Jesuit’s rich portrait of 17th century China, as told to a Florentine scientist, intrigued a fragmented Europe Florentine writer Lorenzo Magalotti published Relazione della China after a colourful evening’s chat in 1665 with Austrian Jesuit priest Father Johann Grueber, who had spent several years in China. Photo: Wellcome Library, London.
Marco Polo wasn t the only adventurer who returned from China with a treasure trove of tales and mesmerising accounts of the Orient. For centuries, missionaries and traders were the savvy travellers who unlocked the mysteries of the Far East, relating them to avid European scholars and readers hungry for all things exotic.
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If you live in a city, you make do with whatever green space you have. Sliver of rubbish-strewn lawn, patch of poo-smattered scrub – fine, we’ll survive. But forget just making do: a new park in the Italian city of Turin should have us all clamouring for bigger, better spaces.
Sandwiched between two halves of a dual carriageway, the Precollinear Park stretches 700 metres from the River Po up to a piazza on the neighbouring hillside. You would probably never have wanted to mooch along this disused tram track before, but since it was renovated during Italy’s first lockdown, it’s been heaving with people every day. The park is clean, it’s green and it has a readymade route all laid out for you – what’s not to like?