Adrian Fletcher on Tuscan Restaurants, Italian Photos and European History 500-1700

Bellatrovata ("good thinking") is used mostly for new travels by Adrian Fletcher ( aka "dom Paradox DOCG" ). After each trip / project, the pages and photos get expanded and added to Dom Paradox's main website Paradoxplace. Here are some previous home pages for Bellatrovata.

Bellatrovata 2006 Home Page	Listing of 2006 Bellatrovata pages
Bellatrovata 2005 Home Page	Listing of 2005 Bellatrovata pages
Bellatrovata 2004 Home Page

Paradoxplace started out in 2000 as being about Italian (especially Tuscan) restaurants and food, stories and histories of the Middle Ages (500 - 1348) and Renaissance (1348 - 1600), books, and Italian towns, countryside and art in photographs. Its photographic coverage now includes Venice and Northern Italy, Puglia, Sicily, Central Italy and the Abruzzi, Umbria and Le Marche. It has also extended its coverage to Burgundy in France and England and has just (June 2006) finished a six week discovery tour of Spain and Portugal. It is even rumoured that some Australian stuff may appear as that is where Adrian Fletcher lives mostly!

The site also contains dozens of pages on the histories and stories of movers and shakers of the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Early Modern Europe in Tuscany (especially useful for visitors to Florence and Siena), Venice, Sicily and elsewhere in Italy, Europe and Asia. The main time period covered is from the end of the Western Roman Empire, through the Early and Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, to the emergence of the Nation States of Early Modern Europe - a period spanning roughly the years 500 to 1600.

All original material on this site © Adrian Fletcher 2000-07 - The contents may not be reproduced without permission

Bellatrovata and Paradoxplace and are the creations of Adrian Fletcher. Adrian was born of British (army) parents in Cairo during the Second World War, then lived and was schooled in Hythe and Sandwich in Kent, in the south east of England.

He started his working life with English Electric Ltd in the UK midlands, after obtaining degrees in Physics and Management from Imperial College, London (where he was also Student Union President). He came to Australia in 1972 via South Africa, where he had spent three years building up a computer bureau for Rand Mines. During the early seventies he directed the MBA business and public policy courses at the Graduate Business School at NSW University, and then moved to head up planning and finance for a large packaging manufacturer in Sydney.

He married in 1974 (the marriage was dissolved in 1994), and has three children now all in their twenties.

In 1980 he became the youngest general manager of Australia's largest private sector bank (the Bank of New South Wales), later being promoted to Westpac Banking Corporation's Chief Financial Officer and putting together systems and teams to operate in the newly deregulated Australian and International banking environment in areas as diverse as finance and accounting, capital management, strategy and its implementation, mergers and acquisitions, economics, government relations, management systems and organizational development. He spent the years 1987 - 90 based in the City of London as Head of Westpac’s Global Investment Banking Group, was a member of the bank's Executive Committee, and senior board member of several subsidiaries including leading Australian stockbroker Ord Minnett.

During the 1990s Adrian Fletcher was Chairman of several Australian public companies in the Petsec Energy Group, and also undertook a range of advisory and management consulting assignments. In parallel with this and the pursuit of wide ranging reading and music interests, he also set out to learn more about alternative approaches to understanding people in organizations and their needs. This was driven by the clear need to do something about the observably large number of unengaged (alienated) people in most large (private and public) organizations, and the number of unsustainable strategies being followed by these organizations.

In 1999 he spent time as a coach to the top management team of The Smith Family (a major Australian not for profit organization), with a particular interest in laying the foundations for a significant expansion in their Learning for Life program. This program gives monetary and advisory help to Australian children who do not have the resources to, for example, pay for textbooks, clothing, school outings or a number of other things that are not part of the "free" education system. Reliable statistics show that an unbelievable 700,000 plus Australian children (or around a quarter of the school age population) are exposed to various forms of social exclusion as a result of parental poverty.

Already widely travelled in Europe, North America and Asia, Adrian decided to spend the year 2000 on sabbatical in Central Tuscany in Italy (amongst other things working with Australian Greg Page's well known real estate company (Alfaimmobiliare di Gregory Page) in Castellina in Chianti). During this time he became known as Adriano, produced (after intensive research) a guide to Restaurants, Food and Festivals in Chianti, Siena, Florence and Umbria, got into photography, and started work on "The World of the Middle Ages, Italian Renaissance and Central Tuscany" easy to read histories / chronologies (especially useful to visitors to Florence, Siena, etc) which are now part of the Paradoxplace website.

He now spends several months each year in Europe (mainly Italy where Castellina-in- Chianti has become a second home), extending his experiences, knowledge and photographic library, and adding to the content of Paradoxplace.