A Venice museum you can wander without a plane ticket, Brigitte Bardot's old Paris flat on the market, and hundreds of tiny candle-lit boats drifting down a Slovenian river — this week's internet trawl turned up a proper mixed bag for the armchair-travelling set.
The travel standout is a Venetian cabinet of curiosities — the kind of densely packed, centuries-deep collection that makes the city's quieter corners worth lingering in. The blogger behind Messy Nessy Chic visited in person, then discovered the collection has a full virtual tour online, so you can poke through its oddities from your sofa. Even better: the site's free Venice weekend guide in its A-Z directory has just been updated, handy if the real thing is calling.
Further east, Slovenia marks the arrival of spring with one of Europe's most charming rituals. Once a year, children build miniature wooden houses called "gregorčki", load them with candles and set them adrift down the river — a slow parade of light saying farewell to winter. Most towns now string nets downstream to gather the boats afterwards, so the tradition stays as gentle as it sounds. It's the sort of small-town festival that justifies a spring detour off the Ljubljana–Venice route.
Back in Paris, Bardot's former apartment has come up for sale. It's been renovated many times over since the 60s icon lived there, but the red velvet-walled living room and a leopard-print room (now a gym) still whisper of its former occupant. Meanwhile in New York, a new photography book gathers Albert Scopin's lost 1970s shots of the Chelsea Hotel — a young Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe and Wim Wenders among the frames — a decent excuse to revisit the Chelsea on a Manhattan stay.
There's history too: a 1925 Paris Opera programme for "La Nuit Créole", found at auction, shows how Creole culture was packaged and staged for European audiences in June 1925, complete with miniature portraits and verse from Baudelaire and José-Maria de Heredia. And for the design-minded, the roundup digs into "Frasurbane" — the 90s postmodern aesthetic named for Frasier, all serif fonts, astrolabes and sepia-staged product photography — plus an explanation of why mid-century control rooms were so often seafoam green.
Beyond the travel hooks, you'll find jewellery designer Carina Shoshtary, who describes herself as a modern hunter-gatherer working in salvaged graffiti crusts, old bobbin lace and discarded shower nets; an 18th-century drawing of the legendary tooth worm; an Instagram account devoted entirely to attractive gutters; and a primer on Poland's Śmigus-dyngus, or Wet Monday, the Easter water-fight tradition with roots that may predate 1000 AD. Girls once bought their dryness with painted eggs — pisanki — believed to promise good harvests and healthy births; these days it's mostly a light sprinkling of family and a lot of laughter.
Who's this for? Anyone building a mood board for their next trip — Venice, Paris, New York and Slovenia all feature — or simply after a well-curated half hour of strange and beautiful internet. Original roundup by Messy Nessy Chic.