The catalog is the narrative guide for the exhibition held in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana dedicated to cocoa – one of the most precious treasures from the New World – as described and narrated in Brother Bernardino de Sahagún’s work. According to Aztec mythology, cocoa has a divine origin, closely connected to the god Quetzalcóatl. Maps and archaeological, historical, artistic and artisan artifacts tell the story of chocolate, from the Mesoamerica of the Olmecs to the ‘bean to bar’ movement, a beacon of hope in respect to ‘the Other’.
111 Places in New Orleans That You Must Not Miss is your ultimate guide to uncovering the Crescent City’s most unique and hidden gems. Beyond the jazz clubs and Mardi Gras parades, this book reveals the city’s soulful layers—where history, music, cuisine, and mysticism collide. Discover the roots of jazz, the birthplace of America’s first cocktail, and the vibrant mix of Creole and Cajun cultures.
Explore secret spots like a chapel adorned with cast-off prosthetics, the oldest African-American Catholic church in the U.S., and a bridge hosting Voodoo ceremonies. Indulge in local flavors with praline bacon, pork belly po’boys, and Bananas Foster sno-balls. Find eccentric treasures like a chartreuse beehive wig or a hand-painted sign reminding you to “Be Nice or Leave.”
From dive bars to haunted landmarks, 111 Places in New Orleans invites you to experience the city’s quirky, mystical, and unforgettable spirit—one hidden place at a time.
This book overturns the truism that people carry objects to places. Instead, it asks how objects transport people—physically, imaginatively, and emotionally—to spaces and worlds beyond their immediate reach. It explores artworks as maps of imagined journeys or as worlds inviting inner exploration, grounded in ‘deep travel’ or psychogeography. Centered on Shanxi, China—a cultural crossroads known as West of Mountains—the book examines pivotal works that model these journeys. Highlights include China’s “Stonehenge” tracking solar movements, Zoroastrian-themed sarcophagi, tomb murals depicting afterlife journeys, and Buddhist scrolls for water-land rituals. Lavishly illustrated, the volume combines essays on interconnected themes with close analyses of individual pieces, offering a rich narrative on how art shapes profound spatial and imaginative experiences.
Belgium’s two most beloved export products, chocolate and beer, have much more in common than you might think. The roasting process for malt and cocoa is strikingly similar, and fermentation plays a crucial role in both. Chef Michel Eyckerman proves with his delicious recipes that they also pair perfectly together. In this stunning book, you will learn to taste and combine these treasures through 52 savory dishes, sweet desserts, aperitifs, pralines, and much more. The dishes are beautifully captured by top photographer Karl Bruninx.
Welcome to 111 Places in Richmond That You Must Not Miss, a collection of the sites and experiences that make the River City such a special place. To those who don’t know Richmond, Virginia, USA, you’ll find the city itself to be a hidden gem, the cradle of 400 years of American history, steward of the magnificent James River, and the unlikely home to heralded culinary masters.
To those who do know Richmond, the self-deprecating but proud populace inured to its remarkable features, by flipping through these pages you will uncover secrets about your city, new and old. You know Hollywood Cemetery, but do you know the final resting place of our famous psychic horse? Have you kept an open mind about our smaller neighbors to the North and South and gazed at the Heavens from “the Center of the Universe” or seen the Petersburg residence constructed entirely from tombstones?
In July 1880, 30-year-old Robert Louis Stevenson, yielding to the insistence of Lloyd Osbourne, his 13-year-old adopted son, and starting from a map he had drawn for Lloyd, began to tell an adventure of pirates and buried treasure. The tale flowed so naturally that Stevenson decided to put it on paper. When the last chapter was also published in Young Folks magazine, Stevenson decided to change the title to the book and call it Treasure Island. In his hands, the children’s adventure had incredibly transformed into an epic exploration of the ambiguity of moral values and the dual essence of human nature. Because of its value and fascination, Tresure Island was chosen to start the “Dédale” series, in which it is illustrated by the unpublished drawings of French illustrator David B. and enriched by a preface signed by the well-known writer Alberto Manguel, followed by an introduction by Léonard Puoy, focusing on the significance of treasures in our culture.
From atmospheric bookshops and cafes to storied libraries and pubs steeped in writerly lore, London is a paradise for bibliophiles. Whether you’re after the quiet romance of the Keats House gardens or looking to lose yourself amid the elegant nooks of Daunt Books or the stacks at the British Library, this guide unlocks the city’s greatest literary treasures. Toast the ghosts of writers past at Ye Old Cheshire Cheese, soak in the decadence of the Oscar Wilde Bar or even go further afield on London’s best literary day trips.
Fife is an ancient Scottish county, proudly known as the Kingdom. Its distinctive, self-contained identity is summed up in the old adage ‘Bid farewell to Scotland, and cross to Fife!’ A compact peninsula shaped like the head of a Scottie dog nosing the North Sea, it boasts magnificent approaches from south and north via the celebrated bridges over the Forth and Tay. Tourists flock to the world-famous golf courses in the old university town of St Andrews. But Fife is packed with all manner of much less-visited treasures, places of stunning natural beauty as well as fascinating monuments of every era, from prehistoric to post-industrial, testaments to its long and eventful past and richly diverse cultural heritage. You will discover a land where generations of the illustrious and the powerful, the humble and the hard-working have all left their mark, from kings and queens to miners and fishermen, from bishops, earls and industrialists to scholars, artists and sportsmen – to say nothing of the internationally famed Fifers whose legacies have changed history. This book will introduce visitor and native alike to a whole host of unexpected and contrasting sites and sights that celebrate the delightful otherness of this unique little Kingdom.
Campi Flegrei, near Naples, is a seismically active landscape that attracts, stimulates, and challenges. It seduces the soul, engages perception, and demands to be interpreted rather than merely registered.
People have chosen to live amongst these unique geological and volcanic features, weaving the fabric of human occupation and taming a land in perpetual transformation, one of the harshest yet most enchanting environments. Mankind has matched its own impermanence against the earth’s inevitable and unrestrained convulsions, in the process hewing out some of the most glorious examples of human endeavor, such as Cumae, the oldest Greek colony in the Western Mediterranean, the bustling Roman port of Puteoli, and the “dolce vita” savored in the baths and villas dotted around the Bay of Baiae.
Luigi Spina has been exploring this land since 2020, delving into the complex, stratified geography. Key landmarks include places of memory (archaeological sites, monuments, landscapes), which, like true benchmarks of perception, outline the path towards an understanding of a world that links nature, ancient ruins, and the overwhelming presence of mankind. Balanced between mimicry and contradiction, the Campi Flegrei landscape is now blanketed by a dense urban sprawl, where the ancient and the contemporary coexist in a kind of precarious equilibrium, generating a complex socio-cultural state of affairs that is challenging to govern.
Spina explores and photographs places such as the Dragonara Cave, the Piscina Mirabilis, the Theatre of Misenum, the Flavian Amphitheatre at Puteoli, the Temple of Apollo on the shores of Lake Avernus, and the Temples of Venus and Diana, as he wanders through the hills above Baiae, finally heading towards Cumae.
The Gulbenkian Museum published its long-awaited catalogue of Calouste Gulbenkian’s collection of illuminated manuscripts, marking the culmination of several years of research and collaboration by a group of international scholars.
This group of works, which was particularly prized by the collector, was acquired for his own personal enjoyment and kept at his home in Paris before being transferred to Portugal. In the 1960s, when they were housed at the Marques de Pombal Palace in Oeiras, the codices were damaged by flooding. The restoration work that allowed these specimens to be studied and exhibited at long last was only completed in 2014.
The first article, by Manuela Fidalgo, the emeritus curator of this group of works from the collection, explores the milestone moments in the creation of the collection, homing in on Gulbenkian’s choices and the way in which he sought to preserve his books. She has also written a brief account of the flooding of 1967 and the restoration of the damaged specimens.
The second essay, by François Avril, former curator of the Manuscripts Department at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, an expert in medieval manuscript volumes and the scientific coordinator of this catalogue, takes an in-depth look at the specimens that make up the collection, plotting the timeline of the acquisitions and uncovering their provenance. The catalogue, which covers 27 books and 10 fragments, was coordinated by Angela Dillon Bussi, a specialist in medieval history and former assistant director of the Biblioteca nazionale Marciana, Venice and the Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana in Florence.
The catalogue entries, which are all illustrated, divide the codices into two sections. The first puts forward a codicological study by Angela Dillon Bussi, in collaboration with Davide Baldi Bellini. The second explores the history, content and artistic importance of the pieces, with contributions from renowned experts such as Angela Dillon Bussi, Federica Toniolo, François Avril, Giordana Mariani Canova, James Marrow, Jonathan Alexander, Lieve de Kessel and Nigel J. Morgan.
Ammi’s Kitchen: Heirloom Recipes from Rampur is a tribute to all grandmothers who have been the torchbearers of saving and passing on the legacy of classic traditional family recipes. Pernia Qureshi’s grandmother, Mussharaf-ul-Nissa Begum, originally from Chandausi in the United Provinces, was married at a young age into the princely state of Rampur. With the influence of her hometown, now combined with the newfound exposure to Rampur’s more modern and eclectic cuisine, she created a food language that was uniquely her own.
This book is a collection of recipes she mastered over the years, which still carry the aromas of the treasures of history.
The aristocratic families of Europe once used to indulge in luxurious banquets with exquisite table accessories to demonstrate their power and extravagantly while away the hours. Well into the 18th century, it was not unusual for people to bring their own cutlery—quite often peculiar, valuable one-of-a-kind pieces. In the Baroque period, matching dinner services came into vogue and, in the wake of industrialization, became mass-produced commodities. Trading with faraway countries, conquests, and migration augmented people’s menus with “exotic” fruit and spices and contributed to a change in customs and traditions.
In an exceptional exhibition on the mores of dining, the Jewelry Museum in Pforzheim presents historical goldsmithing and contemporary design, jewelry “to eat,” and treasures from across the globe. In addition, the accompanying publication will entice you with its special aspects of food culture—after all, the way to one’s cultural heart is also through the stomach.
Text in German.
Dutch interior designer Roelfien Vos gained international acclaim for her iconic luxury interiors. In celebration of her 25-year career anniversary, she offers a unique glimpse into her exceptional creative process with the book Tailored to Wonder, showcasing the people, places, and objects that inspire her. A stunning coffee table book about the power of interior design, a love for craftsmanship, travel, art and fashion — and an unapologetic passion for excellence. With her signature style — a blend of contemporary design, global treasures, and custom-made creations with a keen eye for detail — she has left her personal mark on projects around the world. This book is a must-have for anyone fascinated by distinctive design, inspiring stories, and poetic living spaces that redefine luxury.