Follow the Monet: New exhibit debuts in Paris
Claude Monet is one of the most famous painters of all time, and his prolific career is the subject of a major art exhibition opening today at the Grand Palais in Paris. Some 33,000 culture vultures already have reserved tickets to the Monet retrospective, the largest in France in 30 years. It features nearly 200 of his works cherry picked from 70 museums around the world.
Nature, religion make for a holy hike in Italy’s Piedmont region
LORI RACKL: Hikers can travel between peaceful sanctuaries — and off the well-worn tourist track — in the Biella region of northern Italy.
Italian town of Sordevolo is all about Passion
LORI RACKL: Sordevolo in northwest Italy’s Biella province has been staging a Passion play every five years for the past two centuries.
Run with the Bulls and run for your life in Pamplona
The subject of more than 3,000 YouTube videos, bull runs are virtually synonymous with Pamplona, an ancient fortress town in northern Spain. No other city - except ours back in the Michael Jordan days - says "bulls" like Pamplona. The annual - and sometimes deadly - tradition begins today. Pamplona officials estimate 3 percent of runners get injured, sometimes fatally. Just last year, a Spanish man was killed after tripping near a bull. The animal pierced his neck with its horn.
Fiery Las Fallas Festival a bang-up time in Spain
In March, I headed on a trip to Valencia - Spain's third largest city, after Madrid and Barcelona - fully determined to escape my round-the-clock addiction to the theater. But wouldn't you know it: I arrived in the history-rich Mediterranean hub just in time for the climactic week of the city's annual Las Fallas festival, quite possibly the most wildly dramatic, elaborately choreographed, grandly orchestrated and literally explosive example of urban performance I've ever experienced.
