Tag: italy

Walking through Italy

Portae Romanorum

The WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge provides the theme of Variations on a Theme.

Last year’s vacation in Italy provided a theme that thrives in the narrow streets and alleys, as well as the doorways of antiquity and the middle ages: portals in many varieties!

Going back into Roman times in Ostia Antica, the old harbor of Rome, the portal was often the entrance into the yard.  On the Forum Romanum, portals were a key part of larger structures and the entryways between different sections.  In the hill towns of Tuscany, such as Montepulciano and Pienza, the narrow streets and alleys are filled with arches that create portals throughout.

Italy is filled with beautiful architecture, scenery, food, and, most of all, friendly people, which makes it a stunning vacation country!

Here are some of these portals and arches…

Enter the house in Ostia Antica
Portals of the Forum
Looking forward in Time
Streets of Montepulciano
Arches in the Alley
Looking through Montepulciano
Pienza Portal
Alleys of Pienza

Hope you enjoy this short trip through Italy and have a wonderful day!

Tuesday Photo Challenge – Old

Make the old new again!

Welcome to Week 93 of the Tuesday Photo Challenge.  There were wonderfully delicious entries that left me either hungry or smiling with satisfaction; I’m sure that a couple of us went looking for something tasty, as we were inspired by the posts.

This week, I’m thinking it is not necessarily time to go on a diet yet, but rather to take a look back in time. Let’s go out there this week and find the Old!  I’m definitely not restricting your choice of subject, as there are lots of interesting subjects that have stood the test of time: buildings, landscapes, trees, people, recipes, books, music, etc.

So remove the lenscap and unleash your creative self through the lens!  Have fun with this one and bring out your finest!

Here is something that has stood the test of time…

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Ageless Arches

From last year’s vacation in Italy, our day in Rome had beautiful weather. It was a little tricky to avoid the crowds, but from this angle you can still see the people in the arch on the left side to give an idea of the scale of the Colosseum.

The full rules of this challenge are in TPC Guidelines, but here’s the tl;dr:

  • Write a post with an image for this week’s topic
  • Please tag your post with fpj-photo-challenge (if you’re not sure about how tags work, please check out this WordPress article about tagging posts)
  • Create a pingback link to this post, so that I can create a post showing all of the submissions over the week (note: pingbacks may not appear immediately, as my site is set up to require approval for linking to it; helps against previous bad experiences with spamming)
  • Have fun creating something new (or sharing something old)!!

I’m looking forward to seeing what old catches your eye!

Reaching Ever Higher

The hill towns of Tuscany

The WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge provides the theme of Ascend.

There were a number of approaches to this theme that came to mind rather quickly, so you can expect more than one post for this theme…

As a started, I couldn’t help but think of the amount of ascending that my wife and I did while exploring the hill towns of Tuscany this year.  These picturesque towns had us climbing everywhere, as very few streets stayed at the same level very long, and none had us do more climbing than Massa Marittima, as we even ascended the tower at the top of the town for an amazing view.

Here’s part of the climbing that we did in Massa Marittima…

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Where do they lead?

Luckily, the great food kept us well-sustained for all this climbing!

Have a wonderful day!

Another peek of interest

Views everywhere!

The WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge has the theme of Peek.  A bit of an interesting theme, as it allows us to take it into many directions, which today is a look back to bella Italia!

Our trip to Italy was a wonderful vacation, away from the fast pace of our daily lives to a leisurely enjoyed set of wanderings and discoveries!  There were lots of locations where we got a peek into history, a look down the alley or street, and, in general, the pleasure of seeing life in a different light.

Here’s a selection of places…

Looking toward the Capitol
Into the tower…
Where do they lead?
Alleys everywhere!
Connecting with neighbors
Narrow street
Alleys abound in Pienza
Small alleys
Narrow streets
Vespa Street

Hope you enjoyed this look back to our vacation and have a wonderful day!

A peek across the Forum

Politics and intrigue

The WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge has the theme of Peek.  A bit of an interesting theme, as it allows us to take it into many directions.

As I mentioned yesterday, there are a couple of images that came to mind.  Today’s image is also from this year’s trip to Italy and is probably one of my favorites.  In this photo, we get to look across the ages at a location that has had a significant impact on Western civilization: the Roman Forum.  Many political deals were made here, the fate of countries and people were decided and much intrigue played out!

Take a walk back into history…

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Looking across the Forum

Looking from ancient to more modern in the background, one can walk and explore many events in one locale.

Hope you enjoyed this look back and have a wonderful day!

Time for a Peek!

A peek back in history

The WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge has the theme of Peek.  A bit of an interesting theme, as it allows us to take it into many directions.

The image that I decided on for this post is one from last weekend’s outing to Oxbow For my first image in a series for this week (yes, I thought of several already 🙂 ), we’re taking a peek down a quintessential street in the lovely town of Volterra in the province of Tuscany in Italy.  The added bonus in this image is the gentleman in the lower right of the image, who is also taking a peek down the street.

Take a breath of the atmosphere in Volterra…

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Streets of Volterra

As you see, these streets are just filled with old World charm, taking us back through the centuries and leaving us to imagine all that has occurred here.

Hope you enjoyed this look back and have a wonderful day!

Coming around…

Colossal arches make the rounds

The WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge has the theme of Rounded.  The first entry that I put together for this challenge was from Nature, so why not one that is man-made this time?

There is a lot of structures that are rounded, as the arch is one of the quintessential load-distribution mechanisms in architecture. The arch spans a large area by resolving downward forces into compressive stresses along its curved shape. The first arches appeared in the 2nd millennium BCE in Mesopotamia and were perfected by the Romans to build structures that still stand across the ages.

Take a look back into history with the set of arches on display here…

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Colosseum View

The Colosseum has withstood both time and earthquakes (and pollution) to still stand proud in the 21st century!

Have a wonderful day!

Enamored throughout antiquity

Love is in the aire

The WordPress Daily Post prompt has the lovely theme of Enamored; definitely this is something that most of us humans can relate.

The prompt immediately made me think of one of the images that I captured during our Italian vacation.  While visiting the stunning excavations in Ostia Antica, we came across this lovely statue…

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Cupid and Psyche

These star-crossed lovers from times long past are not from Verona, which provided them with a far less tragic fate!  The excavations are well worth a couple of days of exploration, as they provide a wonderful picture of life in the olden days.

Hope you enjoy!

Shiny moment in Chiusdino

Shining light

The WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge has the wonderful theme of ooh, Shiny!; of course, this did generate some ideas, but I landed somewhere unexpected….

As I still had my Lightroom catalog from our trip to la Bella Italia open, why not take a browse?  That led me to the little village of Chiusdino, nearby where we stayed in the hamlet of Colordesoli (37 inhabitants).  It was a wonderful stay that allowed us to find the Abbey of San Galgano…

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Abbey of San Galgano

A simple iPhone image, as we were just wandering around on our first day in Tuscany.  The location was simple magic and filled with spiritual energy, that was amplified by the stunning Sun!

Hope you enjoy!

A Walk across the Forum – pt. 3

Foro Romano e Palatino!

As I’m off to Israel for a week for business (sorry no time for photography), I thought I’d prepare a couple of blog posts in advance.  I’m flying Alitalia from Boston to Rome to Tel Aviv, so it’s only appropriate to have this post scheduled for the time that I spend about an hour and a half at the Leonardo da Vinci airport outside Roma.

This third installment of images is somewhat larger, but there are still more to come!

Flowers and the Basilica of Maxentius
Looking toward the Capitol
View toward Colosseum
Temple of Antonino and Faustina
View across Palatine toward Maxentius
Looking through and over the Basilica of Maxentius

The views in this set are across multiple directions of the Palatine Hill and capture some of the key elements that stand out.  There is so much to see that we could have spent the entire day exploring.