Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Armchair adventuring


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Somewhere, beyond the sea…

I’m stealing an idea from my friend Claire, over at the Scribblings blog, and I’m doing a post about the sea and I.
After all, the sea is quite on topic hereabouts – we talk adventure and exoticism, and the sea is one of the many ingredients of many, many adventure stories, and quite a lot real life adventures too.

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So, I’ll start with something close and personal.
My father was so taken with the sea, that he actually ran away from home to join the navy when he was 16.
His five minutes of C.S. Forester ended with his family going to Genoa to bring him back.
He never sailed, never served in the navy or anywhere else.
So he decided I should become a sailor.
When I was five. Continue reading →


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Progress report and French cuisine

I’m past the 5000 words mark as I stop and go invent something for dinner.
And once again I spent about one hour of today’s first writing session doing extra research for flavor.

The big surprise of the day – research-wise – was discovering the contents of the French RCIR, military-issued rations, called the “Ration de Combat Individuelle Rechauffable” (Combat Ration Individual Reheatable).

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My only personal experience with military rations was during my service in the Italian Air Farce, on the single occasion in which we were taken to the field.
To call the experience underwhelming would be an understatement.
And Italians are supposed to be good with food, but the general wisdom was that some predatory NCO was reselling the rations and feeding the troops the leftovers. Continue reading →


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Artistic inspiration: Michael Whelan

Yesterday, while taking a break from writing, I was browsing the Facebook updates and I stumbled on an image that I remembered from my high school days.
This one.

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It is an illustration for Poul Anderson’s story Tiger by the Tail, part of the Dominic Flandry series.
It’s been thirty-five years, yet I still remember when I first saw it, and I still get the same feeling, the same thought…

I must write something like this one day or another.

The artist is the multi-award winner Michael Whelan, and I’m surprised and pleased at the number of my favorite books he illustrated. Here’s a small gallery of my favorite paintings by him.


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Cities of the Imagination

It went like this: first my friend Hell (yes, they really call him like that) did a blog post about the city he writes about, the city he was born in, Taranto. Then my friend Alex did a piece about the city he was born in, and about which he writes about, Milan.
And so I did a piece on the city where I was born, and about which I sometimes write about, Turin.
The piece that came out is weird and melancholy, and I even forgot to give it a title, and you can find it here translated through some web gizmo that I’m sure will make it even more surreal.

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But the fact is, I have written a lot more about London, Paris and Shanghai that I ever did about Turin.
And so, why not do an alternate universe sort of piece, about the towns I write about in my fiction?
My cities of the imagination, if it does not sound too pretentious, and with all due respect for both Italo Calvino and Schuiten & Peeters. Continue reading →


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Alfonso Azpiri, 1947-2017

Spanish comic artist and illustrator Alfonso Azpiri passed away a few hours ago.
Azpiri was one of the many graphic artists whose works I cherished.
Wikipedia classifies him in the “adult oriented” field, but his stories, that ranged from science fiction to horror, while often incredibly racy, were also a fun mix of caricature and satire, and his pneumatic, big-haired trademark female characters were both sexy and absurd, sultry and silly.

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With the character of Lorna, he created a silly, naughty mix of Star Wars and Barbarella.

Here is a small gallery of his works, in memoriam.
And yes, depending on where you are, some of this might be considered NSFW. Continue reading →


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August reading

I spent most of the last two weeks reading instead of writing.
Granted, three books of mine came out in the last four weeks, so I can’t really complain, but I know there will be hell to pay to hit deadlines and be good. And yet, right now fatigue both physical and mental was such that I needed to stop and recharge my batteries.
I’ve found out I slowed down somewhat, and gone are the summers in which I’d read three or four novels per week. But it’s not a race, so it’s OK.

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My friend Claire over at Scribblings did a post on her reading week, and I thought, why not?
A simple list of what I’ve been reading recently.
Just for fun. Continue reading →