Done with Bonaparte: Portoferraio, Mark Knopfler and Napoleon

2015-06-11 09.41.29

This little fountain sits behind Napoleon’s “summer residence” in Elba, where he was exiled in disgrace after a horrific defeat — one Mark Knopfler described in his beautiful Done With Bonaparte.  Napoleon never lived here; this house outside Portoferraio Italy was not his home but was to be a summer retreat.  He fled Elba before he ever spent a night there.

The small island  also includes several other beach towns with lovely harbors.  There are also some lovely – and some weird, — sights.  I’ve added a few below.

Right now it’s really late; I’ve shared some of Knopfler’s lyrics from his meditation on the suffering of Napoleon’s soldiers in the defeat that cost their leader his command and position, and cost them far more:

We’ve paid in hell since Moscow burned
As Cossacks tear us piece by piece
Our dead are strewn a hundred leagues
Though death would be a sweet release
And our grande army is dressed in rags
A frozen starving beggar band
Like rats we steal each other’s scraps
Fall to fighting hand to hand
 

Save my soul from evil, Lord
And heal this soldier’s heart
I’ll trust in thee to keep me, Lord
I’m done with Bonaparte

I pray for her who prays for me
A safe return to my belle France
We prayed these wars would end all wars
In war we know is no romance
And I pray our child will never see
A little Corporal again
Point toward a foreign shore
Captivate the hearts of men

Save my soul from evil, Lord
And heal this soldier’s heart
I’ll trust in thee to keep me, Lord
I’m done with Bonaparte

2015-06-11 10.25.40
Everybody needs a Mussolini apron – buy one just outside Napoleon’s summer house!
2015-06-11 10.09.26
Old Portoferraio in oil
2015-06-11 11.18.43
The harbor in Porto Azzuro

 

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Cynthia Samuels

Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families. For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million. She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings. She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com. Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World. A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.