Culture

A small Italian town that was on the brink of desertion is now attracting thousands of tourists after artists from around the world were commissioned to paint colorful murals on the sides of shops and homes.

Building sand castles isn’t just for kids: One U.K. dad has been getting in on the summer fun, too. Mark Lewis, 57, is passionate about molding sand into weird and wonderful landscapes, creatures, and buildings, and his creative sculptures — including Spongebob Squarepants and a giant pair of Crocs — have been earning him attention on social media. He’s also created figures of Star Wars’ Jabba the Hutt and R2-D2, as well as The Lord of the Rings’ Helm’s Deep and Isengard, and he believes “the bigger” the sand sculpture “the better.” “It’s all about bringing joy into the world and inciting a smile on someone’s face as they discover something unexpected [to] surprise [them] on the beach,” he said. “I also love making things tall. The higher the sculpture, the more impressive it is, and we love it when people look at it thinking, ‘How on earth did they do that!’”

An English book collector was riffling through a children’s novel he’d picked up from a thrift shop when he stumbled upon a happy surprise: notes his wife had written 50 years ago as a child. A collector of around 50 novels by the late Enid Blyton — a bestselling children’s author who penned an estimated 800 books over four decades — 67-year-old Steve Mills told the BBC he was “completely gobsmacked” by the discovery. He was going through some new additions when he found the writings from Karen, 60, in a copy of The Naughtiest Girl Again, which had been donated by her mother in the 1970s. It somehow ended up in a thrift store in Rayleigh — a town in the U.K. that’s more than 160 miles away from where Karen grew up in Staffordshire. Steve, a retired civil servant who has loved Blyton’s books since he was a child, told SWNS, “We’ve taken it as one of the universe’s strange coincidences.”