Rovinj, WWII Love Notes, Rye Madness, the Brain on Fiction & More: Endnotes 19 March

Every Friday, we celebrate the weekend — and all the reading and relaxing and daydreaming time ahead — with Melissa's favorite book- and travel-related links of the week. Why work when you can read fun stuff?!

This post is part of our Endnotes series.

That sun-dappled village above is Rovinj, a fishing settlement found in northwestern Croatia. Perched on the edge of the Adriatic, it feels equal parts Italian and Croatian, and it’s altogether charming. You can enjoy a coffee with whipped cream along the harbor, climb the 192 (rickety) steps to the top of the historic bell tower at the St. Euphemia church, meander along the cobbled alleys of Old Town, eat fresh-as-fresh-can-be seafood, and just generally soak up the awesome vibe. (This is where David and I ate the best pizza we’ve ever had in our lives.) {more}

• Chocolate wrappers, ticket stubs, cigarette packs, and love letters — a World War II couple’s letters were found under the floorboards of a British hotel. ‘The pair, whose names are unknown, declare their love for one another, with the man writing: “Oh darling I’m so lonely without you”.’

• Travel writer Mark Baker (our guest on the Prague episode of our show) shared a bunch of beautiful and melancholy photos of Prague under lockdown. It’s been a long year.

• Solving the mystery of the Dostoevsky dash.

• These vintage photos of travel guru Rick Steves are a delight.

• Authors are ‘forever trespassing into history, digging around in the soil, dusting off new discoveries and tilting them to the light.’ Read more of an author’s reflections on retelling historical episodes as fiction.

• This is fascinating! In the early 1900s, the population of the tiny island of Alicudi, near Sicily, started having visions of ‘witches banqueting on remote beaches; talking hessian sacks; women growing wings and flying to the island of Sicily to do their shopping; ghosts, clowns and soft pebbles falling from the sky.’ And scientists think their bread was to blame.

• ‘Symmetrical lines, pastel hues, immaculate composition, or something idiosyncratic and beautiful that you can and cannot describe at once’… how to see the world like Wes Anderson.

• We love the book City of Ghosts by Victoria Schwab and couldn’t be more excited that it’s being adapted as a TV series.

• I was honored to be a guest on the podcast Find Your Voice, a show for people who think they’re not ‘real writers.’ Host Allison Fallon talked about how I made the jump from cookbook author to book-and-travel-podcaster. (And a bunch of other personal and interesting stuff.)

• This needs no sales pitch: On the Undeniable Lure of the Historic Literary Home

• This Twitter thread is informative and amazing. Performer Rosita Royce danced with doves at the 1939 New York World’s Fair and, well… you just need to read it. Click through to enjoy all the details.

• What happens in your brain when you ‘lose yourself’ in fiction?

• Read the short story Once a Sarah, Always a Sarah by Sam Cohen. ‘[W]e meet a college student Sarah, and then a pack of maybe interchangeable other Sarahs, default-friends our own Sarah sort of hates. The first astonishment: every sentence casts a little spell, reminds what a sentence can do.’

• A look at the careers of Helen Liu Fong, Annie Graham Rockfellow, and Norma Merrick Sklarek, three designers ‘who helped light the way for women in architecture.’

• Remember the discussion of scrapple in the Pennsylvania episode of our podcast? Yeah, there’s a Scrapple Trail and club devoted to this breakfast meat.

• This excerpt from Michael Rosen’s new book Many Different Kinds of Love is tear-inducing and life-affirming and so very good (and a bit hard to read). But lovely. (You can also listen to the author read his poem.)

• Beyond Ann Radcliffe: 100 Women Writers in Horror, the Gothic and Supernatural Fiction from the 18th Century to 2021

• This is a very important quiz: Which of the six wives of King Henry VIII are you? (I got Catherine of Aragon.)

• This photo is obviously so great, but what was Louis Armstrong doing in Egypt?

Wishing you delightful mysteries and stories with satisfying endings.

Top image courtesy of Dimitry Anikin/Unsplash.