Over the hills, under the moon - and off the beaten path

During the summer of the Great Terror - in June and July of 1794 - the guillotine on what is now Place de l'Île de la Réunion,  worked almost day and night. More than 1300 'enemies of the Revolution' were beheaded.  At the time, the fates of the headless corpses were kept secret to avoid outcry, but a brave woman dared to follow the cart, which was transporting her father's body and she found out it passed through a gate into a walled-in, secluded convent garden just a few hundred meters from the guillotine. Here the bodies, men and women, adults and children, aristocrats and commoners, all alike, were dumped together into two vast mass graves.  A few years later the convent garden was bought by grieving relatives and you can to this day walk inside, even though so few people visit that we actually startled the woman, who is guarding the place. While all traces of horror is long gone from the busy Place de l'Île de la Réunion, here in the Picpus cemetery, you can st...

  The last two weeks have been pretty sprinkled with even more pretty. We took off from Paris to visit Normandy and we have now seen untold numbers of romantic villages and towns filled with pastel-colored half-timbered houses garnered with hollyhocks. After having lived in Paris close to Porte de Stalingrad with its graffiti-tagged concrete facades, its elevated metro tracks, and its many drug addicts and heavily armored policemen, it has been almost a culture shock to be surrounded by all this niceness. Our base has been in Rouen, which we before we came to visit, knew almost nothing about - except it being the town, where Jeanne d'Arc was burned at the stake almost six hundred years ago. We did pass the last remaining, forbidden tower from the castle, where Jeanne was held prisoned, and interrogated - and we walked across the Place du Vieux-Marché, where she was burned - only 19 years old.  But, in contrast to its dark past, Rouen turned out to be an absolutely lovely ...

After many months of staying put, it is SO wonderful to be allowed back into the world, but as you never know if and when everything is once more bunkered down, we decided this summer to stay pretty close to our home base and live some months in Paris.  The last year we have all seen how severe Covid lockdowns made the Parisian streets and boulevards almost empty, but this July, even though the throngs of tourists may not have arrived, the city seems to have completely refound its joie de vivre. The night we arrived, the Place de la République was filled with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dancing Parisians celebrating the lifting of the last Covid restrictions on the size of assemblies.  There was dancing around the Marianne monument and it felt like we were celebrating the revolution or the liberation from a restrictive regime.  But even though everyone was happy, Rita and I also felt a slightly bitter taste in our mouths.   Many French people do not want to ...

  At the end of our garden, across the water, we can see the small island of Faroe, and even though we haven't really explored most of Gotland, we felt tempted to visit it. Faroe island is known for being rugged and beautiful, but its primary claim to fame is probably that it, for many years, was the home of the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman.  Here he built a marvelous, secluded house, and we decided today to make it our mission to find it - hidden as it is somewhere along the rugged coast.    You can't just ask locals for directions to the place. We tried, but they must have been used to sheltering Bergman from prying eyes and they obviously still feel somewhat protective of their famous, former resident. The answers were each time along the lines of 'The Bergman house? Gee, I don't know exactly. It is far from here. Very far from here!' What we could do, was finding an old photo of the house to see how it looks, and then, by following the island coastline on aer...

  Furillen made a huge impression and by chance, our next big discovery was yet another abandoned and beautifully renovated limestone quarry, which lies just next to our house in the north of Gotland. The large 160-hectare Bungenäs quarry was for many years off-limits as it was  used by the Swedish armed forces for military training. When the military left the area, the plan was to erase all the industrial buildings and the military installations and build a golf resort with 300 identical houses. The entreptreneur Joachim Kuylenstierna, whose father had worked at the garrison, hated the idea and bought the site with a bold plan.    He wanted to have houses on Bungenäs that were adapted and almost subordinated to the wildly rugged landscape and contacted a young, local architectural firm, Skälsö architects, which made a master plan for the area.     When you now buy a plot at Bungenäs, you can't build a pre-fabricated house and you are not allowed to fence i...

  During summer Gotland is normally filled to the brim with tourists, but in these corona times (and out of season) we almost feel we have the island to ourselves. The roads are  empty, and when we drive around, we let os lead by serendipity. Yesterday, chance took us to the small island of Furillen, which turned out to be an abandoned limestone quarry.   The surreal potholed wasteland and the brutal, almost postapocalyptic beauty of the run-down industrial buildings looked like a set taken out of a Mad Max movie, but when we peeked through the windows, we could see some minimalistic, beautifully renovated rooms and restaurants using limestone, concrete, and hardwood. This was actually a hotel!   We looked in on www.furillen.com and found out the quarry had been closed for many years, when it was discovered by the Swedish fashion photographer Johan Hellström. He immediately fell in love with the harsh landscapes and sold everything he owned to buy the isla...