Worldcrunch
Tourists found Largo Maradona sealed off this week after municipal police fined stalls, seized goods, and flagged illegal licenses, prompting ultras leader “Bostik” to cover the famous mural of the soccer legend in protest. A neighborhood continues to defend its secular shrine.
This giant chicken will attract tourists! Let’s honor Queen Elizabeth with a statue that looks nothing like her! And other very visible bad ideas around the world…
As good as the Paris Games have been to the French capital, does that mean we must forever fix the Olympic rings on the Eiffel Tower? It looks like Mayor Anne Hidalgo may have drunk her own Kool-Aid — or too much water from the Seine.
At just 18-years-old, Daria Kozyreva sits in a pre-trial detention center. She is facing five years for “repeatedly discrediting the Russian army.” Here is her letter to all Russians, trying to convince people of good will to denounce the Kremlin regime.
The emblematic palace of King Louis XIV, born from the will of his father Louis XIII, is celebrating its 400th anniversary. Throughout its adaptation to different eras and restoration, the work has (almost) never stopped.
The toppling of statues and other political symbols creates new spaces that are themselves a reckoning for society.
The editor of Mada Masr writes about what how to remember the revolution in Egypt.
When I visited the prehistoric site of Stonehenge in southern England, it was still possible to walk among, and even touch, the megaliths. Not for long, though: A year later, the damage to the standing stones caused by erosion forced the authorities to start keeping visitors at a safe distance.
My daughter Cécile had climbed the steps all the way up the Leaning Tower of Pisa. She smiled for the camera, but you can tell she didn’t feel so safe close to the tilted edge.
This monument on Minsk’s Island of Tears is dedicated to the memory of the Belarusian soldiers who died in the 1979-1988 Soviet-Afghan war.
The Georgi Dimitrov mausoleum in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, was built in 1949 to contain the embalmed body of the country’s first communist leader. After the fall of the USSR, some members of the government started thinking the monument was an embarrassing nod to Bulgaria’s totalitarian past, and in 1999, they decided to blow […]
For 2,000 years, the Roman aqueduct of Segovia, in central Spain, has defied the passage of time. With the French Pont du Gard (of which I’ll show you a picture soon), it’s one of the best preserved examples of its kind.
The Italian Renaissance Trinità dei Monti church, at the top of the famous Spanish Steps in Piazza di Spagna, was a little bit like a home away from home for us French travellers. “La Trinité-des-Monts,” as we call it, was built by a French king and has been under French responsibility ever since — together […]
Welcome to Ciudad Mitad del Mundo, the city in the middle of the world, about 30 kilometers north of Quito. My wife Claudine and I were standing on each side of a line symbolizing the Equator. Modern equipment has since shown that the Equator actually lies about some 240 meters north, but this stays between […]
Exclusive: A historian has identified Pope Francis’ birthplace in Buenos Aires, after false reports of where he was born circulated following his election last year.
We visited Rome often, and almost always made sure to pass by to admire the majestic Fontana di Trevi. We never took part in the tourist tradition of tossing a coin over your left shoulder and making a wish to return some day to the eternal city. Our many Roman returns confirmed my doubts about […]
NEW YORK – In the art world, auctions and mega galleries dominate. There are departed graffiti artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat who sell for tens of millions of dollars. Venice’s biennial tips its hat to ‘outsider’ artists, such as Antonio Ligabue, and mixes them with ‘insiders’, such as Richard Serra. Enter Thomas Hirschhorn, a creator of […]
SKOPJE – Cameras flash on Macedonia Square. There aren’t droves of foreign tourists in Skopje, but the Macedonian diaspora, back in the country on holiday, can’t believe their eyes. A huge mounted warrior is in the center of the capital, brandishing his sword skyward: counting the pedestal, the monument has a respectable height of 24 […]