Renaissance

By Peter Abraham, Globe Staff DETROIT — Just walked to the ballpark from the hotel, about a mile right through the heart of downtown Detroit. Save your jokes. I saw a bunch of people headed to a techno music festival on the waterfront. There were city workers tending to flowers in carefully landscaped swatches of grass on every block. Sure, I saw some boarded-up buildings, but I also saw what looked like some new businesses. I passed what looked like some good bars and the marquee of the Fox Theater advertised a bunch of concerts coming this summer.

(Jeremy C. Fox for Boston.com) Children play on the playground at the Boston Renaissance Charter Public School in Hyde Park. By Boston.com A Hyde Park charter school is offering a summer day camp that includes academic subjects, sports, martial arts, technology, and arts and crafts activities for students from grades K-1 to 6. The Boston Renaissance Charter Public School's Summer Enrichment Day Camp will also include daily trips around Hyde Park and Boston, including sites such as the New England Aquarium, the Boston Children's Museum, and...

Leonardo da Vinci coined the painting term "sfumato" to refer to the blurring of usually sharp outlines to create a sense of depth. It was one of several techniques that contributed to the idealized realism - the spaciousness, the gorgeously described bodies - of Renaissance painting. Photographer Bill Armstrong borrows images from the Renaissance in his exhibit at Gallery Kayafas, and, blurring the edges, vaults them into the realm of contemporary art. Separating out individual figures, he re-creates them in paper cutouts, which he lays on brightly toned grounds.

Nearly 100 students participated in Rockland High School's Shakespeare Festival in late March. The event, which is held only once every four years due to the expense of costumes, is an evening of renaissance entertainment. Teachers filled the roles of a renaissance court, with Rockland's principal and an English teacher playing the king and queen, respectively. Three teachers played witches, and another English teacher played a jester. Students ranging from freshmen to seniors performed scenes from "A Midsummer's Night Dream," "Richard III," "Macbeth," "Romeo and Juliet," "Twelfth Night," and "Much Ado about...

URBINO, Italy - From Julius Caesar to Benito Mussolini, the Italian peninsula has had its share of tough guys. But few were as tough - or as simultaneously urbane - as Federico III da Montefeltro (1422-82), count and later duke of Urbino. As a mercenary general who never lost a war, he fought both for and against most of the Italian powers of his time: Florence, Milan, the papacy, and even the king of Aragón (who hired him to conquer Naples). Once the most feared man in Italy, he is remembered today for his extraordinary good taste.

Nestled between the intellectual pretensions of New Haven and the hedge-fund haughtiness of the Gold Coast, Bridgeport is a down-to-earth, ethnically rich community that also happens to be the biggest city in Connecticut. Its downtown is studded with architectural gems, many of them former Beaux-Arts or Art Nouveau bank buildings. While a lot of storefronts stand empty for now, "Coming Soon!" signs just about equal "For Lease" or "For Sale" placards, indicating a city on the verge of a renaissance.

Style battles substance in the French animated sci-fi/action film "Renaissance," and if the results are visually a knock out, it's a split decision overall. Stark eye candy of the first order, the film is saddled with the oldest story this side of "Blade Runner. " Still, comic-book fanboys and graphic designers with time to kill should feel no shame in checking this one out. "Renaissance" has been filmed using some combination of motion-capture, rotoscoping, and many...

Nearly 100 students participated in Rockland High School's Shakespeare Festival in late March. The event, which is held only once every four years due to the expense of costumes, is an evening of renaissance entertainment. Teachers filled the roles of a renaissance court, with Rockland's principal and an English teacher playing the king and queen, respectively. Three teachers played witches, and another English teacher played a jester. Students ranging from freshmen to seniors performed scenes from "A Midsummer's Night Dream," "Richard III," "Macbeth," "Romeo and Juliet," "Twelfth Night," and...

The House of Medici was a powerful family dynasty in Florence during the 14th, 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. They made their money in banking, and although they were not monarchs, they held great political power. Their greatest legacy was their support of art and architecture during the Renaissance. As patrons they supported many important artists, including Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Donatello, Brunelleschi and Botticelli. Florence Art Guide: The Medici Genealogical Tree www.mega.it/eng/egui/epo/medalb.htm With the Medici dynasty spanning hundreds of years, the easiest way to understand...

CAMBRIDGE -- On Friday night, Boston Secession, the 24-voice professional chorus, pulled off a neat trick: a concert dedicated to "Minimalism in Choral Music" that contained very little actual minimalism. Artistic director Jane Ring Frank talked up the history of the style at length, but the music was often something else. Take Gavin Bryars's work "And so ended Kant's traveling in this world," which received a beautifully precise American premiere. Bryars is a sometime minimalist, but this lovely 1997 setting describing the German philosopher's last days is more an austere...

Kevin Spak and Sam Liberty are obsessed with fun. Fun is what keeps them up at night and what gets them out of bed in the morning. They think about fun the way a chef thinks about flavor, the way a symphony conductor thinks about sound. For the past nine years, starting when they were in college, Spak and Liberty have been trying to understand how fun works — to discover new forms of it, to figure out ways to conjure it and trap it in a box. Spak and Liberty are board game designers.

By Paul E. Kandarian, Globe Correspondent The Renaissance Aruba Resort & Casino was named Aruba's Best hotel by Monarc.ca , the largest database of hotel reviews in Canada. The AAA 4-Diamond resort was picked as the "Best Resort in Aruba" for having the best views, quality-to-price ratio, and restaurants of any other resort on the island. The resort is located in the middle of the island's capital city, Oranjestad, and also has a 40-acre private island open exclusively to resort guests, located off shore and accessible by boats that leave the resort every 15 minutes.

If you want a feel-good sports story for the school year - at least the past few months - you would be hard-pressed to find a better one than Baylor. In football, the Bears won their last six games, finishing with a wild 67-56 victory over Washington in the Alamo Bowl. That capped a season in which quarterback Robert Griffin III won the first Heisman Trophy in school history. Add that to the undefeated and top-ranked women's basketball team (13-0) and the unbeaten and fourth-ranked men's basketball team (14-0)

Most rappers boast about their intellect, but few go out and actually get a master's degree in medieval and Renaissance literature so they can spit better rhymes. Then again, most rappers aren't Baba Brinkman. The 33-year-old Canadian, who when talking is just as likely to quote from Ice-T as make a reference to evolutionary psychology, has put his life at the service of hip-hop, a form of music he sees as limitless in its power. To prove it, he's rapped a version of Geoffrey Chaucer's 14th-century "The Canterbury Tales.

URBINO, Italy - From Julius Caesar to Benito Mussolini, the Italian peninsula has had its share of tough guys. But few were as tough - or as simultaneously urbane - as Federico III da Montefeltro (1422-82), count and later duke of Urbino. As a mercenary general who never lost a war, he fought both for and against most of the Italian powers of his time: Florence, Milan, the papacy, and even the king of Aragón (who hired him to conquer Naples). Once the most feared man in Italy, he is remembered today for his extraordinary good taste.

Ses Carny is a blockhead. A professional blockhead, that is, as well as a comedian, actor, fire-breather, and sideshow entertainer. In his 11 years taking great pains to entertain his audience, Carny claims to have been injured only three times. He is now once again hosting the Torture Show at King Richard's Faire in Carver. His is just one of the many acts - alongside jousters, jugglers, animal acts, and musicians - at the Renaissance festival which is celebrating its 30th season. This year, Carny will at times be sharing the stage with Jacques Ze Whippeur, he of the drawn-on mustache...

The Carver pine grove is hardly peaceful these days. On weekends through Oct. 24, it's filled with throngs of visitors to King Richard's Faire. The medieval gatehouse and shops surround a special place that swirls time. History teachers might lament the cheerful mingling of medieval, Renaissance, and mid-18th-century behavior and attire, but visitors care less about chronology than fun. The immense and popular fair is theater within theater. Visitors merge into the planned and impromptu performances and become actors themselves, haphazardly reenacting history as momentary spectacle.

PRINTS AND THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE At: the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 485 Broadway, Cambridge, tomorrow through Dec. 10. Call 617-495-9400 or go to www.harvardart museums.org. CAMBRIDGE - We think of woodcuts, engravings, and etchings - prints - in the same way that we think of paintings and sculptures: as art. So they are, of course. But in the 16th century the capacity of prints for reproducibility and the manipulability of paper made printmaking an extremely effective example of what we would now call communications technology.