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Between 1900 and 1930, a poor and destitute seed pedlar took more than five thousand photographs of daily life in an isolated valley of the Italian-speaking Swiss territory to the south of th...
Imagine Indiana Jones, but instead of ancient artifacts, he’s searching for apples. Replace the dusty temples with abandoned orchards, and you’ve got The Lost Apple Project, a nonprofit org...
If there is anything that can make a strident music fan salivate in anticipation, it’s the idea of an unreleased track or lost album from a favourite band. It’s like catnip for the musicolo...
There are many reasons to tell the story of Mata Hari – an extravagant icon of femininity, famous burlesque performer, World War I spy, and “collector” of high one standing lovers – her...
We often have a romantic notion of what it might be like to walk into a thrift store and walk out with treasure. But in reality, what happens next can be a roller coaster ride that changes your...
What do you mean you’ve never heard of the lost civilization of Great Tartaria? It’s only one of the weirdest architectural conspiracy theories going. It seems there has been a monumental c...
I was walking along the Seine this weekend, slowing my pace for the lonely bouquinistes (the open-air booksellers that have squatted the quays of the river since the 18th century), when a dog-e...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2021/02/16/a-forgotten-ode-to-the-little-paris-shopfront/
A pair of clandestine, gender-bending lovers are about to embrace at la brasserie. A fashionable young woman in a barely-there dress is partying the night away in the cabarets of Paris without ...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2020/09/02/before-playboy-came-la-vie-parisienne/
One of my favourite things about Eadweard Muybridge, the man who gave us the moving image, aside from the vast array of exotic spellings he adopted for his birth name (Edward Muggeridge), is th...
Their’s is a love of strange and beautiful proportion. The kind measured in porcelain, peanut-sized dolls, and antiqued oysters as big as your face. “It’s hard to imagine a time when we�...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2018/09/12/digging-for-treasure-and-love-in-new-york-city/
For a few Spring months in 1954, a melancholy Picasso found himself enraptured by 19-year-old Sylvette David. Of all the muses who bookmarked his life — and there were many — she’s fallen...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2018/08/21/what-happened-to-picassos-forgotten-teenage-muse/
It was a pretty epic Round Table, albeit one held in vain. Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Yves-Saint Laurent and other creative power-houses had joined forces with one impossible goal: to s...
Every summer we run into the same problem: too many amazing festivals, too little time. Then we caught wind of the long lost Delphic Festivals, which makes every concert we’ve ever been to pa...
Of the 16 million tourists that visit Florence on average per year, I wonder how many of them walk by the old palazzos without ever noticing their most interesting little secret hiding in plain...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2018/05/22/dont-miss-the-miniature-wine-windows-of-florence/
Our dream treasure hunt? One that involves an international quest for free whiskey and a $10,000 prize, which was precisely the case in the Summer of 1967. In one of cleverest marketing ploys o...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2018/02/02/theres-a-51-year-old-whiskey-treasure-hunt-still-going-on/
A few years ago, a worldly friend who’s always in the know posted something to her Facebook wall that went something like this: Mudlarking on the Thames is the best way to spend a Sunday morn...