Worldcrunch
Brightly-decorated Sicilian carts don’t just look great. The scenes carved in the wood of the carretti siciliani used to be a good way to teach history, and pass on folklore, to illiterate workers.
These two Peruvian women in traditional clothes were taking a break from a nearby festival, watching me watching them.
Ask anyone in France about Brittany, and there’s a good chance they’ll tell you how bad the weather is in the northwestern region. Looks like blue skies to me!
My wife Claudine was barely paying attention to the endless limousine she was walking past. Too conspicuous for her taste, maybe?
Wrought iron restaurant signs are a German specialty, and usually point famished travellers like me toward excellent Gasthaus food. But not far from Tangermünde, where I took this shot, a different sort of iron still separated Europe in two.
This man was giving his boat a fresh coat of paint on a hilly street in Valletta. Less than a year before, a U.S.-USSR summit in Malta is credited by some as having closed the Cold War. That meeting was aboard a much bigger Soviet boat anchored in the nearby harbor of Marsaxlokk.
In northern Norway, this Sámi family was wearing colored gákti costumes. And I don’t think it was merely for tourists — in the 1960s, some northern families were still in the habit of wearing traditional clothing when selling hides at the local market, or herding reindeer.
This Arlecchino belonged to a band from Bergamo that had made the trip to my native eastern France. Parading in the streets of Montbéliard, this character from the Commedia dell’arte was participating in the folk singing and dancing festival organized by the choir I used to conduct.
I don’t often go for artistic shots, but this lighthouse staircase in the big fishing port of Hvide Sande, in western Denmark, caught my eye.
India’s capital, New Delhi, has long been known for its over-the-top traffic jams and erratic drivers — here’s how it looked 22 years ago.
Granted, it was the “60s — but of which century?
To get from the foot of the butte Montmartre to the Sacré-Cœur basilica in Paris, you can either go up the 300 stairs or, since 1900, buy a ticket for the funicular.
One of the best things about traveling in organized tours is that you get priority tickets for everything, meaning that we never had to wait in line to get into the Vatican, the Taj Mahal, or in this case, the Mayan city of Tulum.
Britain is making the news today. I took this shot in Edinburgh“s Princes Street, just five years after Scotland, as part of the UK, joined the European Union.
Amalienborg, the winter home of the Danish royal family, is located next to a ferry docking point — very convenient for tourists. You may notice this slide is a little bit dusty, but my grandson and I didn’t want to photoshop that away.
The style of mailboxes around the world varies considerably. This opulent one, in eastern Germany, looked like it could have been used by Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Our faithful Peugeot 404 makes a cameo appearance, with the Ribat fortress of Monastir in the background.
The penitent on the right-hand side of this picture was having a hard time breathing under his capirote, during Easter processions in southern Spain.
In Tunisia’s capital, colorful Bardo guards kept a watchful eye on the Lion Staircase, one of the entrances leading to the parliament building inside the Bardo Palace.
The Scottish island of Staffa, with its other-wordly basalt pillars similar to the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, unites two of my interests: German classical music composer Felix Mendelssohn composed an overture, inspired by the cathedral-like echoes of the island’s Fingal’s Cave; and the place is also mentioned in the adventure novels of French writer […]
At the markets of Peć, in western Kosovo, there was no real way for me to tell whether I was in the 19th or 20th century.
Napoleon Bonaparte’s exile on the Italian island of Elba, about 50 kilometers east of the French emperor’s native Corsica, was still commemorated when I went there 47 years ago, although with slightly unflattering knick-knacks in souvenir shops.
A saiga antelope’s head, dried seahorses, horn powder and God knows what else was in those jars … Much like La Paz, Singapore was a great place to buy exotic souvenirs.
Larissa in eastern Greece is traditionally held to be the birthplace of Achilles. This would-be motorcycle hero was also destined to fall, caught by the heel by a local traffic cop.
I could tell you about the state of traffic in Indonesia, about the refined paintings adorning Bali’s rickshaws, or pretend I took this shot to show the hardships of precarious workers in Southeast Asia. But really, it boils down to the fact that I thought “Muncul” sounds like “my a**” in French.
On Moscow’s Sparrow Hill, tourists can buy nestling dolls or wooden chess boards while enjoying the view over the Russian capital.
When my grandson went on his honeymoon in Brazil two years ago, I advised him to go to Paraty, a highly picturesque colonial village south of Rio, with its very colorful harbor and cobblestone streets. He had better weather than I did.
If you’re eating paella in a restaurant in Valencia, there’s a good chance you’re eating the real deal: The authentic paella valenciana was born there.
Constantine, in northern Algeria, was French for about a century, from the middle of the 19th century until 1962 — just seven years before I drove down there with my family. My wife Claudine and daughter Cécile were gazing into the impressive ravine that surrounds the city, with the viaduct over the Rhumel river in […]
Coming across the border after our stay in Syria, our first stop in Jordan was Jerash, the ancient settlement known as Gerasa. Sitting at an outdoor café, we gazed upon the “Pompei of the East” — and the rugs for sale right next to the Roman ruins.
The statue in front of the Tokaj-HétszÅ‘lÅ‘ cellar is a fair depiction of how I remember the visit. The Hungarian wine was indeed very good, which goes to prove that you can be French and still like foreign vintages. Egészségedre, as they say in the country!
The majestuous scarlet macaws flying about in Guatemala were a nice change from the birds I’m used to seeing in the streets of European cities.
Upon landing in the Indonesian capital, we were welcomed (straight on the tarmac) by a parade of men in traditional costumes.
I’ve taken my share of pictures of guards from around the world, but these may be the most original, keeping an eye on the Palazzo Pubblico in the tiny landlocked microstate of San Marino.
Sweden boasts about 1,700 such runestones that feature the old Scandinavian runic alphabet. This one, outside of Gripsholm Castle near Stockholm, was erected in memory of fallen Vikings.
In the second half of the 20th century, countless painters would set up their easels on the Place du Tertre, on top of Paris’s Montmartre hill. Some no doubt were trying to channel Picasso, who used to live nearby. By this point, the great Spanish master had set up shop in the quieter climes of […]
The stunning facade of the Basilica di Santa Croce in Lecce, in southern Italy, is a good example of the exuberant architectural style that has earned the city its nickname of “capital of Baroque.”
I like the juxtaposition between this minaret and the improbable electrical entanglement in the foreground: Clearly, you needed to have faith to believe the whole thing was going to hold up.
The fishermen“s wives of yore used to wear seven colorful petticoats; some say to represent the seven waves in a set, others say to keep warm while awaiting their husbands’ return. In the late 1950s, these women working at Nazaré“s seafood market already considered it folklore, as they found it doubtlessly easier to carry their […]
Not only is the Great Stupa, in the ancient Sri Lankan capital of Anuradhapura, considered an architectural marvel, but it is one of the holliest places for Buddhists, as the shrine is believed to contain relics of Buddha.