2026 Italy, Malta, Greece

We liked our last cruise so much we're going on another! To Italy, Malta, and Greece with some time at the end in Paris.

I'll be sharing postcards in this thread. They will also be on a nicely formatted web page.

Made it to Italy! Our first night was at La Posta Vecchia, a lovely seaside hotel in a villa restored by J. Paul Getty in the 1960s. It's decorated with some beautiful pieces including this fine Piranesi map, the Ichnographia Campi Martii. There's a small museum for the 2nd c. BC Roman villa in the basement.

Pompeii

Today we are in Amalfi. It is beautiful but we are having a hard time with the heat and the tourist crowds. We usually do not travel in summer!

Sicily today! Our cruise ship is parked by Taormina, a hilltop town. My main activity was enjoying wines at Gambino, a winery up on Mt. Etna. Also a stop in the oddly named village of Linguaglossa.

Now we are in Malta for two days. It's a really weird and interesting country, particularly the period the Order of St John ran things 16th-18th century as a sort of religious / corporatist fiefdom. It's also beautiful with honey-colored limestone and everything so Baroque and tidy.

Malta has this unique history of a megalithic culture from around 3000 BC that built enormous temples, some of the oldest freestanding buildings in Europe and without precedent on the mainland.

The Grandmaster's Palace is a bit of a mixed bag. But it's interesting for the extraordinary wealth the Hospitallers commanded for much of their rule.

But the Grandmaster's Palace also has these extraordinary 1710 Gobelins tapestries depicting exotic scenes from Africa, India, and the Americas. Just opened and newly restored and they are astonishingly beautiful.

The racism and colonialism inherent in this artistic project is important to understand. But the artistry is also beautiful, I'm glad to have seen them.

I appreciate the ubiquitous European cafe where you can sit outside and have a drink and snack and it is no fuss, just practical and comfortable. I wish we had this in the US.

One neat thing in Malta is that the Maltese language is everywhere: signs, ATM screens, casual local conversation. Europe's only indigenous Semitic language, a vernacular Arabic from when Sicily was Muslim.
Malta is rapidly globalizing now thanks to being the center of "innovative" businesses in Europe (gambling, cryptocurrencies, etc). I wonder if it will maintain its language in another two generations. Everyone already speaks English too.

Leaving Malta

The highlight of yesterday in Malta was a visit to St. John's Co-Cathedral, the main church of the Knights of Malta. It is remarkable for being almost entirely a consistent Baroque design from one man. It is sumptuous.

One neat thing is the floor of the cathedral is almost entirely intricate marble tombstones for knights buried underneath. With fascinating graphic design, also inscriptions telling poignant stories. You can browse them in this map view.

St. John's also has two Caravaggio paintings. I was really struck by this St. Jerome. Caravaggio is known as the bad-boy homosexual Baroque painter and has lots of erotic images of young men. Here St. Jerome is quite pious and elderly but also is painted with a sensuality that is the gay male gaze.

Malta is also striking for being built almost entirely out of yellow limestone, one of the country's only natural resources.

After a day at sea we made it to Santorini. It's sort of overwhelmingly touristy but uniquely beautiful as a caldera island.

Obligatory panorama shot of the harbor under Fira / Φηρά

This morning was a walk around the old part of Rhodes / Ρόδος and a visit to the Grand Master's Palace. The same Grand Master as in Malta: I've been following the Hospitallers around from Amalfi to Rhodes to Malta. Perhaps I should stop in Acre as well!

The Palace of the Grand Masters of Rhodes is a bit of a mixed bag: impressive building, not much in it. But the mosaics are astonishing, ~2000 year old Roman floors from Kos.

Mykonos / Μύκονος today, my first time here in 30+ years. Still beautiful, still a bit overwhelmingly touristy. I am sorry I didn't get out to Delos this time, that was memorable.

A day trip to Corinth from Nafplion. Remarkable ruins and a museum full of treasures.

The museum also had a fine collection of dicks. These were votive offerings to Asclepius, a prayer for healing. Lots of sculpted legs, ears, hands too.
What's particularly interesting is these are personalized sculptures, not a mass produced stereotype.

We also made a stop to take photos of the canal at Corinth that shortcuts the Peloponnese

We are in Paris! Our first night was dinner at Brasserie du Louvre, a pleasant and reliable standby. Their cocktail featured a clever spray on top of an egg white foam.

Today we visited the Calder exhibit at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, an extraordinary retrospective. I now appreciate the evolution of his career much more, also the diversity of his works. Phenomenally staged exhibit, really great.

The big moment in his life was visiting Piet Mondrian's studio in 1930. After that he abandons anything figurative and focuses on abstract sculptures, mostly the mobiles. But he also had some variety: his wire figure sculptures are delightful.

Not pictured: the fantastic exhibit of the artifacts of Calder's Circus, a late '20s sort of flea circus he performed with various tiny kinetic sculptures. Totally idiosyncratic and fascinating. There's no film of his performances at the time but he did record this 1961 rendition.
I love that this American mechanical engineer was hanging out with all these French Surrealists and Abstraction-Créationists and offered them a deranged circus, then sublime kinetic sculptures.

Today I briefly visited Saint Roch in Paris, a huge Baroque church. It has a remarkable design with three successive chapels: a grand altar, a more intimate altar to the Virgin, and then a sort of faux stone grotto in the back with a crucifixion. Also an interesting monument to Charles-Michel de l'Épée, a pioneer of Deaf education in the 18th century.

A few Paris street snaps near Notre Dame

Welcome back to America!