1. Rigoletto I have been an enthusiast for opera for all of my adult life and even a bit longer as my first opera was as a schoolboy (it was Donizetti’s Anna Bolena at Glyndebourne in the UK). It was a bug that bit me that night and the effect has never worn off. I…

Cathédrale Notre-Dame Notre Dame Cathedral, 3 June 2025 Notre Dame Cathedral, 15 April 2019 In June 2025, I was lucky enough to get tickets for one of the first concerts to be held in the recently reopened cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. I thought going to a concert might be the best way of…

In my previous blog I said had avoided going to Montmartre in the past because of the crowds but decided to go along anyway this time on my recent trips to Paris. This is also the reason why last year was the first time I had visited possibly the most well-known classical fine art gallery…

I have visited Paris more than a few times in my life, mostly on short trips for work, in my television days, but there were two places, maybe the most famous ones, where I never quite brought myself to go. One was the Louvre and the other was Montmartre – both world-famous destinations for anyone…

I have stayed in Paris twice in the last year, in May 2025 and then in February 2026, and took the same apartment for both visits. There is something special in visiting and then revisiting familiar places in other countries. It felt like that to me in the Parisian district of Le Marais. Once an…

In May 2025, I spent two weeks in Paris – I’d been there many times before, mostly for work, but never for such an extended period. I wanted to allow it to get under my skin. I think it worked because, I returned in February this year and plan to make Paris trips regular events…

I went to Nigerian Modernism, Art and Independence, the impressive exhibition at London’s Tate Modern last week, 19th March. There are a lot of art works here, a vibrant mix of paintings, tapestries, ceramics and sculpture from the 1940s until the end of the 20th Century. In its nine large rooms, the exhibition confounded my…

I spent two weeks in the Eternal City of Rome this January. The first part is here https://wolfiewolfgang.com/two-weeks-in-rome-part-one/ I’ve been here on numerous occasions over the years, either for work or for passing visits en route to elsewhere. I’d been to the Sistine Chapel (unforgettable, of course) to St Peter’s, also for work, and to…

In January 2025, I spent two weeks on holiday in an apartment in the centre of the Centro Storico (Historic Centre) of Rome and I felt I had lived there for ever. It was like being at home, but with many world famous landmarks just a few minutes walk away . With a speedy internet…

Welcome to Glinka Gallery, it’s open 24/7. it has six individual galleries for fine art, photography, poetry, dance and music and it is just a few finger clicks away from you wherever you are. I want to show you around.

The city of Ravenna in Emilia-Romagna on the Adriatic side of Northern Italy, is a civilised and quietly prosperous place, if it wasn’t for its most famous treasures, we wouldn’t guess that once, over a thousand years ago, the city was the capital of the Western Roman Empire. Those treasures are the sublime works of…

Piazza del Popolo, Ravenna’s main square. Basilica di San Francesco The beautiful city of Ravenna, on the East Coast of Italy, in Emilia-Romagna, sits between Venice and Rimini, but is less crowded than its more famous neighbours. Once, however, it was the capital of Italy and one of the grandest cities of Europe. San Vitale,…

Britain votes for its next government tomorrow. It is definitely the end of an era. The polls (haha) tell us the present Conservative government is heading for a crushing defeat – maybe the worst in its nearly two hundred year history. If so, a depressing era in British politics will come to its well-deserved end….

My poem Aleppo will be on display at Pleiades Gallery, Manhattan, New York City from 11 June until 6 July where it will be displayed with Heather Stivinson’ s exhibition Borders and Boundaries. Opening reception: 13 June, 6-8pm. It will be followed on Saturday 6 July with a special event: Ekphrasis: A Poetry Reading with…

I live just up the street from the Lewes Chamber Music Festival, now in its 12th year, and I’m just back from the final concert of this year’s truly inspiring festival. The theme was Schoenberg and friends, and the festival director kept to her brief with a series of concerts that explored and celebrated the…

Donald Trump found guilty on all charges in hush money case. He is guilty of so much more. A Greek tragedy in British English – Noun (ɡriːk ˈtrædʒədɪ  ) (in ancient Greek theatre) a play in which the protagonist, usually a person of importance and outstandingpersonal qualities, falls to disaster through the combination of a personal failing and circumstances with which he or she cannot deal Collins English Dictionary….

John Singer Sargent, self-portrait, 1906 Ladies is an old-fashioned word in 2024, we say women, or even other less gender-specific terms, but, in the 1880s and 1890s, in Europe and the US, it was lady if you were a lady, and woman if you were female, but not a lady in the class-conscious world that…

Last Thursday (16th May 2024), I finished a three-year marathon, reading the whole of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (155 poems in English and in French) at my weekly on-line poetry event called Wolfie’s Poetry Surf which will have been running for exactly twelve years this coming Thursday. I’ve hosted poetry events in my…

I was thinking about nostalgia today – you know the things ain’t what the used to be feeling. Well, I’m not really someone who dwells in the past, or so I think. I like the present, my day today, and I’m quite keen on the future too. I’ve found recently that more than a few…

I’ve been catching up with the blogs on my website, sadly neglected for over a year, but now back in action. In fact, I’ve neglected it for longer than that, considering I hadn’t posted anything about my foreign travels since 2015, when I went on two trips, to Italy https://wolfiewolfgang.com/it-was-all-mistake-my-three-inspiring/ and to Portugal https://wolfiewolfgang.com/my-time-in-lisbon-portugal-was-pure/ During…

It was like coming home when I looked out of the window of the apartment in Lahti, just as it felt like leaving home when I said goodbye to the cottage in Virtaa, near the little town of Sysmä, after a week’s break in Finnish rural paradise (see previous blog https://wolfiewolfgang.com/away-from-it-all-at-the-centre-of-all-things-in-rural-finland/). I’m a bit like…

It is early September in 2023, I am sitting in a rocking chair in a cottage, a converted 19th century log house, in a little village called Virtaa, 7.7 kilometres from a small town called Sysmä. The cottage is in the grounds of an old manor house, Virtaan Kartano, owned by Juhani and Tiina Stjernvall….

I was in Germany in April 2023, I’d been to Leipzig for the Bach 300 festival before catching a train for ten great days in Berlin. A city I last visited in the late 1990s, just a few years after Germany’s reunification and the city was still like a building construction site. Then it was…

Even people who don’t think they like classical music know and even like at least some of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 – 1750). Those who love classical music are mostly in consensus that he was probably the greatest of all the classical composers. I certainly feel that he stands tall not just…

I was checked in at the Old Metekhi Hotel over-looking the Mtkvari River in Tbilisi, Georgia , on 13th September 2022, after a booking that had been made in 2019, long before Covid changed everyone’s plans. I was here to be the best man at one of my oldest friend’s wedding, a wedding that had…

On the 7th September 2022, during the second week of my trip to Finland, I got a ferry across the Gulf of Finland, in the Baltic Sea, from Helsinki to Tallinn, the capital of the Republic of Estonia. From one country bordering Russia to another, six months after Russia invaded Ukraine, another of its ex-Soviet…

I was in Finland in August and September 2022 and, when I was staying in Helsinki, it was relatively easy to get a train for the 24 mile journey to a place I had read about often and wondered what it would really be like there. I mean Ainola – the home of Jean Sibelius…

In September 2022, after a wonderful time at the Sibelius Festival in Lahti, I stayed on in Finland for another week and moved to Helsinki, a place that everyone I know who has been there to told me that I would love it. I did. I love the way it manages to be a capital…