Worldcrunch
Dunrobin Castle in the Highlands of Scotland is one of the oldest inhabited houses in the country. This stately French Renaissance castle was used as a boarding school but opened to the public in 1973, just five years before we visited it.
The geese in southwestern France would produce what may be the country’s most controversial, yet scrumptious, delicacy: foie gras.
In 1969, nine years before I went there, Caernafon Castle in northwestern Wales was used for the investiture of Charles, Prince of Wales. It raised the profile of the medieval fortress, but its beauty was well worth visiting in its own right.
Howard Zerangue served more than 25 years as sheriff of Opelousas, Louisiana. I wonder why that is …
Blue sky, blue car, blue bicycle, and a very blue pub.
In the fairy tale, the evil queen disguises herself as an old woman and tries to kill Snow White with a poisoned apple. What the story left out is that she then moved to Cyprus to sell jars of marmalade.
“Tony” the Cypriot shoe seller definitely had a knack for presenting shoes in a novel way.
In the late 1950s, some villages in southern Portugal still didn’t have access to running water. I guess you could call this walking water?
The lunar landscapes of the Tabernas Desert, near Almeria in southern Spain, were used as filming locations for some of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns in the 1960s. When my wife and I went there in the 1980s it was pretty much abandoned, but it has since become a major tourist attraction.
A trip on the Volga river — the longest in Europe — is like floating down the stream of history. The magnificently decrepit churches along the way gave us a glimpse of the many layers of the Russian nation, just 10 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, and one year after the arrival […]
Salvador is nicknamed “Brazil’s capital of happiness.” I wonder why …
In 1995, Chairman Mao was no longer such a hot commodity: If you bought one bust of the communist leader at this Beijing market, you got one free.
Going to Lourdes as a tourist, not as a devotee, you come across a diverse bunch: the ailing believers looking for a cure, the admirable volunteers taking care of them, the peddlers cashing in on people’s faith. When I went there 45 years ago, I took this shot of pilgrims waiting for a group photograph […]
Until the Berlin Wall was built, just six years before I took this picture, people could walk freely under the Brandenburg Gate. It would be 22 years before Berliners and tourists were able to get closer to the triumphal arch again.
Judging by the abundance of flowers on the two horse-drawn funeral hearses, the departed must have been someone very important in Sicily.
Being only 70 ft-wide (21 meters) at its base, the canal that cuts through the Isthmus of Corinth is far too narrow for today’s large cargo freighters. It’s now mostly used by cruise liners, on the deck of which tourists can admire its high limestone walls.
My 4-year-old daughter and my father could not look more 1960s if they tried, posing by — and on — a cannon on the square in front of the Prince’s Palace of Monaco.
Having myself long been the conductor of a choir, it was only natural that I should snap a picture of this adorable orchestra of bamboo flutes in the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
With the choir of traditional folk singing I was part of, we went to many national — and international — gatherings of groups of singers and dancers who were trying to preserve their local cultural heritage. I took this picture of these two Cannettes with my very first camera, an Exacta Varex.
Our first trip to Tunisia was more focused toward the interior of the country, driving our Peugeot 404 down to Tozeur near the Sahara, but we still saved time for a detour to catch a glimpse of the beautiful island of Djerba in the Gulf of Gabes.
These Dutch klompen in Volendam bring back a precise chidhood memory: In 1940, when I was about the age of the boy on the left of the picture, I fled from my hometown in zone occupée to the village of Lacrost in the region of Bourgogne — then in zone libre … and I had […]
On our way to Ürgüp and its strange rocks, we drove past a couple of field workers. The whole scene threw me back to my childhood, when I would watch farmers harvest in eastern France.
My wife Claudine was taking a break from the vigorous April sun, resting under the lush azaleas bording the steps that lead to the top of Rome“s Capitoline Hill.
I like Don Quixote enough to dress as him for Carnival. But unlike Miguel de Cervantes’ character, I don’t go about attacking windmills, which is lucky, considering we’ve encountered quite a few during our travels.
For their First Communion, these German mädchen were still dressed as little brides, before albs became more customary.
Forty-nine years ago, the gondola traffic jams on Venice“s Grand Canal somehow seemed more manageable than today.
Chess has been a favorite hobby of mine long before 1963, when I took part in the Franche-Comté regional finals in Besançon. (I finished third.)
I told you we were going to publish this slide soon, didn’t I? As you read this, my grandson may be taking pictures of the same statue of the Little Mermaid before which his mother, my daughter Cécile, was posing 47 years ago: He’s in Copenhagen today.
Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers in Rome’s Piazza Navona, with its four allegorical statues representing the Nile, the Ganges, the Rio de la Plata and the Danube, contains one of the most comical pieces of sculpture I’ve ever seen. Actually, Nile’s head (center) is covered with a piece of cloth because at the time […]
In the near vicinity of the Pont d’Arc natural bridge in Ardèche, southern France, is the Chauvet Cave, which features some of the earliest prehistoric paintings in the world. Not as fun as kayaking on a crowded river, I guess?
Who’s this good-looking fellow dressed as Apollo and followed by his court of Muses, you ask? I told you before I used to take Carnival costumes pretty seriously.
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 […]
Perched on the summit of Cairo’s Saladin Citadel is the Great Mosque of Muhammad Ali Pasha, also known as the Alabaster Mosque because of its white courtyard. It’s one of the first features of Cairo visitors see when they travel into the city.
This nun walking under St. Peter’s Square’s colossal colonnades was looking at copies of L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s official newspaper founded in 1861. Zooming in, I was able to see that the front page was about Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Mater et Magistra on the topic of Christianity and social progress — written four years […]
“Chichi,” as it is affectionately called by visitors and Guatemalans alike, has become one of the most-visited destinations in the country. The colorful blouses these K’iche” women were selling at the city’s market contrasted nicely with the dark hair they inherited from their Mayan ancestors.
What’s most interesting about this shot is not the Swiss wrestlers (or Schwingen) in the foreground — meaning no disrespect, guys — but instead the rapt audience in the background, all wearing their Sunday best.
How better to recover from the spookiness of a Transylvanian burial than with a Transylvanian wedding? It was incredibly hot on this July day in Romania, and I remember one of these wedding-goers offered me a sip from what I assumed was a bottle of water. I took a big gulp, and quickly found out […]
Market places usually make for good, lively pictures. But here in Batalha in central Portugal, some of these young vendors were clearly bored out of their minds.
We went to Finland multiple times. Once we even brought a Finnish dictionary with us to try and understand a few words of the very peculiar suomi language … Many headaches ensued!
From the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland to Arizona’s Grand Canyon, we’ve seen our fair share of geologic wonders over the years. These fairy chimneys in Turkey’s Central Anatolia region are more modest, but still as baffling as the rest.