When I first heard the name Via Veneto I thought of the famous shopping street in Rome, Italy and wondered what kind of cuisine the restaurant served. Soon I discovered the restaurant offered a contemporary interpretation of Catalan dishes within a nostalgic setting designed during the Italian Dolce Vita era.
As a lover of fine foods and wines including bubbly, one of my favorite libations, I was excited to visit Wines and Cavas Eudald Massana Noya, a Spanish wine and cava estate within easy driving distance from Barcelona during a weeklong visit to that northern city. We arrived in the middle of the afternoon on a sunny spring day. After welcoming our group warmly Eudald Massana Noya, the owner, and Ester Tous Font, his wife, walked us out to the vineyards where, with the help of an English language interpreter, he told us, in Catalan (the language of the region) about the vineyards, winery and the property’s organic and biodynamic farming practices.
We drove to Figueras from Barcelona with the express purpose of visiting the famous museum, home of the largest Dali collection in the world. It was time well spent. After parking on a nearby street we walked a couple of blocks bypassing the main entrance straight to the Jewels Gallery which had a dedicated ingress.
This trendy hotel, part of the large Sol Meliá chain, was located in a 37 story tower building. Its target audience were luxury oriented travelers, especially celebrities and those with a penchant for music, design and gourmet meals. It had a penthouse VIP lounge (a favorite) for Level upper floor guests, meeting space, two restaurants, nightclub, pool area, fitness center and spa. The name Me was designed to convey that Me equals you “because Me becomes you.”
Named for Charles-Augustin Meurice the hotel’s history began in 1771 in Calais, where upper-class British travelers on their way to Paris would arrive after crossing the Straits of Dover. There, an enterprising regional postmaster, Meurice (1739-1820), welcomed them to French shores at his Calais coaching inn and arranging rides to Paris aboard his coach service. It was a 36-hour trip, and Meurice built a second coaching inn in Paris in 1817 to welcome the weary travelers on their arrival. The Hotel Le Meurice moved in 1835 to its present site, one of the most fashionable locales in the city, overlooking the historic Tuileries Garden.
As the core of the Habsburg Dynasty for over half a millennium, Austria developed a rich cultural heritage with two widely diverging personalities. First there is Vienna on the Danube in the eastern reaches of the country, which was home to the Habsburg court from the end of the Middle Ages until the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of the First World War. Throughout the centuries it grew into one of the leading capitals of Europe, filled with grand palaces and monuments; and it became a beacon of the arts, especially music. Today, with a population of 1.7 million (20 percent of Austria’s total population) Vienna remains Austria’s political, cultural and economic center. Here, history and traditions meld with contemporary vitality to create an especially stimulating environment. Meanwhile at the western tip of the country, nestled within a picture-book alpine landscape, the lovely baroque city of Salzburg, birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, has attained international fame among music lovers for its annual Salzburg Festival. Outside of Vienna, however, Austria has remained a mainly rural environment of small communities, slow-paced and steadfastly attached to their traditions, some said to date back to Celtic and Roman times.
