Monday, February 5, 2018

Paradiso

My dear things! Fatheads!


Just random notes, you know.

In the middle ages -- remember not long ago we were reading that biography of Caterina Sforza? --  aristocratic ladies (and don't we sometimes wish we had been one of them, instead of the farm wife all our ancestresses likely were) aristocratic ladies were happy if they could have among the rooms of their palaces, or their husband's hunting boxes, a "paradise" of their own: a cozy set of rooms, more like an entire floor at a fine hotel today probably, but still a relatively small, private, warm-in-winter, cool-in-summer interior, decorated as they liked, and meant to be a feminine refuge from whatever loud public life their husband's or father's career required of them. One imagines stucco walls hung with Renaissance Madonnas and tapestries from Ovid, and young girls playing lutes amid plashing fountains and parrots. Only no tropical monkeys please, even if they were a gift from some duke's possessions in New Spain. Anne Boleyn, sensible, cold weather Renaissance Englishwoman, disliked them and so do we.   

Clearly the weather is cold outside the windows of my paradiso. Still it is a great joy to get home from work at an unreasonably early hour, having gone in to work at an unreasonably early hour, and to be able to light the little lights and mix a cocktail, and just safely watch the snow.   

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thanks for stopping by ...

Escape hatch

Pardon a repeat of Feb. 2019, won't you? Warning! I've recently found out Blogger might be about to go the way of the dinosaurs. Sp...