… and we often forget that Israel was a hot tourist spot in the 1950s.
Another destination for future adventures of The Corsair.
Category Archives: Media
North Africa in 1951
But the French Riviera is only one side of the Mediterranean.
Across the sea to the south, North Africa was a tourist spot in the 1950s, too… and the Corsair will make a stop here in 2018.
The French Riviera in 1949
One of the key concepts in The Corsair is to set the stories in the Mediterranean in the 1950s. The French Riviera is frequently featured in the stories. So here’s how it looked in that sort of golden age of mass tourism…
Travelers’ tales, gossip and word of mouth
This guy here on the right is Herodotus.
Or an acceptable likeness thereof – a Roman copy of a Grecian bust.
The Romans loved Herodotus – and according to Cicero he was the Father of history.
To me, he’s a fun read, and also the first stop for me when I decide to write a new Aculeo & Amunet story.
The Histories of Herodotus provide a wonderful collection of facts, hearsay and speculation about the Ancient World…
This is the display of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that things done by man not be forgotten in time, and that great and marvelous deeds, some displayed by the Hellenes, some by the barbarians, not lose their glory, including among others what was the cause of their waging war on each other.
High Weirdness: Valerie and her Week of Wonders
It is always good to look at something different within the genres we like.
And different is the word for Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, a 1970 Czech fantasy film by Jaromil Jireš, which is sort of a cult and had been on my “to watch” list for a while now.
Surreal, macabre, sexy and very weird, Valerie is the sort of movie that reconciles me with fantasy – a million light years from muscular barbarians and spitfire dragons, it’s sort of a journey into a dream landscape that baffles and fascinates.
Great film. Continue reading
My ghost decade: 1953
Two days and The Devil Under the Sea hits the shelves (but you can preorder it right now), and I got thinking about the 1950s.
Now, the 1950s are sort of a gray area as far as I am concerned – a gray area for my generation of Italians, really: the history program in school stopped at the Second World War, and we were born in the late 1960s, so the ’50s sort of fell between what we learned and what we experienced. A sort of “ghost decade”.
And yet, with hindsight, it was a pretty exciting decade1.
It was the decade of bebop and rock’n’roll.
It was the decade of revolutions and uphevals.
It was the decade of the New Look, and of the Dolce Vita.
A lot of stuff happened, and the world was shrinking.
The density of events in the 1950s is both a joy and a horror when writing The Corsair.
I wrote about 20 pages of what was planned as the third story, set in Egypt in 1953/54, before I checked my facts and found out the whole action took place during a coup that basically locked down the nation under martial law.
Oooops.
Scrap the thing, redo from start.
But I already told you I like doing research, and after all the events in the ’50s were quite influential on my life, and exploring the decade is becoming a hobby (another one!) of mine. Continue reading
Karavansara 