LIGHT MODE
DARK MODE
Hershey Felder is a pianist, actor and producer known for his portrayals of classical and American composers on the theatrical stage. Canada born to European parents and with a European heart, Felder is a proud resident of Florence.
Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai stands on a corner of the Santissima Annunziata square. And there's an incredible love story behind the partially open shutter.
On the tip of borgo Santa Croce, a quiet street flanked by 16th-century buildings, several small openings are carved out of the meter-thick walls of the Palazzo Corsini-Antinori. Now owned ...
On a table at Sor Tino, a perfectly Tuscan restaurant in chic Brentwood Los Angeles, is a bottle of Tuscan wine with a curiously personal Anglo name, “Philip”, and a ...
In a small corridor in the grand Palazzo Vecchio, the seat of Florentine government since its first stone was laid in 1299, a carved mask stands before a background of ...
The late 16th-century façades of via il Prato are significantly conservative by Florentine standards. One imagines that the structures, with their imposing entrances and hard-edged rectangular lines, might have been ...
A Florentine friend, Filippo Ciabatti, now residing in the United States as conductor of the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra, sent me a photo of myself in the role of American composer ...
In 1924, just after being married, Antonio and Iris Origo purchased a rundown 15th-century villa named La Foce on the via Francigena in Val d’Orcia. Restoring the property became their ...
The Maggio Musicale Fiorentino is legendary. It takes its name from the age-old Florentine May holidays, when nobility and civilians alike would decorate all of Florence with spring blooms to ...
The longer I live in Florence, the more convinced I am that there is some unusual magic in this place where artistic souls have not just passed through for millennia, ...
It was only a summer and a half ago, when our current times were unimaginable. The dozen guests arrived for dinner alfresco on the terrace overlooking Florence, floating mystically down ...
It was a grey wintry afternoon in a 1980s Montreal. The snow was piled high and the streets had developed a dirty sludge, but there, on a street called Sherbrooke, ...
Lockdown red became careful orange before turning to a liberal yellow, and a midday stop at an osteria once again became a possibility. I enter Osteria di Santo Spirito, at ...
Standing on the piazzale Michelangelo on a painterly grey afternoon, I see an oxidized green dome not quite towering above the rest, just being “present”. I wonder about its construction, ...
Mystically, she appears, as if a former century had suddenly folded back its hidden portal. Quietly she stands there beneath the blue-gold Florentine sky, poised in her black silk ruffled ...
It was June of 2013, I was appearing on stage in southern California in the role of George Gershwin and making Florence home was still a dream. A group of ...
The road to a mystical Florentine moment began in my hometown of Montreal. I was still a teenage pianist and I had just learned that Fryderyk Chopin, the ...
In this enchanted city of Florence, it isn’t just the art, it’s the artists, where meeting one might lead to meeting two, or four, and then, as if by ...
It all began when I was a very little boy, so I am told. I was born in Montreal, one of North America’s oldest cities that held on fast ...
