Cathy Rapicano ☮♿ 🎶✌🌿🌸

At first glance, this looks like nothing more than two lovers holding each other against a garden wall. But look at what her hands are doing... The painting is by John Everett Millais, and the scene is set in Paris, on a specific and terrible date: the 24th of August, 1572, the eve of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, when thousands of French Protestants, the Huguenots, were slaughtered in the streets by their Catholic countrymen. On that night, there was only one way for a man to be spared: if he tied a white cloth around his arm, a sign that he was a Catholic, the killers would pass him by. The man in this painting is a Huguenot. And the woman who loves him is desperately trying to save his life... she is winding a white band around his arm, gazing up at him, pleading with him to just wear it, to tell the small lie that will let him live and stay with her. But gently, without anger, he is stopping her. With one hand he loosens the cloth she is tying. He will not wear it. To wear it would be to deny his faith, to save his body by betraying his soul, and he cannot do it, not even for her, not even to live. Millais fills the scene signs of what is coming: she wears a ring, he wears none, a marriage that will never happen. And the two of them are pressed so close that you cannot tell, at a glance, whether this is an embrace or a struggle. It is both. It is a woman trying to hold a man in this world, and a man who has already made his peace with leaving it…

A British soldier waves at the camera in France as he makes his way home after spending more than a year as a prisoner of war in Germany

This is real footage from 83 years ago London in 1943

15 places where nature doesn’t look real 🧵 1. Grindelwald, Switzerland

The most famous keyhole in Rome Through the Aventine Keyhole, you’ll see a perfectly framed view of St. Peter’s Basilica, aligned through the beautiful gardens of the Priory of the Knights of Malta.

Here's what the world looked like a century ago - thread 🧵 1. Kids on the streets of England in 1901

Places on Earth that don't look real - thread 🧵 1. Namibia, where the desert meets the ocean

This was New York City on Good Friday in 1956