The Neglected Ghost Town of Italy’s Dolce Vita Drinking Water

San Pellegrino is an icon of the Italian lifestyle, the most stylish brand of sparkling water you can order anywhere in the world, synonymous with luxury, fine dining, jet set summers in Europe and “la Dolce Vita”. One of its first admirers was allegedly Leonardo da Vinci, who visited the source in Lombardy to sample the…

Beautiful Tomboys of the 1930s

I was tumbling through Tumblr, one of my favourite places on the internet to discover history’s lesser-known muses and there, on page thirty-something of my browsing, I stopped at a photograph of an androgynous woman taken by Marianne Breslauer, a name unfamiliar to me. As I began googling her work, my screen was soon taken over by black…

Crumbling Communist Murals the Soviets Left Behind

In the early nineties, well after the destruction of the Berlin Wall, did you know there were still over 300,000 Soviet soldiers in Eastern Germany? In 1991, there were still 4,200 Russian tanks, 690 aircrafts, 180 rocket systems and over 200,000 civil employees and relatives of officers, among them about 900,000 children. Until the final withdrawal…

13 Things I Found on the Internet (Vol. CXCIV)

1. At the Beach in 1905 Colorised photo by Sanna Dullaway 2. Amateur Explorer Discovers more than 250 Designs etched into the Quarry walls by WWI US Troops Eight miles of secret tunnels deep in the forests of Northern France … used by the American Expeditionary Force, sent by President Wilson to reinforce Britain and…

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Found in a Flea Market: A 1930s Scrapbook of a Young Lady’s American Dream

A recent visit to the Brooklyn flea market unearthed a quite remarkable treasure; a lovingly compiled 1939 scrap book once belonging to a young lady called Lotta June Miller. The scrap book records her journey across America to become a theatre director. Photographs, old signed playbills, tickets for sleeper cars on trains and Valentine’s cards…

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The Story of Messy Nessy’s Makeover

Six years ago almost to the day, I launched this blog. I had no idea what I was doing, I barely understood what the term “blog” even meant, but I knew I had something to share so I signed up to the blogging platform WordPress, (which wasn’t much harder than creating a MySpace page), chose…

Paris, the Big Picture

This photograph had me at hello, somewhere midway through my morning scroll on Pinterest. I’m always lured in by photos of the Petite Ceinture, the abandoned inner city railway of Paris, a surviving relic of a bygone era, closed since 1934 (you can take a tour with me at the end of this post if you’re curious).…

Up Close & Personal with Coco Chanel in her Apartment at the Ritz

The most controversial years in Coco Chanel’s life were spent living at the Hotel Ritz in Paris. While most of Paris was being booted out of their homes during the German occupation, Coco lived in luxury throughout most of World War II– thanks to a highly questionable relationship with her lover, a German Aristocrat and Nazi…

World War II Love Letters

The other day from across the pond, a New Yorker got in touch with me to ask whether I might be interested in a scrapbook he found at a Brooklyn flea market, made by a young lady leaving New York in 1939 for California to become a theatre director. Of course I was interested, and of…

This Miniature Belle Epoque Photo Studio is Ready for its Close-up

In an era where an expression like “selfie” is announced as the Oxford dictionary’s word of the year, the idea of going to a photographic studio to have a picture taken of yourself, does seem rather like something out of a dreamworld… Ali Alamedy is an artist from Turkey who creates incredibly accurate and detailed dioramas, most recently this early photography studio from the 1900s…