Word: conventionals
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...Florentine artist filippino Lippi was the product of a scandalous 15th century love affair: his father, Filippo, an artist and Carmelite friar, was chaplain of Santa Margarita convent in Prato when he ran off with a beautiful nun named Lucrezia Buti. Their illegitimate son, coached by a Florentine painter, became one of the most famous artists of his age, known for the imagination and versatility of his work and patronized by the rich and powerful. The twist in the tale came four centuries later: Filippino's fame had long since faded when England's Pre-Raphaelites "discovered" the genius...
...best stuff is produced by nuns of the convent of Santo Domingo el Antiguo. The Cistercian sisters use very little artificial coloring and not a whole lot of sugar, so their marzipan is usually a dull off-white, but delightfully light. Buy a $5 box and grab a coffee from one of the caf?s near Plaza Zocodover, then board the Tren Imperial (a toy train on wheels) for a scenic ride around the city. It's a feast for the stomach, the eyes and the soul...
Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters, which won the top prize at last year's Venice Film Festival, is set in Dublin in the '60s, when girls who had committed no crime more serious than naive sauciness, or who had been raped or impregnated, were sent to convent Borstals run by some very nasty nuns. "Here," one sister tells a girl, "you will be saved from eternal damnation." In fact, the place is a hell on Eire. The nuns, using their charges as unpaid laborers in a sweatshop laundry, flog the girls, make ribald fun of their naked bodies, allow...
...relatively new arrival. Twenty-two years ago, when a group of Granada's Muslim converts launched their project with the purchase of a vacant plot on the crest of the Albaicín hill, they ran into opposition. Even though the mosque site lay between a church and a convent of cloistered nuns, the local authorities suddenly designated the area as residential and scotched the plans. Legal battles ensued and tensions mounted, not just in Granada but elsewhere in Spain, where antipathy towards mainly Muslim immigrants from North Africa is never far from the surface, even though the country likes...
...Sister María, a nun visiting Granada from her home near Madrid. But her more cloistered sisters in the adjacent Convento de las Tomasas don't seem to be on the same wavelength. Ruiz points out that they have raised the height of the wall that divides the convent from the mosque and topped it in part with a metal grill. "We shall ignore it," says Ruiz, who sees the new mosque and its associated Islamic cultural center as a place where understanding between the two religions can be improved. There's much work still to do. Many...