The Saint Stefano church, one of the churches of the seven-churches complex in Bologna, houses a spectacular mitre with pearl embroidery from the second quarter of the 14th century. The iconography is not your average Christian fare, featuring dragons, birds, and lion masks amid foliage. It is, in fact, so Read more
Late last year, I visited the Domschatz Fritzlar. This is a small museum with several embroidered medieval textiles on display, which you can photograph as long as you don’t use flash. The textiles are extremely well-lit and very close to the display case glass. This means that you can examine them Read more
In a bid to compensate people for high energy prices, Germany offers regional transport tickets for only 9 euros per month during June, July, and August. Apparently, to get commuters out of their cars and into public transport. Good luck to those of us living in rural areas. For example, Read more
We have no contemporary eyewitness accounts of the first Christmas. Still, quite a few of the nativity scenes in the Western world look very much the same. How did that happen? And how does this relate to a group of almost identical embroidered vestments made in Germany in the second Read more