Juliet's Journey by Kathy Gates (book review)

 

Juliet is thirty, her mother has just died and she has decided on a whim to leave Australia to volunteer at an art school in Baiardo, Italy, against her brother's advice.

Juliet doesn't expect that her first task will be to weed and clear up along the boundary with the neighbouring property, nor does she expect the rage that this induces in the neighbour, Luca. This is only one of the several intrigues and mysteries that Juliet encounters in her first few weeks at the art school.

Juliet is starting to fall for Luca, when her ex-fiance, Stuart, a dodgy property deceloper turns up.

Can Juliet help the villagers to stop Stuart's plans to turn the art school into holiday homes? Can she convince Luca that everything is over between her and Stuart and that she isn't connected to his property development plans?

(Stuart's plans for the art school reminded me of some of the less than appropriate development proposals hanging over Edinburgh at the moment, including the proposed demolition of the Blue Goose Pub with its beer garden overlooking the Water of Leith to make way for student flats.

I was also instinctively drawn to a story set in an area of Italy I've visited with a heroine called Juliet. Though my parents didn't meet while acting in a school production of Romeo and Juliet.)

This is an engaging, romantic novella in the wonderful setting of northern Italy with a light touch but with the serious issue of inappropriate property development at its heart. Well worth a read.

Juliet's Journey by Kathy Gates is available here.

Kittens in an Italian hill town

In yesterday's review of The Holy Place, the poetry book from Caroline Gill and John Dotson, I said that Caroline's poem Monte Testaccio: Mound of Potsherds reminded me of some feral cats Crafty Green Boyfriend and I had met in Italy several years ago now. 

Tommaso Gervasutti had wanted to know more, so here is a photo of the cats, that we met in Dolceaqua in the northern corner of Italy, near the border with France. The cats seemed to live by themselves in the mediaeval old town. They were quite wary (and quite smelly too!) but one of them let Crafty Green Boyfriend pick it up.

 And here's a photo of Dolceaqua, as it's a very photogenic place!

 As ever, red text contains hyperlinks that take you to other webpages where you can find out more.

Altered Book - Autumn

I thought it might be nice to revisit the altered book I made after I'd visited Italy a few years ago now.

I made the book from an old anthology of articles from the Italian press. You can see the original book in this post.

This is the autumn colour page of the book. The background is an article about Italia Nostra, which is an Italian conservation group. The leaves we found on a walk in the woods near the River Po in Torino. I coloured the background in pencil crayon.

You can see other pages of the book here, here and here.

I've started collecting autumn leaves again this year and hope to make some collages with them!

Favourite Souvenir

Inspire Me Thursday's art journal challenge this week is to journal our favourite holiday souvenir. This gave me an ideal opportunity to add this page to my still incomplete altered book holiday journal of our trip to Italy in November 2005. We bought the bottle in Ventimiglia, a lovely Italian town on the coast near the French border. It's a very beautiful bottle, but we were very disappointed by the quality of the amaretto that was in it! Never mind, it's still a lovely ornament!

Altered Book 5

The background to this page is an article about holidays in the city, so it seemed an appropriate background to a photo of Turin and some tickets etc from our time there!

Altered Book 4

This page of the book features the Hanbury Botanical Gardens, on the coast between Ventimiglia and the French border. The background is a pencil crayoned sketch from a photo and I stuck in two tickets for the gardens. In this case, the text has nothing to do with the pictures, I'm running out of appropriate text!

Altered Book 2

I'm much happier with this page than with the earlier page in the book! We visited the Museo di Antichita in Torino so I've pasted a ticket from the museum plus a separate copy of the photo onto an article about archeological discoveries with the photo echoed in a pencil crayon design across the page.

Altered Book 1

Now that I'm back from Italy, I'm starting to put together my first altered book. The book itself is mostly in Italian, which makes an ideal background for this scrapbook. I'm trying to keep as much as possible to the principles of recycling for this altered book, eg I'm not intending to print out digital photos to include. I'll customise our Plane Tickets Travel Wallet to hold my non-digital photos to complement the book. I've started the book with a double page spread on the Museum of Cinema in Turin, which is housed in the tallest building in Turin, the Mole Antonelliana. I cut out a drawing of the building from a publicity leaflet and pasted it onto a background that I had coloured to vaguely illustrate the hills around Turin. I've used pencil crayons as they seemed the best option for the glossy paper in this book. The first article on the page is about theatre and is followed by an article on Turin's football team, which offered some approriate words that I highlighted in the second part of this double spread, where I have pasted our tickets to the exhibition of science fiction films that was showing when we visited the museum. It's an excellent museum too...

In Italy

I'm in Italy for three weeks from tomorrow! I'll try to update this during the International Playbus Congress, which has loads of interesting workshops on environmental activities worth blogging (if my Italian is good enough to understand what's going on!) I'm less likely to update during my holiday! Ciao!

Recycled Art at the International Playbus Congress

I’m running a workshop on environmental art at the International Playbus Congress in Turin on Saturday 5 November. This workshop will explore recycling and reuse in collage work and the wider potential of collage in community work.

Participants have been asked to bring some materials, which combined with materials provided by the organisers, can be used in collages. In this first half we'll make greetings cards, bookmarks, notepaper and envelopes. After the creative work, we'll look at each others work and discuss how we approached the collage.

In the second half, participants will work in small groups to explore how they could use collage in their work. For example, children can make collages to show what they want included in a new play area; collage can be used in consultation work with children; people who have learning difficulties or who are illiterate; collage can help discussion about difficult issues and of course can stimulate recycling!

For more about this workshop please visit:
http://recycled-art.mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk

My First Altered Book!

I've become fascinated with altered books - old books used as a base for making art journals or other pieces of art. This book is a 1970s collection of articles from Italian newspapers and magazines, with notes in English. It is probably too out of date to be much use to anyone (I certainly prefer reading the current issue of Oggi!). So this will be my first altered book - a journal of my three weeks in Italy. I'll draw on the blank pages, paste in momentoes and photos and pick out found poetry from the text. Plus I'll leave in some of the cartoons, which are the best thing in here!

It may not work, but I'm sure it will be fun trying! I'll post my progress here!