Visitors to the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819 and opened to students in 1825, encounter one of the most recognizable expressions of American architecture: Jefferson’s Academical Village. Presiding over the Lawn is the Rotunda, a building inspired by the Pantheon in Rome and conceived as the intellectual heart of the University. Construction began in 1823 and was completed in 1828, two years after Jefferson’s death at Monticello.

Recent archival research in Vinchiaturo has produced a copy of the original birth record of Giuseppe Petardi, the man who would become known in America as Joseph Petarde. The document establishes that Giuseppe was born in Vinchiaturo on March 20, 1866, the fifth of eight children of Domenico Petardi and Maria Teresa Fantacone.

Joseph Sciorra, (born April 4, 1955), the folklorist and cultural historian who spent more than three decades recording how Italian Americans shape their neighborhoods, faith and art, died on October 6, 2026, in New York.

On February 7, 1917, Joaquín Sorolla wrote from Granada to his wife, Clotilde, in Madrid, as he did almost every other day while he travelled across Spain. These were the years of Vision of Spain, the commission Archer Huntington had given him for the Hispanic Society of America in New York. His letters, now kept at the Museo Sorolla in Madrid, let us follow those journeys day by day, often against the clock.

Samba on your Feet is a film by Eduardo Montes-Bradley | To experience samba and Carnaval is to immerse oneself in a living history.

A morning beneath the Guastavino tile vaults of St. Paul's Chapel at Columbia University in Morningside Heights, where every curved surface carries itself.

Milt was a Jewish soldier from Brooklyn serving with the 106th Infantry Division when he was captured during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. His captivity took him to Stalag IV-B, where he remained until liberation by the Red Army. Those events became the heart of our film, but working with Milt also meant getting to know the person who had carried those memories through a long life.

A Roman mosaic discovered beneath a garden in Llíria opens a window onto the many cultural layers inherited by modern Valencia.

While researching Joaquín Sorolla and Vision of Spain, I came across Ruth Matilda Anderson, the American photographer who traveled through Spain documenting its people, landscapes and traditions. A century later, I discovered that the journey I thought I was retracing had already been made.

Yesterday, while scouting locations for Visions of Spain, I returned to the old U.S. Custom House at Bowling Green. I know the building very well, or at least I thought I did. I spent time there while making Daniel Chester French: American Sculptor, because the monumental figures representing the four continents were designed by French and carved by the Piccirilli brothers. Now I’m back for Guastavino.

Exploring the Island and the Guastavino vaulted ceiling. We tend to think of Ellis Island from the American perspective: the immigrant arriving before the the skyline of the new country . But architecture travels too. For those from Barcelona, Valencia, and Naples, those vaults may not have appeared foreign. The materials, the rhythm of the arches and the logic of the construction belonged to an architectural vocabulary with roots much closer to the world they had just left b

Filmmaker Eduardo Montes-Bradley reflects on photographing ceramic artist Paul Chaleff at work and what still photography reveals about the body, labor, clay, and memory.

I came to Paul Chaleff’s studio understanding that he and Anthony Caro had worked together. What I did not yet understand was the scope of that collaboration and the circumstances that made it possible. Perhaps now...

While filming ceramic artist Paul Chaleff in Ancram, filmmaker Eduardo Montes-Bradley encounters Haesook Kim and reflects on memory, loss, and the limits of documentary.

Just arrived in Ancram, New York, where we are planning to spend at least a week documenting Paul Chaleff at work, following the craft and process of one of America’s most celebrated ceramicist-sculptors.

The Hispanic Society had recently acquired his Portrait of a Boy (1927), and I stood in front of it longer than I meant to. It wasn't only the painting. It was the strange sensation of having walked out of one of my documentary film project and into another.

I went back to St. John the Divine, this time to take the Vertical Tour. Our guide was a parishioner originally from the German-speaking part of Switzerland whose name, regrettably, I can't remember. She was knowledgeable, patient, and seemingly quite at home leading a dozen strangers up the narrow spiral staircases and into the upper reaches of one of New York’s most extraordinary landmarks.

We tend to think of pre-revolutionary Cuba through its popular music. Son, rumba, mambo, bolero, jazz: these have become inseparable from our historical imagination of the city. But another Cuba sounded at the same time, and its musical geography was remarkably international. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Yesterday’s walk was conceived as a journey beneath Rafael Guastavino’s domes and vaulted ceilings, beginning at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, at Fifth Avenue and 55th Street, continuing through Grand Central Terminal, and finally descending into the ghostly loop beneath Lower Manhattan, where trains still pass through the abandoned City Hall station.

A minimal photo essay from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, tracing Rafael Guastavino's Valencian timbrel vaults from La Lonja to nearly 1,000 American buildings.