Yesterday I wrote about the practice of sticking love letters Casa di Giulietta (Juliet’s House) in Verona. I discovered that there was a movie made about the custom. Here’s the trailer . . .
Quotes from Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Monthly Archives: November 2012
Too Many Love Letters
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In Verona, Italy there’s a house called Casa di Giulietta or Juliet’s House. While Romeo and Juliet are fictional characters, that hasn’t stopped thousands of tourists from flocking to Juliet’s house and attaching their love letters to Juliet’s wall. It’s said that affixing a love letter to the wall will make the love everlasting.
It’s very romantic and evidently very messy as the notes are often stuck to the wall using chewing gum. The Verona city council has now banned the practice except for specially marked panels. The fine for bypassing the special panels and attaching a note to the wall of Juliet’s house is 500 euros.
Dodger by Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld novels, leaves fantasy for a moment to write about Victorian England with Dodger.
As you might guess, the main character of the novel is based on the Artful Dodger from Oliver Twist. Dodger is a young adult who lives by his wits in London. The story starts out on, pardon the cliché, a dark and stormy night …
A storm. Rain-lashed city streets. A flash of lightning. A scruffy lad sees a girl leap desperately from a horse-drawn carriage in a vain attempt to escape her captors. Can the lad stand by and let her be caught again? Of course not, because he’s . . . Dodger.
Seventeen-year-old Dodger may be a street urchin, but he gleans a living from London’s sewers, and he knows a jewel when he sees one. He’s not about to let anything happen to the unknown girl—not even if her fate impacts some of the most powerful people in England.
From Dodger’s encounter with the mad barber Sweeney Todd to his meetings with the great writer Charles Dickens and the calculating politician Benjamin Disraeli, history and fantasy intertwine in a breathtaking account of adventure and mystery.
Beloved and bestselling author Sir Terry Pratchett combines high comedy with deep wisdom in this tale of an unexpected coming-of-age and one remarkable boy’s rise in a complex and fascinating world.
Five Interesting Facts about Bram Stoker (1847 – 1912)
Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, was born on November 8, 1847 and died on April 20, 1912. Here are five quick facts about the author that you may not know:
1 – Although we may think of Stoker as being English, he was actually born in Clontarf, Ireland. (Clontarf is a suburb of Dublin.)
2 – He was a sickly child and was bedridden for much of his first seven years. However Stoker thrived after that. He grew to be over six feet tall. His red hair plus athletic build lead a biographer to refer to Stoker as a “red-haired giant.”
3 – An early romantic interest of Oscar Wilde was Florence Balcombe. She eventually became the wife of Bram Stoker.
4 – Stoker was a late bloomer in terms of his writing career. He didn’t publish Dracula until he was fifty years old.
5 – Speaking of Dracula, in the 1980s the original manuscript of the novel was found in a barn in Pennsylvania. It revealed that Stoker considered calling the novel THE UN-DEAD. I don’t know about you, but I like Dracula better.
Novels by Bram Stoker
- The Primrose Path
- The Snake’s Pass
- The Watter’s Mou’
- The Shoulder of Shasta
- Dracula
- Miss Betty
- The Mystery of the Sea
- The Jewel of Seven Stars
- The Man (a.k.a. The Gates of Life)
- Lady Athlyne
- The Lady of the Shroud
- The Lair of the White Worm (a.k.a. The Garden of Evil)
Oz: The Great and Powerful
I don’t know if I can wait until March of 2013. What am I talking about? That’s the release date for Oz: The Great and Powerful. The movie is based, of course, on the characters from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
The movie is a a prequel to the happenings in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. So don’t expect to see Dorothy and Toto. Instead, Oz: The Great and Powerful tells how a man came to the land Oz and became the Wizard.
Just for Fun – Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders
Gyles Brandreth writes a mystery series based on the fictional adventures of Oscar Wilde and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders is the fifth book in the series.
Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders opens in 1892, as an exhausted Arthur Conan Doyle retires to a spa in Germany with a suitcase full of fan mail. But his rest cure does not go as planned. The first person he encounters is Oscar Wilde, and the two friends make a series of macabre discoveries among the letters—a finger; a lock of hair; and, finally, an entire severed hand.
The trail leads the intrepid duo to Rome, and to a case that involves miracles as well as murder. Pope Pius IX has just died—these are uncertain times in the Eternal City. To uncover the mystery and discover why the creator of Sherlock Holmes has been summoned in this way, Wilde and Conan Doyle must penetrate the innermost circle of the Catholic Church and expose the deadly secrets of the six men closest to the pope.