Alexandra Pecci
Editor's Girl Friday
Travel, food, history, life. Contact me at apecci@live.com.
PROJECTS
The Washington Post
A churros-fueled brunch tour of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter
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...
nshoremag.com
Spain Travel Guide
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...
The Washington Post
Magical meals in a Massachusetts town
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...
The Washington Post
Frankfurt on the fly: A long layover allows for a walking tour of the German city
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...
nshoremag.com
Romantic Escape in Rhode Island
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...
EveryDay with Rachel Ray
Cocktail Hour on Wheels
This season’s answer to the food truck is the cocktail truck: a shiny Airstream trailer, classic flatbed or funky VW bus retrofitted into a fully functioning bar. Nancy Barger, of Barger’s Beer Truck in Knoxville, TN, helms a fleet of six that have pulled up to birthday parties, corporate events and baby showers. One was even hired out to surprise a groom at his wedding reception. “He did a cartwheel when he saw us,” she says. And who wouldn’t, to score a jalapeño-spiked margarita (Austin’s S...
northernnewengland.aaa.com
Big Digs
With many properties designated as City Landmarks, Boston’s archaeology program is sometimes called upon to excavate and preserve lost history before construction projects get under way. The Old North Church reached out ahead of a major restoration in time for its 300th anniversary in 2023. When I learned that the program eagerly recruits voluntary help, I jumped at the chance to participate.
EveryDay with Rachel Ray
America, the foodie-ful
If you're planning to celebrate the National Park Service's 100th birthday, you're likely to work up an appetite.
nshoremag.com
Pristine Island of Providenciales
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...
northernnewengland.aaa.com
Delights in Essex, Massachusetts
As the mound of juicy, fat-bellied fried clams threatened at any moment to topple over the edges of the paper plate and onto the picnic table, I felt something that I don’t usually feel at dinner time: doubt. “I don’t know if I can eat all this,” I told my mom.
northernnewengland.aaa.com
Essex Base Ball Organization
I glimpse them first through a row of ancient maples as they play their game in
the sunny, open field. These baseball players might be ghosts, merely apparitions in the Indian summer morning, were it not for the physical evidence of dust clouds kicked up by the bounce of a well-hit ball or the running of feet across the worn-flat grass.
plus.usgbc.org
Accessible and Sustainable
Ron Rambo is many things: a friend, a son, a volunteer and advocate for the disabled community, and a well-known figure of the city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Now, he’s adding the word “pioneer” to that list, thanks to the Rambo Project, a cutting-edge home that will not only provide a totally accessible place for him to live with his wheelchair, but also one that will be radically sustainable.
Nicknamed “Ramboland,” this ambitious project has been years in the making and has attracted the a...
nshoremag.com
Gloucester-Based Sculptor
“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...
EveryDay with Rachel Ray
This Class Lets You Drink Wine and Play with Power Tools
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...
nshoremag.com
Private Resort in the Grenadines
Matthew Semark smiles broadly from the wooden dock on the tiny private island of Petit St. Vincent as our boat, The Poseidon, approaches.
“Welcome to Petit St. Vincent,” he says, as we step ashore. Clad in breezy white linen, Semark speaks with a cheerful British accent and holds a wooden tray carrying piña coladas and cold frangipani-scented hand towels. The lush, green island is ringed by white sandy beaches, and a couple of...