What Venice Still Has to Teach Us
I was standing inside St Mark’s Basilica on a recent trip to Venice, looking up at the mosaics while a wonderfully engaging guide walked us through the story of the Republic of Venice. She spoke not just about the art and architecture, but about something far more striking—how this small, lagoon-bound city managed to build a system that endured for around a thousand years. It’s one thing to read that fact in a book. It’s another to stand there, in a place shaped by that continuity, and feel the weight of it. Venice wasn’t just beautiful—it was stable, deliberate, and, for much of its life, remarkably effective.
Read More
Saving the Season
Before the age of global supply chains and year-round availability, every season had its own distinct flavour, its own fleeting window of abundance. Summer brought a riot of berries and stone fruits, autumn a cascade of apples and pears. This bounty was a blessing, but also a challenge: how to honour this generosity without letting it succumb to the inevitable march of decay? Long before the first refrigerators hummed into existence, our ancestors devised ingenious ways to hold onto the harvest. They dried, they salted, they sugared, and they fermented. And in the art of distillation, they found one of the most profound methods of all: transforming the ephemeral essence of a season into a spirit that could last for generations.
Read More