#LaBelleEpoque #4
"The Past"
©2006 Esther Pearl Watson
We are at the weekly market in Bourgueil (trying hard to learn how to pronounce the word "Bourgueil"). We haven't seen Phil. He normally comes to the market to buy a portion of paella from the truck where it is made in a huge pan. Maybe he has been and gone.
Last night, we were invited to watch a BBC documentary at the Lightfoot's house (Lightfeet?). "A Very British Renaissance" tells the story, in three parts, of how the ideas of the Italian Renaissance played out in Elizabethan England.
I'm afraid I saw very little in it to celebrate. The use of the word British (meaning pertaining to the united kingdom of Scotland and England) was unfortunate since "Britain" had not come into being yet. And the colonization of the Americas is pushed as a founding concept even as the preceding brutal Elizabethan colonization of Ireland is ignored. In fact, Ireland's legacy of England's Renaissance was conquest, war, famine, and death -- four horsemen who rode roughshod over the notion of England as a beacon of enlightenment in Northern Europe.
Playlist:
1812 Overture
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Ljubljana Symphony Orchestra, Anton Nanut
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