Versailles Restoration: Bosquet des Trois Fontaines

One of the 15 Ornamental groves in the gardens of Versailles will be reopened on June 12th.

It marks the latest in a series of American gifts to restore the great creation for Louis XIV of Andr? Le N?tre and Charles Le Brun. After the second world war John D. Rockefeller gave millions to restore the place, convinced that the chateau and its gardens were of wider than French significance. Americans then responded generously to storm damage in the 1990s, and now the American Friends of Versailles have given $4m and years of voluntary work to help French experts recreate the Bosquet des Trois Fontaines (the Three Fountains Grove).

Travel: Libya?


Susan Spano takes us along on a US tour group’s (Mt. Travel Sobek) journey to Libya:

Best of all, Libya, like China in the 1970s, remains largely untouched by the despoiling hand of commercial tourism. There’s a prevailing air of naivet? and freshness unlike any I’ve ever felt.
Visitors have been trickling into Libya all along. It received 300,000 foreign tourists last year, mostly Europeans drawn by Libya’s fabled Roman ruins, considered the best outside Italy, and its sandy Saharan south, which in the last decade has taken the place of strife-torn Algeria as a destination for desert treks.
Then he showed me how to cross the street in Tripoli, where the roads aren’t divided into lanes, there are no stop signs and vehicles move in herds. You walk out bravely, with a raised hand and index finger pointing heavenward, as if to say, “Fail to stop at the risk of Allah’s wrath.” It worked.

Lonely Planet has a Libya Travel Guide.

Surfers not put off by sharks


Matt Sedensky writes about surfers & sharks (I remember discussing this issue with abalone divers when I lived in California….).

KAHANA, Hawaii ? Sam George can’t believe the audacity of surfers who seem to return to the water as soon as the blood of a shark attack dissipates ? even though he’s one of them.
“Once the blood cleared and the paramedics got off the beach, I’m as silly as the rest,” said George, San Clemente-based editor of Surfer magazine.

Roanoke’s O. Winston Link Museum


Virginia Postrel writes about the new 0. Winston Link Museum in Roanoke, Virginia (Link recorded the waning years of steam locomotives)

The museum is in the former Norfolk and Western train station, which famed industrial designer Raymond Loewy redesigned in 1947. As Modernism’s Victoria Pedersen writes: “He completely transformed the 1905 neoclassical station, adding 22-foot ceilings, marble walls, terrazzo floors, a futuristic wall of horizontal windows and a dome. He also designed a concorse leading to the train platform that featured the first passenger escalators in the Roanoke Valley, cutting-edge technology for the period.” The new station was the epitome of streamlined modernism. But what that meant in the Virginia of a half century ago is spelled out in the letters above the door in these photos from the Library of Congress collection, the first of which Modernism reprinted