My first collection of photos on this blog of Bonefro, Italy received quite a bit of attention, especially from those who were looking for family roots in Bonefro. I was very lucky to spend 8 summers in Bonefro helping to run the Adriatic Chamber Music Festival, and I feel that I came to know the town and its people very well. It’s a time of my life that I will never forget, and I do plan to go back again.
Here is a second batch of photos that I took in 2004, a mix of photos of Bonefro, Termoli and the Tremiti Islands, islands that can actually be seen from Bonefro on the clearest of days, something I saw only once or twice in my 8 years there. I hope you enjoy the pictures.
As mentioned in the previous blog, the most important part of any small town in Italy is its piazza. This picture is one of those rare moments when not a soul sits in the center of town chatting, playing cards or simply walking around.
For 8 years, I spent a good portion of my summer vacations in a part of Italy not commonly visited by most tourists. Far from the vineyards of Tuscany or the city dwellings of Rome and Naples or the island region of Sicily is Molise, the agricultural heart of Italy. Molise is the forgotten part of Italy, and if any tourist guides devote any attention to the region, it is usually in the form of two pages at most. Even then, these guides will describe the area as forgettable with maybe the exception of its beautiful beaches and the Tremiti Islands. I think they are wrong.
Molise occupies an area formerly known as Samnium, home to the ancient Samnites, who settled in the region starging around 600 BC and lasting until 290 BC when the Roman Empire conquered Samnium in the Third Samnite war. Many people you meet in ancient villages throughout Molise will claim to be direct descendants of families that have lived in the region for over 1,500 years and longer.
Bonefro is a small town in the hills overlooking the Adriatic Sea that serves as an example of the hundreds of small towns that dot the landscape of Molise. This is a photo essay I took in the summer of 2004 of Bonefro.
At the heart of every village in Italy is the piazza, a place for people to hang out and talk with friends about anything from politics and the news of the day to the gossip of local neighbors. And most often the people that hang out in the piazza are men, usually retired or on break from their work in the fields. The women are usually not seen very often, as they are usually at home taking care of the family cooking.
On August 25, 1609, Galileo Galilei showed a gathering of Venetian lawmakers his latest invention, the telescope. It was the beginning of a revolution that over a period of 400 years would lead humankind to see deep into the heavens culminating with the Hubble Space Telescope and the twin Keck observatories. The discovery also helped herald the advent of deep space probes such as Cassini, Pioneer, Voyager , the slew of satellites currently orbiting Mars and even one named for Galileo himself. Many more such devices are in the planning stages that will dwarf the level of observation attained thus far in the history of astronomy. On the drawing board, and in some cases the building stages, are Hubble’s replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, the planet-hunting Kepler Mission and many more.
I have always been an astronomy enthusiast. While not delving into the mathematical side of astronomy, I have been fascinated by it ever since I was a little kid. I must admit that even today, I find it relaxing to spend a day up at Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton and taking in the telescope tour for the upteenth time, not to mention the nice little hiking trails in the area. With one-fifth of the world’s population unable to view much of the heavens at all, it’s nice to find places where the heavens can be very much visible. While it may not be the view one gets in the middle of nowhere, it’s certainly the best one can get close to home. Hopefully the International Year of Astronomy for 2009 will help make people more aware of what they are missing.
I lived in Munich, Germany for five years, and it’s a little strange coming back each and every time. Insignificant memories come back after looking at anything from a building corner, a stairway to the U-Bahn, faces of people on the street, sounds usw…
In the summer of 1990 I spent a couple of months backpacking around Europe with a good friend of mine from school. As most backpackers do, we visited the usual countries in Western and Central Europe, such as England, West Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria and even Sweden. But what was slightly unusual for that time was to have the ability to travel rather easily around Eastern Europe, unusual in the sense that it was possible to enter these countries without a visa or with ones that were more or less easy to acquire. This was just six months after the Berlin Wall opened up and other Communist countries of the former Warsaw Pact began falling like dominos and transforming into young democratic countries, some for the very first time and others again after many decades of Communist rule. With people now suddenly given the gift of traveling wherever they wanted to, they were streaming both west (to live and work) and east (out of curiosity), making it much easier for Americans to visit these countries, with or without a visa. To most young people today, the events of 1989 and 1990 are ancient history, and to them it’s no different than the events surrounding the Treaty of Westphalia or the Franco-Prussian War, just another batch of dates and events to learn for their high school history tests.
But by the time I visited Europe in the summer of 1990, these events were still very vivid in the minds of people around the world. One of the countries we visited in Eastern Europe at that time was Czechoslovakia, a country still recovering from its peaceful Velvet Revolution of a few months earlier led by Václav Havel and Alexander Dubček. Just a few weeks before, a ban from Communist times on playing music in the streets of Prague had been lifted by the new government led by Mr. Havel, making the center of Prague a very festive place to be at that time. Musicians of all sorts were performing throughout the city, whether it be on the Charles Bridge or in Wenceslas and Old Town Squares. Music ranging from gypsy, the Beatles, klezmer and more could be heard everywhere. Prague of 1990 was quite different than the tourist trap the city has become since then, without the hordes of hand crafts stores and portrait painters that can be found all over the city today. In addition to the music groups, other forms of art were on display such as painters, theater groups and more. One particular item stuck out for me, a Trabant car stuck atop what looked like four elephant legs (see picture above). It was difficult to imagine such a scene just a few months earlier under the Communist government, but times had quickly changed and people were enjoying a life that wasn’t available to them just a few months earlier. In fact, it felt as if the scenes of musical and artistic groups as well as the giant walking Trabant were a sort of collective middle finger to their former Communist overlords now that they were suddenly tossed into the ash heaps of history.
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Below is an East German Trabant TV commercial from the 1960s with the cinematography quality of a Monty Python sketch, not to mention having the feeling that John Cleese might pop up somewhere sitting at a table saying “And now for something completely different…”
I consider myself pretty lucky to have visited Venice, Italy on many, many occasions. During my years of living in Germany, and before then, I was a frequent visitor to the city, as a good friend of mine lives and works in Venice as an art restorer. To those who are looking for a place to visit to simply wile away the time in thought and on foot, Venice is the perfect place to do so. Sure, Venice is a tourist trap and in some ways seems like a glorified Disneyland, but there is a side to the city that can be seen if you have the right connections there to show it to you.
Venice is also a rather warm city, especially when compared to the rest of Europe on the other side of the Alps, although snow storms are known to come along every now and then. And for those who have visited Venice in the summer months of June to August, the city can be extremely hot! But Venice has an other important feature in the life of the city: floods.
Floods are a big part of Venice’s history and some huge floods have literally left their mark on the city’s walls. This past week has been no exception with the worst floods since 1872 hitting the city in lightening fashion, leaving no time for city officials to erect elevated walkways for residents and tourists to traverse the cities many narrow streets. Only once when I’ve been to Venice, in October of 1999, did I experience “Acqua Alta“, the term for Venice’s annual floods. As you are walking through Venice’s narrow streets and ally ways, the water begins to rush in, and city shops and dwellers respond immediately by putting up walls and barricades to protect their shops, hotels and apartments, and simply waiting out the floods until they recede.
Some people on occasions such as this become rather creative in their ways of dealing with the flood. The man in the video below decided to surf the water in St. Mark’s Square, the heart of Venice. Floods in this part of the city tend to be higher than areas closer to the train station, allowing him the water he needs to pull this off. Of course, as the waters continued to climb, making it the worst flood since 1872, he probably could have scuba dived in St. Mark’s.
Update:
Well, it turns out that I shouldn’t believe everything I read. While the floods in Venice were truly big and unusual, turns out that the 1966 floods are still the worst on record and not as the title of this article would suggest. This was confirmed by my good friend who lives in Venice and who nicely hinted that I shouldn’t believe everything I read…
As mentioned in the previous blog, the most important part of any small town in Italy is its piazza. This picture is one of those rare moments when not a soul sits in the center of town chatting, playing cards or simply walking around.
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