Inn (77 Borough High Street; 44-207-407-2056) a 17th-century coaching inn that is now the only galleried pub — meaning that it has balconies — left in the city. The menu is modern; the ambience is noisy in the downstairs bar, and quieter in the upstairs dining room. Dinner for two is about £45. It’s hard to resist the urge to stand on one of the balconies and shout things — lines from “Romeo and Juliet,” perhaps? — at the people below. Dickens was an enthusiastic patron of the George and mentions it in “Little Dorrit,” which would be a fine choice of reading material, either to read to yourself or aloud to your companion over lunch.
THE BASICS
A number of airlines, including American Airlines, Virgin Atlantic and British Airways, fly nonstop between Kennedy or Newark airports and London’s two main international hubs, Heathrow and Gatwick. Fares for travel in late May were around $580 in a recent Internet search.
Express trains run from both airports to the center of town. The Heathrow Express to Paddington is £14.50, or $28.70 at $2.01 to the pound, and from Gatwick to Victoria it’s £16.90. A nonexpress train from Gatwick to Victoria is £8.90, and the Underground from Heathrow is £5.
London is expensive, and one way to save money is to use taxis sparingly. A cab from Heathrow to the city, for example, is between £45 and £70, and from Gatwick, it’s about £85.
If it is not raining, try to walk as much as you can — wear comfortable shoes and invest in a London A-Z map to help navigate the complicated layout. Or else take the Tube. Buy an Oyster Card for discounted fares.
Correction: April 27, 2008
The 36 Hours column last Sunday about London misidentified the member of the Beatles who scrawled on a piece of paper the first lyrics to the song “Help!,” part of the collection at the British Library Reading Room. It was John Lennon, not Paul McCartney. The column also misstated the years during which Samuel Johnson worked on his famous English dictionary. It was published in 1755; he did not work on it in the mid-1800s.
read more here
Published: April 20, 2008
Correction Appended
THERE are many different Londons, and they appeal to people with many different passions: museum lovers, theatergoers, opera buffs, devotees of royalty, students of history, people who like to walk in the rain. But richest of all, perhaps, is the London for book lovers.
Because the city is the star and the backdrop of so much great literature, it is possible to believe you know it intimately — how it looks, how it feels — without ever leaving your home country, or indeed your home. But it is better to visit, if only for the joy of seeing the landscape of your imagination come to life. How thrilling to happen upon Pudding Lane, where a bakery mishap led to the Great Fire of 1666, after reading Pepys’s account in his diaries. Or to wander along Baker Street, where Sherlock Holmes once fictionally solved the unsolvable. Walk across London Bridge and gaze down, toward Southwark Bridge: this is the stretch of the Thames where Dickens’s sinister characters dredged up corpses in “Our Mutual Friend.”
The city is not so foggy as it was in 1952, when Margery Allingham published “The Tiger in the Smoke,” or as socially stratified as it when Marianne Dashwood waited in “Sense afnd Sensibility” for a suitor who never called; or as greedy as it was in the thrusting 1980s of Martin Amis’s “Money.” But it is all of those Londons, an accrual of different descriptions and eras. It is a city made for description — reread the first passages of “Bleak House,” also on the subject of fog, for a moody introduction — and one that so reveres its authors that it buried a number of the best ones in style, in Westminster Abbey.
There are plenty of organized literary-themed excursions around the city, easily found on the Internet. Or you can ramble idiosyncratically on your own, which is more fun. If you take the Tube or the bus, make sure to carry a book.
Friday
6 p.m.
1) WILDE NIGHTS
Check into the Cadogan Hotel (75 Sloane Street SW1; 44-207-235-7141; www.cadogan.com), where Oscar Wilde was arrested and charged with “committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons” in 1895 over his liaison with young Lord Alfred Douglas. Elegant, quiet and also a favorite spot of the actress Lillie Langtry, the hotel is in the heart of Knightsbridge, where there is plenty of shopping to leaven even the most serious intellectual pursuit. Poems to read at the bar: John Betjeman’s “Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel,” which dramatically lays out the scene, and Wilde’s heartbreaking work “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” written after he served the prison sentence that broke and ultimately killed him. A double room is £295, or $581 at $2.01 to the pound.
8 p.m.
2) ELEMENTARY, DEAR HOLMES
The Sherlock Holmes pub (10-11 Northumberland Street WC2; 44-207-930-2644; www.sherlockholmespub.com) may be slightly kitschy, but it has an authentically musty-without-being-dingy ambience, enthusiastic service and generous portions of traditional pub food. Enjoy dishes with names plucked from the works of Holmes’s creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — “The Sign of Four,” for instance, signifies the soup of the day, while “Hounds of the Baskerville” refers to toad in the hole, or sausages in Yorkshire pudding — in an upstairs dining room decorated with pictures of the masterful fictional detective. A three-course meal for two is about £46. The pièce de résistance is a meticulously reconstructed study decorated à la Holmes. It looks as if he has just stepped out for a second, laying down his cup of tea and his violin.
Saturday
10 a.m.
3) LAZY MORNINGS
Have breakfast in bed while reading Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth,” an exuberant hymn to a vibrantly multiracial modern-day London. Or, if you’re motivated, head to the fifth-floor cafe at Harvey Nichols (109-125 Knightsbridge SW1; 44-207-235-5250; www.harveynichols.com) for eggs Benedict and interesting hot chocolate (£12.50).
Noon
4) BOOKS FOR ALL SEASONS
Authors wailed and gnashed their teeth when the history-laden old British Library Reading Room was uprooted from the British Museum and plunked down in a modern brick building on a busy road near St. Pancras and King’s Cross railroad stations (96 Euston Road NW1; 44-870-444-1500). But what the library might lack in atmosphere it more than makes up with the Sir John Ritblat Gallery, where some of the greatest treasures of the written word in fiction and nonfiction are exhibited.
The collection includes much-scribbled-on first drafts of works by authors like James Joyce, and treasures like a 600-or-so-years-old manuscript of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” one of the first illustrated works of literature in the English language. There is also an original copy of Magna Carta, one of four in existence; the crumpled piece of paper on which John Lennon scrawled the first lyrics to the song “Help” (here you learn that the line “I do appreciate your being ‘round” was first written as “I would appreciate your being ‘round”); and the 11th-century will of Aethelstan the Atheling, son of Aethelred the Unready. (He left his worldly goods to, among other people, his friends Aethelweard the Stammerer and Godwine the Driveller.)
3 p.m.
5) A LEXICOGRAPHER’S DELIGHT
As you walk around, you can spot all the blue plaques telling you which writer lived where (there were William Makepeace Thackeray, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, for instance, all living at some point in west London). For a peek inside a writer’s home, go to Dr. Johnson’s house (17 Gough Square EC4; 44-207-353-3745; www.drjohnsonshouse.org), a little gem of a place tucked in a quiet spot near to, but worlds away from, the bustle of Fleet Street. Here Samuel Johnson, critic, essayist and aphorist, worked in the mid-1700s on his famous English dictionary — an effort, he explained in his comma-heavy introduction, to regularize a language that had been “hitherto neglected, suffered to spread, under the direction of chance, into wild exuberance, resigned to the tyranny of time and fashion, and exposed to the corruptions of ignorance, and caprices of innovation.”
How Johnson went about such an imposing undertaking is explained in easy-to-digest room-by-room exhibits, culminating in the attic, where a team of clerks sorted through potential words and their sharp, opinionated meanings. Visitors are allowed to leaf through one of the original dictionaries, published in two volumes in 1755, and find for themselves Johnson’s wry definition of a lexicographer as a “harmless drudge.” (Further investigation shows the truth in the story that Johnson really did define oats as “a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.”)
5 p.m.
6) A WALK OF ONE’S OWN
In Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs. Dalloway,” the well-heeled heroine takes a long, contemplative walk through central London, pondering everything from flowers to life itself. Follow along and take in the changing of the seasons — you can tell what time of year it is not only by the blossoms (or lack of them) on the trees in St. James’s Park, but also by the migratory ducks, and the number of ducklings, on hand at any time. Bring a book — maybe “The Hours,” Michael Cunningham’s reinterpretation of the novel — to read quietly on a bench in the park, near the pelicans.
8 p.m.
7) VANITY FAIR
Treat yourself to dinner at the Wolseley (160 Piccadilly W1; 44-207-499-6996; www.thewolseley.com), a glamorous restaurant near the Ritz Hotel beloved by more social members of the London literati. Housed in a large, high-ceilinged space whose previous incarnations include a bank and car showroom, the restaurant has been meticulously refitted to evoke a sophisticated old-word Viennese cafe. The layout gives a feeling of tête-à-tête intimacy while also providing lots of people-watching opportunities. The menu is impeccable — leave room for the rich, beautiful desserts — and its old-fashioned tenor perfectly suits the setting. A three-course dinner is £50 to £100. Alert diners might well catch a glimpse of, among others, the authors Lady Antonia Fraser and Harold Pinter.
Sunday
10 a.m.
8) ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE
Go south to Shakespeare’s Globe (22 New Globe Walk SE1; 44-207-902-1400; www.shakespeares-globe.org), a loving reconstruction of a real-life Elizabethan theater. The season runs only during the warmer months, but the theater houses a permanent exhibition devoted to the playwright’s life and times that includes a rotating case of archival material, like the famous will in which “Shakespeare” was spelled three different ways, leaving to posterity a permanent spelling conundrum.
12:30 p.m.
9) ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL
It’s only a short walk to lunch at the George Inn (77 Borough High Street; 44-207-407-2056) a 17th-century coaching inn that is now the only galleried pub — meaning that it has balconies — left in the city. The menu is modern; the ambience is noisy in the downstairs bar, and quieter in the upstairs dining room. Dinner for two is about £45. It’s hard to resist the urge to stand on one of the balconies and shout things — lines from “Romeo and Juliet,” perhaps? — at the people below. Dickens was an enthusiastic patron of the George and mentions it in “Little Dorrit,” which would be a fine choice of reading material, either to read to yourself or aloud to your companion over lunch.
THE BASICS
A number of airlines, including American Airlines, Virgin Atlantic and British Airways, fly nonstop between Kennedy or Newark airports and London’s two main international hubs, Heathrow and Gatwick. Fares for travel in late May were around $580 in a recent Internet search.
Express trains run from both airports to the center of town. The Heathrow Express to Paddington is £14.50, or $28.70 at $2.01 to the pound, and from Gatwick to Victoria it’s £16.90. A nonexpress train from Gatwick to Victoria is £8.90, and the Underground from Heathrow is £5.
London is expensive, and one way to save money is to use taxis sparingly. A cab from Heathrow to the city, for example, is between £45 and £70, and from Gatwick, it’s about £85.
If it is not raining, try to walk as much as you can — wear comfortable shoes and invest in a London A-Z map to help navigate the complicated layout. Or else take the Tube. Buy an Oyster Card for discounted fares.
Correction: April 27, 2008
The 36 Hours column last Sunday about London misidentified the member of the Beatles who scrawled on a piece of paper the first lyrics to the song “Help!,” part of the collection at the British Library Reading Room. It was John Lennon, not Paul McCartney. The column also misstated the years during which Samuel Johnson worked on his famous English dictionary. It was published in 1755; he did not work on it in the mid-1800s.
read more here
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Rome at Night
There’s death in every open window as you pass along at night,” he wrote some 1,800 years ago. “You may well be deemed a fool, improvident of sudden accident, if you go out to dinner without having made your will.”
Dinner is perfectly safe these days, with street crime low and sewage securely underground. Night now does not really darken Rome so much as illuminate the many parts that matter, a real-life chiaroscuro of the city where Caravaggio lived and painted. With the daytime heat cut in summer, diners at Da Giggetto in the Jewish Ghetto can ponder both their artichokes and the boney, floodlit columns of the Octavian Gate, which stood there a century and a half before Christ was born. Not far away, the Colosseum — where Enlightenment-age tourists wandered at night with notions of Rome maybe even more romantic than ours — rises with singular heft, each stone arch glowing in the night.
Rome at night is, in short, a city lit like a theater, and, especially in the warmer months, should be enjoyed like one. In fact, Georgina Masson, who wrote the 1965 classic “Companion Guide to Rome,” recommended the night as the time Rome should first be seen. The first of her book’s walking tours starts where Rome began, the Capitoline Hill — where Michelangelo designed a piazza, she said, like a “stage set” — overlooking the nubby ruins of the Forum. “Seen by day it requires something of the knowledge of the archaeologist and the imagination of a poet,” she wrote. “But at night ... it is not nearly so difficult to picture the stately ranks of colonnaded temples crowned with the gilded statues and the basilicas rearing their great hulk against the night sky.”
It’s hardly a new thought (it is literally one of the oldest), but in my nearly four years here as the bureau chief of The New York Times, I have found that there is no better place than Capitoline Hill to see, in one dramatic sweep, so much of Rome’s history — especially, as Ms. Masson advises, if one starts at sunset.
A superb walk through time might start on the far side of the hill, on Via dei Fori Imperiali. To the south, the Colosseum glows. Up Via di San Pietro in Carcere is Michelangelo’s Piazza del Campidoglio, with a replica of the equestrian statue of the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius (the original is in the Capitoline Museum) unlit but no less heroic at night, a lone horseman in the center of the city, as has often been noted, at the center of the world. If the Forum is antiquity, the egg-shaped piazza and three palaces are among the finest of Renaissance buildings, stripped of detail at night, revealing more their harmony and, if you are that sort, romance.
A walk down Michelangelo’s steps leads to more of this mix of ages: across the street stands the mini-Colosseum of the Theater of Marcellus, and to the right, the ruins of the Octavian Gate. Here, as elsewhere in Rome, the approach to lighting seems much like Italy’s approach to food: there is so much to work with that it seems pointless to dress things up; the light accents, simply, what is already there. But here, also, the dark side of the city’s history intrudes, as it often does: this is where in 1943, some 2,000 Jews, who had lived in Rome since antiquity, were rounded up and sent to death camps.
Beyond the ruins, on Via del Portico d’Ottavia, the Jewish Ghetto still thrives, with many of the shops buzzing into the evening hours, and nearby is the tiny Piazza Mattei, where four bronze boys play in the Fountain of the Turtles. Stop, at Largo Argentina, where the columns of the Republican Victory Temples, more than 2,000 years old, jut into the night sky (though it is harder then to see the scores of unwanted cats given sanctuary there). It is a good place to end this mini-nocturnal tour of Rome’s history because it was there — not at the Forum — where Julius Caesar was killed, on March 15, 44 B.C, as evening approached (according to some accounts).
History, though, is not the only reason to walk at night. As residents well know, Rome, which evolved not on a triumphal scale, but on a very human one, is simply a lovely place to stroll. Romans are out in numbers to enjoy the summer nights, so visitors can feel assured they are doing generally as the Romans do.
One place to experience this local life is at Piazza del Popolo, once Rome’s northern gate. Every night, but especially on warm weekends, crowds of Italians stroll and shop, with their teenagers working hard to be cool as they wander about the piazza. Our family has gone there often, allowing ourselves to be pulled into the human wave that drifts south on Via del Corso.
The obvious destination from there is Piazza di Spagna, which is full of people day and night. For all the over-the-top adjectives about the piazza and its famous steps — which attracted Goethe, Joyce, Byron, Shelley and Keats, who died there in 1821 at No. 26, now a museum — it is worth noting a contrary view. In December 1872, Henry James arrived on his second visit to Rome and, despite being ill, decided on an evening stroll. He did not care much for Piazza di Spagna.
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Dinner is perfectly safe these days, with street crime low and sewage securely underground. Night now does not really darken Rome so much as illuminate the many parts that matter, a real-life chiaroscuro of the city where Caravaggio lived and painted. With the daytime heat cut in summer, diners at Da Giggetto in the Jewish Ghetto can ponder both their artichokes and the boney, floodlit columns of the Octavian Gate, which stood there a century and a half before Christ was born. Not far away, the Colosseum — where Enlightenment-age tourists wandered at night with notions of Rome maybe even more romantic than ours — rises with singular heft, each stone arch glowing in the night.
Rome at night is, in short, a city lit like a theater, and, especially in the warmer months, should be enjoyed like one. In fact, Georgina Masson, who wrote the 1965 classic “Companion Guide to Rome,” recommended the night as the time Rome should first be seen. The first of her book’s walking tours starts where Rome began, the Capitoline Hill — where Michelangelo designed a piazza, she said, like a “stage set” — overlooking the nubby ruins of the Forum. “Seen by day it requires something of the knowledge of the archaeologist and the imagination of a poet,” she wrote. “But at night ... it is not nearly so difficult to picture the stately ranks of colonnaded temples crowned with the gilded statues and the basilicas rearing their great hulk against the night sky.”
It’s hardly a new thought (it is literally one of the oldest), but in my nearly four years here as the bureau chief of The New York Times, I have found that there is no better place than Capitoline Hill to see, in one dramatic sweep, so much of Rome’s history — especially, as Ms. Masson advises, if one starts at sunset.
A superb walk through time might start on the far side of the hill, on Via dei Fori Imperiali. To the south, the Colosseum glows. Up Via di San Pietro in Carcere is Michelangelo’s Piazza del Campidoglio, with a replica of the equestrian statue of the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius (the original is in the Capitoline Museum) unlit but no less heroic at night, a lone horseman in the center of the city, as has often been noted, at the center of the world. If the Forum is antiquity, the egg-shaped piazza and three palaces are among the finest of Renaissance buildings, stripped of detail at night, revealing more their harmony and, if you are that sort, romance.
A walk down Michelangelo’s steps leads to more of this mix of ages: across the street stands the mini-Colosseum of the Theater of Marcellus, and to the right, the ruins of the Octavian Gate. Here, as elsewhere in Rome, the approach to lighting seems much like Italy’s approach to food: there is so much to work with that it seems pointless to dress things up; the light accents, simply, what is already there. But here, also, the dark side of the city’s history intrudes, as it often does: this is where in 1943, some 2,000 Jews, who had lived in Rome since antiquity, were rounded up and sent to death camps.
Beyond the ruins, on Via del Portico d’Ottavia, the Jewish Ghetto still thrives, with many of the shops buzzing into the evening hours, and nearby is the tiny Piazza Mattei, where four bronze boys play in the Fountain of the Turtles. Stop, at Largo Argentina, where the columns of the Republican Victory Temples, more than 2,000 years old, jut into the night sky (though it is harder then to see the scores of unwanted cats given sanctuary there). It is a good place to end this mini-nocturnal tour of Rome’s history because it was there — not at the Forum — where Julius Caesar was killed, on March 15, 44 B.C, as evening approached (according to some accounts).
History, though, is not the only reason to walk at night. As residents well know, Rome, which evolved not on a triumphal scale, but on a very human one, is simply a lovely place to stroll. Romans are out in numbers to enjoy the summer nights, so visitors can feel assured they are doing generally as the Romans do.
One place to experience this local life is at Piazza del Popolo, once Rome’s northern gate. Every night, but especially on warm weekends, crowds of Italians stroll and shop, with their teenagers working hard to be cool as they wander about the piazza. Our family has gone there often, allowing ourselves to be pulled into the human wave that drifts south on Via del Corso.
The obvious destination from there is Piazza di Spagna, which is full of people day and night. For all the over-the-top adjectives about the piazza and its famous steps — which attracted Goethe, Joyce, Byron, Shelley and Keats, who died there in 1821 at No. 26, now a museum — it is worth noting a contrary view. In December 1872, Henry James arrived on his second visit to Rome and, despite being ill, decided on an evening stroll. He did not care much for Piazza di Spagna.
read more here
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