Category: Travel

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The Coolest Thing the Accountants Said (about History)

An original Summa Arithmetica printed in 1494, courtesy of the Sansepolcro library. All photos from kajmeister.

Everything you know about this is entirely wrong, and it’s just getting worse.

Accountants are as interested in words and form as they are about numbers.

Pay attention to Nothing.

Did you get this far in the post? My mentioning that dreaded word–accounting–didn’t scare you off? (yet?) Great! I feel trusted.

I spent three days in Siena, Italy, among the brightest and sagest of accounting historians. They are a terrifically brilliant and friendly lot, and I was privileged to talk a little myself about my research and medieval accounting (love me some Christine de Pisan). I heard a couple of presentations that I thought even y’all would find interesting, so I promise to skip the bits about Michel Foucault, isomorphism, and The Institutional Method. Herein, I shall pass on a few juicy items that you, my blog public, will appreciate.

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Gardens of Power

Florence’s Boboli Gardens, photo by kajmeister

They say all roads lead to Rome, or perhaps lead back to Rome in European history. All garden roads seem to lead back to Rome. Where did Italian gardens originate? Roman models. How about Hampton Court, the “other” estate of Henry VIII? English gardens came from Roman models. Palace of Versailles? French gardens copied the Italian ones. But even the Romans would have known about the earliest ones in Persia, like the garden where Cyrus the Great used trees and lawn to  demonstrate his power.

In Florence on vacation, our first stop was Boboli Gardens aka the Medici gardens. This was the Renaissance garden of power, which made me think about garden styles and how different styles and different regimes have influenced those garden styles. This is mainly an excuse to show a few vacation photos, but still, who doesn’t like a lovely little garden?

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U is for Utah

Author’s note: We are down to the last six posts of the alphabet. You may have noticed that they’re going to slide a few days into May, so not technically finishing in A to Z April. Still, let’s finish this alphabetic journey about dinosaurs … we are on the home stretch!

Geology Utah, dinosaurs discovered across the variety of ages.

Normally, I would not be touting tourist information for any particular place, and certainly not gathering or sharing information from a chamber of commerce-y site. But this is about dinosaurs and that site is Utah. Utah is a dinosaur place. So is Wyoming and so is Colorado. And China, Argentina, Mongolia. Those are your international dinosaur hot spots.

(Gosh, I sure would like to go Ulaanbataar and see their dinosaur fossils and Chinggis Khan artifacts. How am I ever going to convince my spouse that would be the next great vacation, when we haven’t even been to Paris or Germany or Prague or Madrid… hmmm… anyway.)

There’s just no getting around it. Utah was prime real estate for capturing fossils from almost all significant ages. It also has the second-most different types of dinosaurs discovered, only behind China.

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