For me, one of the great joys of travel is having in-person encounters with great art and architecture — which I’ve collected in a book called Europe’s Top 100 Masterpieces. Here’s one of my favorites:    Nowhere else does the splendor of Moorish civilization shine so beautifully than at the Alhambra — this last and greatest Moorish palace in Europe.  For seven centuries (711–1492), much of Spain was Muslim, ruled by the Islamic Moors from North Africa. While the rest of Europe was slumbering through the Dark Ages, Spain blossomed under Moorish rule. The culmination was the Alhambra — a sprawling complex of palaces…

Ask Beatriz Janer about Seville’s storied Feria de Abril, and you’ll get a quick sense of what makes her photographer’s eye for detail so special. Ask Beatriz Janer about Seville’s storied Feria de Abril, and you’ll get a quick sense of what makes her photographer’s eye for detail so special. Sure, she describes the men, women—and horses—all dressed in their finest. The colors. The carriages. But then she talks about the drinks, cold sparkly rebujitos that fight against the heat and keep your feet from hurting and let the dancing go on and on toward dawn. The same passion comes…

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As Europe starts opening up to travelers again, it’s more exciting than ever to think about the cultural treasures that await. For me, one of the great joys of travel is having in-person encounters with great art — which I’ve collected in a book called Europe’s Top 100 Masterpieces. Here’s one of my favorites:    For 2,000 years, the Parthenon temple in Athens remained almost perfectly intact. But in 1687, with Athens under siege, the Parthenon was used to store a huge cache of gunpowder. (See where this is going?) Pow! A massive explosion sent huge chunks of the Parthenon everywhere.…

Food accounts for 13% of cities’ carbon emissions every year. But a small league of C40 Good Food Cities, from New York to Quezon City, is hoping to change that. BROOKLYN, New York – Little about the culinary center serving New York’s Health + Hospitals agency evokes a home kitchen. Hair-netted cooks mix the ingredients for salsa verde in white bins the size of babies’ bathtubs. A row of combi ovens, gleaming and tall, roast hundreds of sweet plantains at a time. Nearby, a 200-gallon water bath chills reduced-oxygen packets of just-steamed yellow-and-white “sunshine” rice, preserving their freshness. And yet,…