Alexandra Pecci

A blond, bespectacled boy of about 6 stands alone on a wooden staircase, his arms and legs swimming in an oversize, bright pink bunny costume, complete with long ears that stick straight up from a fuzzy hood pulled over his head. He’s looking around impassively, when . . .
“Give me a pink nightmare!” his mother calls from the foot of the stairs, her cellphone camera at the ready, and the boy immediately folds his arms against his chest and pulls his face into a petulant frown, sc...

From my home in woodsy New Hampshire, memories of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter always seem cast with a golden glow. It’s evocative and mysterious, a place where narrow, mazelike streets wind between stone buildings, and laundry and Catalan separatist flags hang from tiny balconies. Boys kick a soccer ball in an alley, and trees heavy with oranges grow next to the gothic Basilica de Santa Maria del Pi. There are ancient Roman walls, ruins of the Temple of Augustus and a Viceroy’s Palace with ivy...

Madrid’s Prado Museum, home to paintings by masters like Rafael, Titian, Rembrandt, and Velázquez, is everything you’d expect one of the world’s most important art museums to be. Or so I’ve heard.
The Prado was on our list of possible places to visit during our family vacation to Spain. But we never made it. Instead, we hopped in a taxi and spent the day with field-tripping local school kids checking out monk...

Salem. The name alone conjures specters of skeletal tree branches stretching toward a misty, moonlit Massachusetts sky, menacing black-cloaked Puritans, and witches, ghosts and ghouls lurking around every brick-paved corner. It’s true that Salem has both earned and cultivated its spooky reputation as the Halloween capital of the world. Yet in recent years, the Witch City has also become a food city, dense with creative restaurants, cafes, patisseries, breweries, a distillery and, just like an...

In the just-waking hours of a cool, misty morning, we slipped into Frankfurt, Germany, the way dreams slide between vivid reality and hazy memory: surreal and ephemeral.
A smiling woman wearing a hairnet reached over a counter, and speaking neither English nor German, offered my daughter a cold, skinny frankfurter. We sleepily wandered through meandering lanes flanked by medieval, half-timbered houses that could have been the backdrop to a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. We passed under the old ci...

Was Mother Nature playing a trick on us? The first day of April dawned blustery and cold, with wet, slushy snow falling thick and fast as my husband and I drove to Rhode Island to spend the weekend at the beautiful seaside Castle Hill Inn in Newport. I fully expected the raw, wicked weather to put a literal damper on our overnight trip.
How wrong I was. Instead, we discovered that Castle Hill Inn is...

Functioning bathrooms are taken for granted in the United States, but in many parts of the developing world, sanitation infrastructure is often patchy or nonexistent, and relieving oneself can be a matter of life and death.
“The basic problem is that all over the world there are hundreds of millions of people who don’t have access to a safe toilet,” says Rob Zimmerman, director of WASH (water, sanitation, and hygiene) and sus...

Turks and Caicos Islands exist in a world of vivid color where, somehow, nature’s hues seem more deeply saturated than in other places on Earth. The aquamarine of the ocean is deeper, the white of the sand more sparkling, the pink of the bougainvillea hotter and brighter. That cranked-up beauty is one of the reasons Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI for short) have become, over the past...

“Listen…. Can you hear it?”

Pablo Eduardo pauses, tilting his head and pointing to the heavens. At first it seems perfectly quiet here, among the thick green of flowers and trees, but after a moment of stillness, there it is: The sound of caterpillars munching on leaves, a sound so insistent that one wonders how it could have ever gone unnoticed. Other things break through the apparent silence as well, like the buzzin...

The craze for classes where you paint and sip wine has inspired endless spin-offs—knitting, cake decorating, flower arranging, you get the idea. Upside: A fun night out with pals. Downside: The classes can feel a little twee.

Marketing itself as the place “where paint night meets power tools,” Cricket Studio in Annapolis, Maryland, offers an amped-up alternative: BYOB woodworking classes. For $35 and up, the studio provides the materials and machines to construct a serving tray, wine caddy or...