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Artemisia Gentileschi (Italian, 1593-1653)

Venus and Cupid, 1625-1630

oil on canvas

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I slip [the apron] over my head and make us good things to eat. There are coconut-heady dhals; focaccia pooled with grassy olive oil and sea salt; green tea rice and salmon; peach tart. We eat together each night and no pasta sauce ever gets on my clothes. Between sewing, writing, and cooking, my life is full of making. In every act, I savour.

Maddie Ballard, Bound: A Memoir of Making and Remaking

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Venice, Italy.

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“Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor, for the eternal idleness of the imagined return, for rare flutes and bare feet, and the August bedroom of tangled sheets…”

— Derek Walcott, Bleecker Street, Summer

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Desires are already memories.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (trans. William Weaver)

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Monica Vitti in Venice

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“Sensuality does not reside in a body, but in the words and gestures that the body manages to convey: it is finesse of thoughts, it is delicacy of messages, it is harmony of ideas, it is elegance in actions, it is the charm of the mind.”

— Paola Melone

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Romy Schneider

1972

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“Traveling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, ‘I would stay and love you, but I have to go.’”

— Lisa St. Aubin de Teran 

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“I speak of the summer, of the slow night that grows on the horizon like a mountain of smoke, and bit by bit it crumbles, falling over us like a wave…”

— Octavio Paz, from ‘I Speak of the City’, A Tree Within (trans. Eliot Weinberger)

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“It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

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Marcel Proust in September 1892

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“Encountering an artichoke, one might wonder how the first person to eat that vegetable ever got past the exterior spines and the interior core of throat-raking needles to discover the sweet heart hidden within. Many foodstuffs present similar mysteries, such as rhubarb, whose poison parts surround succulent stems, or vegetables and meats whose toxins require hours of careful flushing before they relinquish edible substances. The vast family of peppers can burn the tissues of the mouth, eyes, and nose so painfully that they are sometimes used as punishment, yet they also have become immensely popular in the diet of many peoples. None of these examples represents bounties of the earth immediately inviting to the palate, and given the sheer difficulty of finding the nutrients to be had from fierce, dangerous, or toxic substances, we might well wonder that human beings ever learned to eat anything beyond the first fruits of the garden of Eden - one of which proved to be the most dangerous of all! (…) The remarkable thing is not just that we managed to eat, but that we managed and continue to manage to take considerable pleasure in foods that present us with challenges to both our senses and our sensibilities.”

— Carolyn Korsmeyer, ‘Delightful, Delicious, Disgusting’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 60, no. 3 (2002)