About A Million Things to Love

A place for beautiful things, curious things, delicious things — and all the little reasons life is worth loving.

Stories to be told...

For most of my life, happiness was probably the easiest thing about me.

People would pass me smiling, sometimes stop to say hello, and often tell me how positive and solare I seemed. The Italians have the perfect word for it, of course. It means something close to sunny — a person who seems to carry a little light around with them.

I took that light with me through school, university and work. It helped me ignore unpleasant people, survive difficult moments and keep moving forward with the fairly stubborn belief that life was, fundamentally, good.

And then, somewhere along the way, I lost some of it.

Things became heavier. The world became greyer. The person who could once find something amusing, interesting or beautiful almost everywhere became much harder to find.

I never found a perfect name for that period. Melancholy is probably the word that feels closest.

But darkness has a rather inconvenient habit of making small lights easier to notice.

So I began collecting them.

A movie I had forgotten I loved. A song that made me dance again. A beautiful room. An extraordinary building. A ridiculous dress. A wonderful meal. A city I wanted to wander through. A book, a painting, a photograph, an idea, a person worth fangirling over.

Little things. Completely unnecessary things. Sometimes very silly things.

Things that nevertheless made the world feel interesting again.

Things to be loved...

That is how A Million Things to Love became what it is.

It is part lifestyle magazine, part visual notebook, part personal archive and part ongoing argument that there is almost always something worth being curious about.

Here you might find interiors next to Ancient Rome, travel beside fashion, architecture beside beauty, food beside books and an old Hollywood house immediately followed by something I saw yesterday and decided everyone else needed to see too.

There is no requirement that all those things belong together.

I love them. That is the connection.

Posts to be read...

A Million Things to Love is about rediscovering things I already loved and finding entirely new ones along the way.

I want this to be somewhere you can come when you need an idea, an escape, a beautiful image, a fascinating story or simply five minutes spent looking at something nicer than whatever the internet was shouting about before you arrived.

Expect travel, homes, architecture, style, beauty, food, books, history, art, culture, interesting people and probably Rome appearing far more frequently than any reasonable editorial plan would permit.

Some things will be useful. Some will be beautiful. Some will be completely frivolous.

I think life needs all three.

And who am I?

Hi, I’m Alina.

I write, research, design, collect ideas and have an apparently incurable habit of following one interesting thing until it leads me to twelve more.

A Million Things to Love is where all of those trails are allowed to meet.

Because one thing to love was never going to be enough.