Top Travel Days of 2025, Seeing the Caillebotte Show at the Getty Center


When I worked full-time as a travel writer, I tried my best to help promote cities after devastating circumstances reduced tourism in those destinations dramatically. I visited New York after 9/11, New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and Nairobi after a horrific mall bombing scared many travelers away. And there I was again in early April, this time in LA after wildfires destroyed the communities of the Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Unless you make a concerted effort to drive to those neighborhoods, you really didn’t see the impact the fires made on those regions of the city. But you certainly felt it when talking to people who live in LA. It seems like everyone knew someone sadly affected by this latest disaster.

The city was a glorious escape from the cold out East, with uninterrupted sunshine and temperatures reaching the upper 70s. We dropped our luggage off in our spacious suite at the Maybourne Beverly Hills, where every room has recently been renovated and its rooftop restaurant, Dante, is one of the hardest reservations to get in the city. We headed over to the Farmers Market, where I used to have meetings as a budding screenwriter, to dine on tasty Trejo’s Tacos, owned by actor Danny Trejo. Then we walked some ten minutes to the LACMA, which housed three excellent exhibitions on Mesoamerican Art, African bead art, and an Asian calligraphy show where the artists used abstraction to create exciting ink-based canvases.

This only whet our appetite for the Caillebotte retrospective the next morning at The Getty Center, the real impetus for making our way to LA. On its first stop before heading to the Art Institute of Chicago this past summer, the show was a mesmerizing look at the changing boulevards and bridges of Paris through the eyes of this gifted painter. Under clear blue skies, the Getty looked better than ever, especially walking around the gardens in bloom, before viewing the Getty’s permanent collection and its bounty of riches. The weather was so sublime that we next headed to Santa Monica Pier, rented bikes, and cruised along the ocean on the bike trail to Venice. Heavenly!

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In Florence, we met a goldsmith, Nerdi Orafi, who works in the same building Salvatore Ferragamo once designed women’s shoes. She creates exquisite handmade necklaces and earrings with her husband in a small studio, their wares so exceptional that Dolce & Gabbana hired the couple to create jewelry for a fashion shoot. Of course, I couldn’t leave without buying earrings for Lisa, designed with three rings, the same symbol Michelangelo used on the marble he worked with. Just around the corner I met a 4th-generation marble paper artist and book binder, Riccardo Luci, who designs the patented peacock feather look on paper Florence is known for. He showed us his process of creating patterns and lightly applying the paper to the paint and water combination to soak up the patterns. Fascinating!

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Guest Post and Photo by Amy Perry Basseches

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