Italy’s Minister of Culture, Dario Franceschini, has announced the winner of a technical tender to design and build a new stage floor for the 2,000 year old Colosseum. The original wooden arena floor covered an underground network of rooms and corridors, which housed the waiting animals, gladiators...
The French seaside town and ferry port was expecting its famous mechanical dragon to be operating in the build up to Christmas and New Year, but COVID-19 struck again and so the Compagnie du Dragon has been using the downtime for a bit of maintenance. I got...
Last week the U.S. National Park Service announced $2,208,110 in grants from the American Battlefield Protection Program to protect 169.03 acres of America’s Civil War battlefields. Unlike the UK, where so many of our battlefield sites are already lost to history, or under threat from developers (See...
The Salis Flying Museum (Musée Volant Salis) has an amazing collection of around 50* historic aircraft at its hilltop airfield, 35 kms south of Paris. It’s the drip trays you notice. Drip trays are a rare sight in most aviation museums because, before they go on static...
Keen to reconnect with its fanbase, Ducati is reopening its museum today (5 Oct) at their motorcycle factory in Borgo Panigale, Bologne, Italy. The museum’s new coronavirus protocols mean that visitors have to book online and register a specific date/time slot in advance. The 15-min time slots...
The Aston Martin Heritage Trust museum is home to some classic, and beautiful, examples of auto engineering excellence. The museum tells the story of the brand’s luxury sports cars and grand tourers – their amazing engine design, development and manufacturing, and their motor racing history. I went...
The KF Aerospace Centre for Excellence has unveiled its plans for a new aviation museum and conference centre at Kelowna International Airport. Site preparation work will start this autumn on the site on Lapointe Drive beside the Kelowna International Airport, across the road from their current airfield...
The WWII Tank Landing Craft, LCT 7074, a veteran of D-day, has finally made the journey from Portsmouth Naval Base to her new home on Southsea where she will be the newest addition to the D-Day Story museum. The newly renovated 59-metre long, 300-ton ship was moved...
Guédelon is a 13th century castle under construction from scratch using only medieval tools, materials and techniques. It is a fascinating project in experimental archaeology that began in 1995 – a quarter century ago! Construction began two years later* in a former quarry in the middle of...
Long overdue, the National Museum of the Royal Navy (NMRN) and Mary Rose are collaborating on ticketing. It was always ludicrous that a visit to the Historic Dockyard in Portsmouth meant dealing with two separate ticketing systems. Ludicrous but understandable. The two organisations that share the Historic...
RMS Titanic, Inc (RMST), the company that has been recovering artifacts from the wreck of the Titanic since 1987, says it plans to make a ninth dive to the wreck in 2021, in a bid to recover the Marconi Wireless Telegraph from the Titanic’s radio room. The...
The Musée de l’Armée (Army Museum) is located in the Hôtel National des Invalides (The National Residence of the Invalids), a collection of 17th century buildings in the centre of Paris that started life as a military hospital. Part of the complex is still used as a...
The Museum of the Atlantic Wall, aka ‘Batterie Todt’, is all about the big guns! Not only was the giant concrete casement built specifically to accommodate a massive gun, it now has one of the two remaining German K5 railway guns parked alongside as a major exhibit....
Montormel*, or ‘Hill 262’ as it was known to the Allies, was the location where the ‘Falaise pocket’ was finally sealed by Polish and Canadian forces on 21 August 1944, trapping up to 50,000 German soldiers and marking the end of the Battle of Normandy. On this...
This is a niche blog about technically-minded travel. It reflects my own interests in the mechanical, technical, historical, engineering, transport and military world.
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