Drystone walls are a very common along the Adriatic coast in Croatia. A web page tells the story: “Farmers had painstakingly picked rocks out of the soil to clear space to grow olive trees and grapevines. They then used the rocks to construct walls around geometric plots, creating, in some cases, a grid that stretched for kilometres.“ A peculiarity are the stone huts called “kažun,“ “Trulli“ in Italy (1, 2).
Up-to-date information on the Fort de la Conchée off Saint Malo in the English Channel is available for download (French). The fortress from the time of Louis XIV is located on a tiny island off the Frace’s storm-tossed coast (1, 2).
“Gargoyles“ was the title of a Disney animated series in the 1990s. The main characters were folloqwing the design of ancient cathedral decorations. Media report that the corporation is planning a continuation of the series (Italian).
The National Geographic web page has a report about those rocks that make our Earth unique among other planets in our solar system.
Geologists at Utrecht University have managed to reconstruct the history of the lost continent Argoland, which broke off western Australia around 155 million years ago and drifted away. As it turned out, it is in fragments but still there.
The “Old House Handbook“ was published in a fully revised and updated second edition. It is “the authoritative guide on how to look after your old house – whether it is a timber-framed medieval cottage, an eighteenth-century town house or a Victorian or Edwardian terrace,“ as stated on the web page of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB)
The Motomachi Stone Buddha in Oita City, carved around the year 1200, is an example of the Jocho School of Japanese stone sculpture.
Video of the month: The town of Rutland in the state of Vermont has a Batman sculpture. It depicts the Super Hero together with Tom Fagan, writer, comic artist and initiator of the Halloween parade, for which the place is famous. The Batman sculpture was created in a local studio by Italian sculptor Alessandro Lombardo from a 12-ton block of marble. The design goes back to the Chinese artist Jiannan Wu. The marble is Danby White, which was donated by Vermont Quarries.
(15.11.2023, USA: 11.15.2023)
