Calendar: January 14

Year: Day to Day Men: January 14

Shades of Black and Green

The fourteenth of January in 83 BC marks the birth date of Marcus Antonius who played a critical role in the transformation of the Roman Republic from a constitutional republic into the autocratic Roman Empire.

Born in Rome, Marcus Antonius was the son of Marcus Antonius Creticus and Julia, the daughter of Consul Lucius Julius Caesar and the third-cousin of Gaius Julius Caesar, dictator of the Empire until his assassination in 44 BC. Antonius was a relative and supporter of Julius Caesar and served as a general during the conquest of Gaul and the Civil War of the late Roman Republic. He was appointed administrator to Italy while Caesar eliminated his political opponents in Spain, North Africa and Greece.

There is little reliable information on his younger years. It is known, however, that he was an associate of Publius Clodius Pulcher, a populist Roman politician and street agitator during the First Triumvirate. By the age of twenty, Antonius had accumulated enormous debt and fled to Greece to escape his creditors; during his stay in Greece, he studied philosophy and rhetoric at Athens. Antonius began his military career in 57 BC by joining the military staff of the Proconsul of Syria, Aulus Gabinius, as commander of the calvary. He achieved his first military honors after securing important victories at Alexandrium and Machaerus, both in Jordan.

Antonius’s association with Publius Clodius Pulcher enabled him to achieve prominence in his career. Clodius secured Antonius a position on Caesar’s military staff in 54 BC. Demonstrating military leadership under Caesar, Antonius and Caesar developed a friendship that would last until Caesar’s assassination. It was Antonius who persuaded Proconsul Aulus Gabinius to restore the Ptolemaic pharaoh Ptolemy XII Auletes to the throne of Egypt after Ptolemy’s defeat in a rebellion. With Ptolemy restored as Rome’s client king, Rome exercised considerable power over the kingdom’s affairs. It was during this campaign that Antonius met Ptolemy’s then fourteen year-old daughter Cleopatra.

After a year of military service in Gaul, Caesar sent Antonius to Rome to formally begin his political career as a quaester, or public official, in 52 BC. After a year in office, Antonius was promoted by Caesar to the rank of Legate and was given command of two legions, about seventy-five hundred soldiers. After Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC, Antonius joined with General Marcus Aemilius Lepidus and Galus Octavius, Caesar’s great-nephew, to form the three-man dictatorship known as the Second Triumvirate. This group defeated Caesar’s killers in 42 BC and divided the Republic’s government between themselves. Antonius was assigned Rome’s eastern provinces which included the kingdom of Egypt, ruled then by Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator.

As the members of the Triumvirate sought individual power, relations became strained. Octavius and Antonius averted war in 40 BC when Antonius married Octavia, Octavius’s sister. However despite this marriage, relations were further strained as Antonius continued his love affair with Cleopatra. In 36 BC, Lepidus was expelled from the Triumvirate and a split developed between Antonius and Octavius. This hostility erupted into civil war in 31 BC as the Roman Senate under Octavius declared war on Egypt and proclaimed Antonius a traitor. Later that year, Octavius’s forces defeated Antonius at the Battle of Actium. Cleopatra and Marcus Antonius fled to Egypt where, after losing the Battle at Alexandria in 30 BC, these two historic figures committed suicide.

Roman statesman and orator Cicero Minor, a leading figure of the Roman Republic, announced Antonius’s death to the Senate. Antonius’s honors were revoked and his statues removed; however he was not subject to a complete condemnation of memory, damnatio memoriae. A decree was made that no member of the Antonii family would ever bear the name of Marcus again. Married four times, Marcus Antonius had many descendants and was ancestor to several famous Roman statesmen. Through his lover, Cleopatra VII, he had two sons and a daughter Cleopatra Selene II through whom Antonius was ancestor to the royal family of Mauretania, another Roman client kingdom.

Notes:Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator was Queen of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt from 51 to 30 BC and its last active ruler. She was a descendant of its founder Ptolemy I Soter, a Macedonian Greek general and companion of Alexander the Great. The Ptolemaic pharaohs, crowned by the Egyptian high priest of Ptah at Memphis, resided in the multicultural and largely Greek city of Alexandria founded by Alexander the Great. Previous Ptolemaic pharaohs spoke only Greek and ruled as Hellenistic monarchs. Cleopatra could speak multiple languages by adulthood and was the first Ptolemaic ruler known to have learned the Egyptian language. Contrary to popular belief, Cleopatra VII did not commit suicide by a bite from an asp but rather through poison.

Calendar: January 12

A Year: Day to Day Men: 12th of January

Climbing Walls

Author and storyteller Charles Perrault was born in Paris, France on January 12, 1628. He was one of the first writers in European literature who turned his eyes to folklore, laying the foundation for the literary genre of fairy tales .

In 1695, when he was 67, Perrault decided to dedicate himself to his children. In 1697 he published “Tales and Stories from the Past with Morals”, subtitled “Tales of Mother Goose”. These tales, based on French popular tradition, were very popular in sophisticated court circles. Its publication made him suddenly very widely known and he is credited as the founder of the modern fairy tale genre. Naturally, his work reflects awareness of earlier fairy tales written in the salons, most notably by Marie Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, the Baroness d’Aulnoy, who coined the phrase “fairy tale” and wrote tales as early as 1690.

Some of his popular stories, particularly “Cinderella” and “The Sleeping Beauty”, are still commonly told similar to the way Perrault had written them, while others have been revised over the years. For example, some versions of “Sleeping Beauty” published today are based partially on a Brothers Grimm tale, “Little Briar Rose”, a modified version of the Perrault story. However, the version done by Disney is quite true to the original Perrault tale.

Perrault had written “Little Red Riding Hood” as a warning to readers about men who were trying to prey on young girls who were walking through the forest. He provided the following comment about the lesson provided by the story: “I say Wolf, for all wolves are not of the same sort; there is one kind with an amenable disposition – neither noisy, nor hateful, nor angry, but tame, obliging and gentle, following the young maids in the streets, even into their homes. Alas! Who does not know that these gentle wolves are of all such creatures the most dangerous!” In his story, the girl gets into bed with the wolf and is devoured. There is no happy ending.

He published his collection under the name of his last son, Pierre (Perrault) Darmancourt, probably fearful of criticism from those who favored the classical style of writing as opposed to the new modern writing style common under Louis XIV . In the tales, he used images from around him, such as the Chateau Usse for “The Sleeping Beauty”, and the Marquis of the Chateau de’Oiron as the model for the Marquis de Carabas in “Puss in Boots”. He ornamented his folktale subject matter with details, asides and subtext drawn from the world of fashion.

Calendar: January 10

A Year: Day to Day Men: 10th of January, Solar Year 2018

A Bed of Green

January 10, 1863 marked the beginning of the London Underground when the Metropolitan Railway, the world’s oldest underground railway, opened its route between Paddington and Farringdon.

The Metropolitan Railway was a goods and passenger railway that served London from 1863 to !933. Its main line headed northwest from the financial heart of the city to what became the Middlesex suburbs. The first section built was beneath New Road between Paddington and King’s Cross and then in tunnel and cuttings besides Farringdon Road to Smithfield, near the city. It opened on January 10 with gas-lit wooden carriages hauled by steam locomotives. It is the world’s first passenger carrying underground railway.

The line was extended from both ends, eventually extending to Verney Junction in Buckinghamshire, more than 80 kilometers from the Baker Street station to the center of London. In 1905, electric traction was introduced and by 1907 electrical multiple units operated most of the services. The Metropolitan developed land near the rail lines, promoting after World War I housing estates using the “Metro-land” brand. In July of 1933, the Met was merged with other railways, tram lines, and bus services to form the London Passenger Transport Board. After the amalgamation in 1933 the “Metro-land” brand was discontinued.

The spirit of “Metro-land” was remembered in a television documentary “Metro-land”, first broadcast on February 26, 1973. A comedy-drama film, starring Christian Bale and Emily Watson, called “Metroland” was released in 1997. That film explored the tension between the youthful idealism of a hedonistic existence and that of the inevitable middle-class establishment. The film title referred to the London suburbs which were served by the expansive London Underground network, an environment that the lead characters had always promised themselves they would escape.

Calendar: January 9

Year: Day to Day Men: January 9

Betty Boop Coffee

On the ninth of January in 1839, French painter and physicist Louis Daguerre presented a full description of his daguerreotype process to a meeting of the Academy of Sciences held by the eminent astronomer and physicist François Arago, the man who proved the wave theory of light.

The first permanent photograph from nature was made by French inventor Nicéphore Niépee in 1826 through his heliographic process; however, the quality of the image was poor and the process required an exposure time of eight hours. Daguerre’s daguerreotype process, the first practical process of photography, improved the quality of the image and reduced to exposure time to thirty minutes.

Born in Cormeilles-en-Parisis, in November of 1787, Louis Daguerre apprenticed in theater design, architecture and panoramic painting under Pierre Prévost. He was originally a revenue officer and later a scene painter for opera sets. In 1822, Daguerre opened the Diorama, an exhibition venue in Paris which presented three-dimensional pictorial views that changed with various lighting effects. He later opened a second establishment in London’s Regent Park.

Born in Chalon-sur-Saône in March of 1765, Nicéphore Niépee initially began experimenting in 1813 in the recently developed printing technique, lithography. Unskilled in drawing and unable to obtain a proper lithographic stone, he sought a way to make images automatically. Niépee made experiments and developed the heliographic process of using light and light-sensitive supports to produce images. He initially used a substrate of light-sensitive bitumen of Judea, which hardened on exposure to light, to obtain an image on glass. With the use of a camera in 1826, he was able to fix an image on a metal plate made of pewter. However, Niépee was unable to reduce the exposure time by either optical or chemical means.

In 1829, Nicéphore Niépee agreed to the repeated requests by Louis Daguerre for a partnership to perfect and exploit his heliography process. After four years of working without any advancement, Niépee died in July of 1833. Deguerre, building upon Niépee’s discoveries, eventually succeeded in greatly reducing the exposure time. He also discovered that exposing an iodized silver plate in a camera would result in a lasting image if the latent image on the plate was developed by exposure to fumes of mercury and then made permanent by a solution of common salt.

For this discovery, Louis Daguerre was appointed an officer of the Legion of Honor. In 1839, he and the heir of Nicéphore Niépee were assigned annuities of six-thousand and four-thousand Francs, respectively, in return for their photographic process.

Notes: Lithography was invented circa 1796 in Germany by the Bavarian playwright Alois Senefelder. By chance, he discovered the ability to duplicate his scripts by writing then in greasy crayon on slabs of limestone and them printing them with rolled-on ink. As the local limestone retained the crayon marks on its surface, multiple images, called lithographs meaning in Latin stone marks, could be printed in large quantities. It was not until 1820 that lithography became commercially popular.

Calendar: January 8

Year: Day to Day Men: January 8

Man on Deck

The eighth of January in 1877 marks the Battle of Wolf Mountain, known by the Northern Cheyenne as the Battle of Belly Butte, a confrontation between the United States Army and warriors from both the Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne. Occurring during the Great Sioux War of 1876, the battle was fought in southern Montana Territory near the Tongue River.

Following Lieutenant Colonel George Custer’s defeat in the Battle of Little Bighorn, a large number of Army reinforcements were sent by the government into the Montana Territory. In autumn of 1876, a few bands of Sioux and Cheyenne tribes were returning to the reservations and agencies, now managed by the army instead of civilian contractors, to acquire food and annuity goods for the winter. These provisions had been promised to the tribes after the government demanded that they cede the Black Hills area to it.

By December, General Nelsen Miles had led a mixed force of infantry, artillery and calvary after Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull’s band and effectively defeated them. Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie defeated the Northern Cheyenne under Chief Morning Star after a destructive raid, known as the Dull Knife Fight, that left two hundred lodges destroyed, seven hundred livestock captured, and most of the Cheyenne forced to surrender. The surviving warriors trekked through snow and icy conditions to join the camp of Chief Crazy Horse in the Tongue River Valley.

Concerned about the approaching winter and the situation of the remaining Cheyenne band, Chief Crazy Horse decided to negotiate a peace with the army. However, a group of United States Army Crow scouts murdered Crazy Horse’s delegation. In retaliation, a series of small raids by the Cheyenne tried to draw out Colonel Nelson Miles’s troops from the Tongue River army post. In December of 1876, Miles led most of nine companies from the army post in pursuit of Crazy Horse at Tongue River Valley. On the seventh of January, Miles captured a few Northern Cheyennes and camped with a force of four hundred-thirty six men along the Tongue River. That night fresh snow fell and the temperatures dropped.

After early morning shots were fired. Colonel Miles set up a defensive perimeter along a ridge on the knoll later called Battle Butte. The defensive position had two pieces of artillery beside it and a clear line of fire in front. At seven in the morning, Crazy Horse and Cheyenne Chief Two Moon began a series of attacks. Due the the army’s firepower, the warriors had to regroup and attack several times; however, these attacks failed when Miles shifted his reserves. Miles’s Fifth Infantry units struggled to take the hills occupied by the warriors; despite the deep snow, the units secured seven of the hills, forcing the Sioux and Cheyenne to withdraw.

Although a draw in many aspects, the Battle of Wolf Mountain was a strategic victory for the U.S. Army as the Sioux and Cheyenne saw they were not safe from the army even in winter’s harsh conditions. Many members of the tribes returned to the reservations. By May of 1877, Chief Crazy Horse had led his surviving band to Camp Robinson to surrender.

Notes: Chief Crazy Horse was a Lakota war leader of the Oglala band; his Lakota name was Tȟašúŋke Witkó, literal translation “His Horse is Crazy”. After his surrender, he resided in his village near the Red Cloud Agency, located by Fort Robinson, Nebraska. Crazy Horse had promised he would remain in peace with the army. Due to mistranslation by an Indian interpreter, the army felt that he was a threat and eventually arrested and placed in the guardhouse. Once inside, Crazy Horse attempted to escape and was stabbed with a bayonet by one of the guards. He was tended by the assistant post surgeon but died late on the night of September fifth in 1877. The identification of the guard remains questioned. Crazy Horse’s remains were handed over to his elderly parents; his final resting place remains unknown.

Chief Morning Star was a great chief of the Northern Cheyenne people and the headchief of the Notameohmésêhese band on the northern Great Plains. Known also as Chief Dull Knife, his Lakota Sioux name was Tȟamílapȟéšni. He died in 1883 and is interred at Lame Deer Cemetery on the Northern Cheyenne reservation in southeastern Montana.

Calendar: January 6

Year: Day to Day Men: January 6

Just Slightly Peeking

On the sixth of January in 1501, construction began on Portugal’s Jerónimos Monastery in the parish of Belém of the Lisbon Municipality. This monastery became the necropolis of the Portuguese royal dynasty, the House of Aviz, in the sixteenth-century until its secularization in December of 1833 by state decree. Its ownership was then transferred to the Real Casa Pia de Lisboa, a charitable institution.

The Jerónimos Monastery was designed by architect Diogo de Boitaca, an influential architect and engineer of some of the most important buildings in Portugal. In this church, he continued his concept of a nave, the central part of the church, and two side aisles of equal height which unified the inner space as in a hall church. The richly ornate vaulting in the main chapel shows ribs with the shape of a twisted rope, a common theme of the Manueline style which incorporated maritime elements. The Jerónimos Monasteryis considered the most prominent of the late Portuguese Gothic Manueline style of Lisbon architecture.

The Jerónimos Monastery was erected near the Tagus River launch point of Vasco de Gama’s first journey; its construction was funded by a five percent tax on the profits of the yearly Portuguese India Armadas. With the influx of such riches as imported spices and the redirection of funds from other proposed monasteries, Diogo de Boitaca was not limited to small-scale plans. He chose calcário de lioz, a gold-colored limestone for its construction. During his span of overseeing the construction, De Boitaca was responsible for drawing the plans and contracting work on the monastery, the sacristy and the refectory.

Architect Juan de Castillo succeeded Diogo de Boitaca in 1517. He moved from the Manueline to the Spanish Plateesque style, an ornamentation that included decorative features constructed of silverware, plata. With the death of King Manuel I, construction halted until 1550, at which time architect Diogo de Torralva was in charge. He was followed by Jérôme de Rouen who added some classical elements. Throughout the following years, construction was halted several more times before the monastery’s completion, a span of work that lasted over one hundred years.

The Jerónimos Monastery became in 1640 a burial place for the Portuguese royal families. Among those entombed within the monastery were four of the eight children of John IV, King Alfonso VI, the Infanta Joana, and Catarina de Bragança. In 1880, Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama’s remains and those of poet Luís de Camões, who wrote “The Lusiad, a celebration of da Gama’s first voyage, were moved to newly carved tombs in the monastery’s nave, just a few feet from the tombs of Kings Manuel I and John III, who da Gama served. The monastery is classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Calendar: January 5

A Year: Day to Day Men: 5th of January

A Cyclist in Blue

On January 5, 1903, the general public could use the Pacific cable for the very first time.

The Commercial Pacific Cable Company was founded in 1901, and ceased operations in October 1951. It provided the first direct telegraph route from America to the Philippines, China, and Japan.

The company was established as a joint venture of three companies: the Commercial Cable Company (25%), the Great Northern Telegraph Company (25%), and the Eastern Telegraph Company (50%). Though the Eastern (a British firm) was the majority shareholder, the CPCC was registered in the United States.

The company used cable ships to lay its undersea cable across the Pacific Ocean from America’s west coast. The cables extended a length of 6,912 miles (11,124 km) and the project cost about $12 million. Before this, messages had to travel across the Atlantic to the Far East via Cape Town, South Africa, and the Indian Ocean, or by way of London to Russia, then across the Russian landline to Vladivostok, then by submarine cable to Japan and the Philippines.

The first section of cable was laid in 1902 by the cable ship CS Silvertown from Ocean Beach, adjacent to the famous Cliff House in San Francisco to Honolulu. It began operating on January 1, 1903. Later that year, cables were laid from Honolulu to Midway Atoll, thence to Guam, thence to Manila. The cables carried the first message to ever travel around the globe from US President Theodore Roosevelt on July 4, 1903. He wished “a happy Independence Day to the US, its territories and properties…” It took only nine minutes for the message to travel worldwide, an incredibly short time compared to past history.

Calendar: January 4

Year: Day to Day Men: January 4th

Red and White Squares

Born on January 4th of 1809, Louis Braille was a French educator and inventor. He was the youngest of four siblings bor to Simon-René and Monique Braille who maintained a successful enterprise for leather goods and horse tack. At the age of three, Louis Braille was playing with his father’s tools in the workshop; an awl that he was using slipped and penetrated one of his eyes. No treatment was able to save the damaged organ and eventually lost sight in the other eye by the age of five, most likely due to sympathetic ophthalmia.

Braille was raised by his parents in a normal fashion and prospered in their care. He navigated the village and paths with canes fashioned by his father. Braille’s intelligence and creative mind impress the local teachers and priests who assisted him with higher education. In February 1819 at the age of ten, he entered Paris’s Royal Institute for Blind Youth which provided a stable environment for blind children to associate and learn. There the students were taught to read by a system devised by the school’s founder Valentin Haüy. The books in the small library used embossed heavy paper with raised imprints of Latin letters which could be traced with fingers.

These books however were in uncomfortable sizes and weights, fragile and expensive to obtain. While the blind children could read the letters by touch, there was no process by which the children could write by themselves. Louis Braille read Haüy’s books repeatedly and was attentive to the oral instructions offered by the school. After he exhausted the school’s curriculum, he was asked to remain as a teacher’s aide and, by 1833, was elevated to a full professorship. For the rest of his life, Braille stayed at the Institute and taught history, geometry and algebra.

In 1821, Braille discovered a system devised by Charles Barbier, a code of up to twelve dots in two columns, impressed into thick paper. These impressions could be read entirely by the fingers. Inspired, Braille developed a system of his own, a system of reading and writing that could bridge the gap in communication between the sighted and the blind. His system was largely completed in 1824, when he was fifteen years old. Braille’s first version, published in 1829, used both dots and dashes in uniform columns of six dots for each letter. In 1837, he discarded the dashes as too difficult to read; the resulting small cells were capable of being recognized as letters with a single touch of a finger. Braille’s system was later extended to include braille musical notation.

Louis Braille published several written books on braille and educational books for the blind. In 1939, he created the decapoint, a systematic method of dot-punching with a specialized grill which overlaid the paper. With the use of an associated number table, which he devised, the grill permitted a blind writer to faithfully reproduce the standard alphabet. With the assistance of his friend Pierre-François-Victor Foucault, Braille helped develop the Raphigraphe, a device that could emboss letters in the manner of a typewriter.

Although respected by his pupils, Braille’s writing system was not taught at the Institute during his lifetime. The successors of Haüy who died in 1822 were hostile to its use. Suffering through sixteen years with a persistent respiratory illness believed now to be tuberculosis, Braille relinquished his teacher position at the age of forty. He was eventually admitted to the infirmary at the Royal Institution when his condition reached mortal danger. He died in January of 1852, two days after he reached forty-three years. Due to the insistence of the blind students, Braille’s system was finally adopted by the Institute in 1854, two years after his death.

Calendar: January 2

A Year: Day to Day Men: 2nd of January

Morning Cup of Joe

On January 2, 1870, construction of the Brooklynn Bridge begins with Washington Roebling as project manager.

In the summer of 1869, John Roebling, noted bridge-builder and chief engineer of the construction, severely injured his foot in a freak accident as he was surveying the site. He died of lockjaw not long after, and his son Washington Roebling, became chief engineer of the bridge project.

Construction on the Brooklynn-side wooden caisson began on January 2, 1870. To dig the foundations for the bridge’s enormous stone towers, caissons, enormous wooden boxes with no bottoms, were sunk in the river. Compressed air was pumped into them, and men inside would dig away at the sand and rock on the river bottom. The stone towers were built atop the caissons, which sank deeper into the river bottom.

After the caissons had been sunk to the river bottom, they were filled with concrete, and the construction of the granite stone towers continued above. When these anchorage towers reached their ultimate height, 278 feet above high water, work began on the four enormous cables that would support the roadway. Spinning the cables between the towers began in the summer of 1877, and was finished a year and four months later. But it would take nearly another five years to suspend the roadway from the cables and have the bridge ready for traffic.

The bridge was built with numerous passageways and compartments in its anchorage towers. New York City rented out the large vaults under the bridge’s Manhattan anchorage in order to fund the bridge. Opened in 1876, the vaults were used to store wine, as they were always at 60 °F (16 °C). This was called the “Blue Grotto” because of a shrine to the Virgin Mary next to an opening at the entrance.

Over the course of the next 40 years, several different liquor vendors would utilize the cellars below the bridge. City records indicate, for example, that in 1901, the “Luyties Brothers paid $5,000 for a vault on the Manhattan side of the bridge,” located at 204 Williams St., while in Brooklyn, “A. Smith & Company” forked over $500 a year to rent a wine cellar from 1901 until 1909.

By the late 1910s, as America debated the vices of liquor, the wine was moved out and the cellars were converted into newspaper storage. But the end of Prohibition in 1933 enticed new wine distributors. A celebration on July 11, 1934 was held in honor of Anthony Oechs & Co.’s move into the bridge’s blue-black caverns. After World War II, for logistical reasons, the city of New York took over permanent management of the cellars. To the despair of modern wine drinkers, adventurers, and those in pursuit of a good Instagram, the cellars have been closed and shuttered for years with only the occasional few gaining access.

Zagreb Archaeological Museum

Chas, “Zagreb Archaeological Museum”; Photo taken Early Morning, October 2017

The Archaeological Museum in Zagreb, Croatia, is an archaeological museum with over 450,000 varied artifacts and monuments, gathered from various sources but mostly from Croatia and in particular from the surroundings of Zagreb.

Its predecessor institution was the “National Museum”, open to the public since 1846. It was renamed to “State Institute of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia” in 1866. In 1878, the Archaeological Department became an independent institution within the State Institute, and the umbrella institute was dissolved in 1939, leaving the Archaeological Museum as a standalone institution.

The archaeological collection of the State Institute had been kept in the Academy mansion at Zrinski Square from the 1880s and remained there until 1945, when the museum moved to its current location at the 19th-century Vranyczany-Hafner mansion, 19 Zrinski Square.

Calendar: November 24

A Year: Day to Day Men: 24th of November

Lion King

Mont Granier is a limestone mountain located between the departements of Savoie and Isere in France. It lies in the Charteuse Mountains range of the French Prealps. At 900 meters tall, Mont Granier has one of the highest cliffs in France.

In the year 1248, in the evening of November 24, a mass of limestone resting on marls slid into the valley, causing a massive landslide that destroyed many villages. This event created the sheer 700 meter north face of the mountain. Five villages were partly or completely destroyed by the avalanche: Cognin, Vourey, Saint-Andre, Granier, and Saint-Perange. Modern estimates calculate about 1000 local residents died due to this night time landslide, making it one of the biggest and deadliest landslides in Europe.

Puente Nuevo Bridge

Puente Nuevo Bridge, Ronda, Spain

Ronda is a city in the Spanish province of Málaga. It is located about 100 kilometres west of the city of Málaga, within the autonomous community of Andalusia. The Puente Nuevo is the newest and largest of three bridges that span the chasm that carries the Guadalevín River and divides the city of Ronda, in southern Spain.

The construction of the Puente Neuvo Bridge that stands today was started in 1759 and took 34 years to build. There is a chamber above the central arch that was used for a variety of purposes, including as a prison. During the 1936-1939 civil war both sides allegedly used the prison as a torture chamber for captured opponents, killing some by throwing them from the windows to the rocks at the bottom of the El Tajo gorge. The chamber is entered through a square building that was once the guard-house. It now contains an exhibition describing the bridge’s history and construction.

Construction of the previous bridge started in 1735, this was the first attempt to span the gorge at this height and was completed by the architects Jose Garcia and Juan Camacho using a single arch design. Unfortunately, this bridge was quickly and poorly built and in 1741 the entire bridge collapsed resulting in the death of 50 people.

Inuyama Castle

Inuyama Castle, Aichi Prefecture, Japan

Inuyama Castle is one of only 12 surviving Japanese castles built before the Edp Period. The castle is often claimed as the oldest castle in Japan. Its original construction was completed in 1440. According to ‘Engishiki, a Helan Period book, Haritsuna Shrine, a Shinto shrine, was moved to make way for the castle. That structure has been heavily augmented over time, and the current towers were completed in 1537, by Oda Nobuyasu. Though the antiquated architectural style of the watchtower atop the tench has in the past led many historians to believe this to be the oldest extant tench in Japan, that honor goes to Maruoka Castle, built in 1576. Construction on the main tenshu (donjon) at Inuyama began in 1601, and continued through 1620.

The castle was the center of power for the Naruse Clan, retainers of the Matsudaira clan and rulers of the Inyama Domain. Inuyama Castle was unique in Japan in that it was privately owned. The donjon (tenshu) has been designated as national treasure. However, it was seized by the Japanese government as part of the Meiji Restoration. In 1891, the castle was damaged in the Great Nobi earthquake, and it was returned to the Naruse family in 1895, on the condition that they repair and maintain it. In 2004, ownership of the castle was turned over to a foundation set up by the Aichi Prefecture’s Board of Education.

Ron Del Barrilito

Ron Del Barrilito

In 1871, Mr. Pedro F. Fernández, upon finishing his professional engineering studies in France, returned to the Hacienda Santa Ana in Bayamón, Puerto Rico and developed a formula for a rum similar to the style of the French brandies and cognacs. Originally, as per European tradition, this rum was made only for the consumption of family and guests. At the time, this rum was served directly from the barrel and thus his guests had affectionately named the rum “Ron del Barrilito” (Rum from the Barrel). Since 1880, the Fernández Family has used the same secret formula and aging process which creates a uniquely smooth and mellow rum that connoisseurs have come to love over generations.

Ron del Barrilito 2 Stars is aged 3 years in oak barrels and is ideal for mixed drinks. Ron del Barrilito 3 Stars is a blend of rums aged 6 to 10 years in oak barrels. These are aged artisanal rums recognized by many to be among the best rums in the world.

The Treasury at Petra

The Treasury at Petra, Reign of Aretas IV Philopatric, First Century AD, Sandstone Rock Carving

Aretas IV Philopatris was the King of the Nabataeans from roughly 9 BCE to CE 40. Aretas came to power after the assassination of Obodas III, who was apparently poisoned. Josephus says that he was originally named Aeneas, but took “Aretas” as his throne name. An inscription from Petra suggests that he may have been a member of the royal family, as a descendent of Malichus the First.

His full title, as given in the inscriptions, was “Aretas, King of the Nabataeans, Friend of his People.” Being the most powerful neighbour of Judea, he frequently took part in the state affairs of that country, and was influential in shaping the destiny of its rulers. While Aretas was not on particularly good terms with Rome, Augustus with great hesitation recognized him as king, After this recognition, Aretas placed a considerable army at the disposal of the Roman general.