Architecture · Mores · Rome

Flooding of Piazza Navona in Rome in July and August for two hundred years

Piazza Navona, one of the central squares of Rome, was turned into a lake for the hottest months of the year from the seventeenth century onwards. For two hundred years the Roman authorities used Piazza Navona to cool the city, flooding it in July and August. This greatly hindered traffic

Archaeology · Archive · The East · Observations · Mores · Humour

The text of a clay tablet: a letter to his mother from a son who complains that she does not buy him fine clothes, while the clothes of the other young gentlemen grow finer with every passing year

The boy cites the son of his father's assistant, who has two new sets of clothes. "Even though you bore me, and his mother merely adopted him, his mother loves him, and you do not love me!" 3,500 years have passed, and so little has

Aristocracy · Books · Observations · Mores

The wife of Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy was called Sofya Andreyevna Tolstaya, just like the wife of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

Counts Alexei Konstantinovich (1817-1875) and Lev Nikolayevich (1828-1910) were second cousins to one another

Monarchies · Mores · Ethnography

Princess Anne, King Charles and Queen Camilla at the annual Highland gathering at Balmoral, the Braemar Gathering

Princess Anne is the only member of the royal family to have taken care to cover her knees. Though, the rules of etiquette for men wearing the kilt call for bare knees, since the length of a kilt, when the wearer stands, should reach the middle of the knee; when

Newspaper clipping with the grid of crossword No. 78, showing numbered rows and columns and black squares, with part of a decorative heading above.

NB! · Archive · Books · Mores

Krestoslovitsa No. 78 in a 1943 émigré newspaper, the forgotten Russian name for a crossword

Krestoslovitsa ("cross-wordery") is the forgotten Russian name for the crossword. If you are sure of your breadth of knowledge and pride yourself on your erudition, do try your hand at this puzzle from an émigré newspaper of 1943.

Science · Mores · Humour

Umbrellas and hats with lightning rods in Europe after Franklin's 1752 invention

In the 1770s, Umbrellas and Hats with Lightning Conductors Came into Fashion in Europe. The device invented in America for diverting lightning strikes from houses made a strong impression on the fashionable European public, which promptly wished to secure against atmospheric electricity its own persons as well. Umbrellas with lightning

Cinema · Observations · Mores · Humour

A post-Soviet person, raised in a standard-issue flat behind an iron door with three locks, itself set over a wooden door upholstered in leatherette, with a bolt, a latch and a little hook, cannot grasp the true horror of American films, in which the most

A post-Soviet person, raised in a standard-issue flat behind an iron door with three locks, itself set over a wooden door upholstered in leatherette, with a bolt, a latch and a little hook, cannot grasp the true horror of American films, in which the most terrifying things (a

NB! · Aristocracy · Observations · Mores · Humour

The phrase "old money style" I take to mean "my ancestors were poor and I am embarrassed about it"

Art · Mores · Humour

Throw out the junk ✔️ Invite old friends round ✔️

Jules Le Roy, 1900

Archive · In the Press · Moscow · Mores

Arrested: Perevedentsev, the yard-keeper of house No. 49 on Serpukhovskaya Street

Arrested: Perevedentsev, the yard-keeper of house No. 49 on Serpukhovskaya Street. The matter is this: when the police set up an ambush in one of the flats of the house, the yard-keeper warned every person making for that flat that those who came there were being detained. "

Art · Moscow · Museums · Mores · Ethnography

The Dowry in Old Russia and Pukirev’s “Accepting the Dowry by Inventory”

The Reception of the Dowry According to the Inventory, Vasily Pukirev, 1873. Collection of the Tretyakov Gallery. The bride is not easy to find in this picture: all the attention is on the things. The dowry, a word still heard in our grandmothers' vocabulary, had in the old days

Engraving of women seated around a table in an interior with a canopied bed and a fireplace, a servant bringing a dish, children and dogs in the foreground.

NB! · Art · Mores

Abraham Bosse's 1636 engraving of women dining together without their husbands

Women at table in the absence of their husbands. Abraham Bosse, 1636