Porto Cheli • Greece • The love we share

Even if you can't shape your life the way you want, at least try as much as you can not to degrade it by too much contact with the world, by too much activity and talk. Do not degrade it by dragging it along, taking it around and exposing it so often to the daily silliness of social relations and parties, until it comes to seem a boring hanger-on. Constantine P. Cavafy

C.P. Cavafy is widely considered the most distinguished Greek poet of the twentieth century. He was born in 1863 in Alexandria, Egypt, where his Greek parents had settled in the mid-1850s. Cavafy’s father was an importer-exporter whose business responsibilities frequently led him to the port city of Liverpool, England. Cavafy’s father died in 1870, and the business he left in Alexandria proved insufficiently profitable for Cavafy’s mother and eight siblings. The family consequently