It’s holiday time, at last – many, many apologies to the people to whom I owe a draft chapter by last month, but I have a five-hour train journey tomorrow, in which it will get finished… In the meantime, we’ve been exploring Bucharest, which has the expected range of classical elements in its architecture, especially the deranged Ceaucescu elements; his immediate inspiration for a giant palace of government and enormous boulevards and parade grounds may have North Korea, but the design has hefty doses of Fascist futuro-classicism (though a lot fewer heroic figures than you might expect).
There were also plenty of neoclassical motifs in the collection of paintings from Romanian artists on the first floor of the palace. I was especially struck by this one – can’t remember the title, and it hasn’t come out legibly in my photo – from 1988 (I think) by one Felix Lupu.
I can find no information at all about Lupu in English, and precious little in Romanian, other than the fact that he was (is?) a poet as well as an painter. Which makes perfect sense. The artist dreams or meditates on his path; on the one hand, the cold perfect beauty of classical sculpture, symbolised by its epitome, on the other the hot immediacy of scribbling verses while a real woman sleeps in bed nearby – both depicted in a different art form. One wonders whether he wrote a poem about this too…
Sphinx 
Of the cities my wife and I visited on our honeymoon, Bucharest was the one we warmed to least – even the guide book said if you were over 25 there was nothing here for you. Not quite true – we saw an okay concert in the Athenaeum for a ridiculously low price, and I liked the casts of Trajan’s Column in National Museum, but it didn’t seize us in the way Cologne, Vienna, Budapest and Istanbul did.
I enjoyed it – anywhere with that number of artisan coffee shops (better coffee and less up themselves than the artisan coffee shops I love in Berlin) has got to have something going for it…