Summer in the Mediterranean
    Winter is cold in the Mediterranean and in the Middle Ages filling the cellars and granaries meant working in haste through a succession of harvests: wheat in June, figs in August, grapes in September, olives in the fall...

Don Quixote and the Wedding Feast of Camacho
    As the French historian Fernand Braudel noted, feasts and banquets play a very small role in Mediterranean literature with the salient exception of the food of dreams--for example, as in Cervantes' Don Quixote or Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel...

Christmas in the Mediterranean
In a very real sense the celebration of Christ’s mass, the feast day celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ on December 25 in Western Christian churches, is the quintessential Mediterranean holiday, albeit second to Easter in importance...

The Muslim Gardens of Paradise
  Rivers of water unstalling, rivers of milk unchanging in flavor, and rivers of wine--a delight to the drinkers, rivers, too of honey purified, and therein for them is every fruit and forgiveness from their Lord...

Climate, Harvest, and Seasons in the Mediterranean
    The contrast between today's image of the Mediterranean and the actual Mediterranean that existed for centuries could not be drawn more starkly...