“Your Majesty, I regret to inform you that from my books it looks like you didn’t pay for the last 247 years”. With these words, the...

Over the last few weeks we heard a lot about the role Spain played in shaping of Renaissance Europe. It was a dominant power in the...

Ever so often, tensions flare up between Morocco and Spain over a few rocks in the Mediterranean or the towns of Ceuta and Melia....

Many years ago, I travelled from Rome to Bologna to see all of Michelangelo’s master pieces. The trip started in Rome where you find most...

A few steps behind Palazzo San Giorgio, which housed the famous Bank of St Georges, is the quiet and small Piazza Banchi where once...

One of the many things that puzzled me when researching our trip was how the Kingdom of Aragon was able to become a Mediterranean power...

A few weeks ago, I wrote about local grapes in Sicily and Sardinia. Some of them have roots back to the time when Greek and Phoenician...

Wanted to write about this topic for a while. The story of the Pied-Noirs is fascinating albeit tragic. I heard it several times. The...

It never occurred to me that someone could blend bread and cheese but people in Genoa do so with their Pecorino Focaccia. There are so...

When researching the making of Focaccia yesterday, I came across three more interesting stories which will be the subjects of my next...

Writing for two days about Genoa made me thinking of Focaccia, the town’s famous flat bread. I wondered how many new bakeries had to open...

Most of us have heard of the Spanish Treasure Fleet, which sailed every year from Havana to Seville with the annual silver production of...

Having seen the Carta Pisana as young student in the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris in 1981, I planned to write a blog about cartography...

In one of my blogs the previous year, I talked about Turkish Gulets, the slow, commercial freighters for bulky goods, which became the...

If we were setting sail two thousand years ago, would we meet a Roman cruising party like us on the AFAED? Did the Romans travel for...

We are all looking forward to the delicious seafood we are going to have during our sailing holiday. Buying if directly from the...

Did you ever wonder why the galleys, the Queens of the Mediterranean, suddenly disappeared in the 18th century? More than a hundred years...

Would we need a weather report for our trip from Genoa to Tunis given that neither the Genovese nor the Pisan merchants had any such...

On our trip from Genoa to Tunis, the coast line changes constantly. The green Apennine Mountains accompany us first, the rougher peaks of...

Two days after our visit to Pisa, we will reach the island of Elba, halfway between the Italian peninsula and Corsica. The official...