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.

In 2002 a large 5.4 earthquake shook the small town of San Giuliano di Puglia, just a short distance from Bonefro. While most of the news was centered on San Giuliano and the 26 people killed there, several of who lived in Bonefro, Bonefro was greatly affected by the quake. Here is a picture of one of the two main churches in Bonefro that had to be reinforced by metal beams in order to prevent it from falling down. It looked this way for several years afterward.

The other church in Bonefro. It too was forced to close after the 2002 earthquake.

Afternoon chat. A common site when walking through the streets of Bonefro, or any other small town in Italy.

The convent. While it no longer serves a religious purpose, the convent is between 400 and 500 years old. It has also served as a jail and more recently a school. It now serves as a center for annual events, such as the Adriatic Chamber Music Festival, which I was a part of. The foundation of the convent itself date back over 2,000 years.

The convent hallway ceilings lit up at night. The ceilings in the convent are high and gothic in design.

Evening music in front of the convent. I can’t remember what these instruments were called, but they were unlike any I had ever seen before.

More evening music and singing in front of the convent.

In addition to the piazza, and sitting right next to the pizza itself are the 4 to 5 bars that are open for business year round, also a place for talking (and arguing), playing cards, watching TV and gambling.

I have always been amazed at some of the front doors all throughout Bonefro, many having on their front doors these to knock on. Very ornate in their design.

Food shopping.

Night festival in Termoli. 45 minutes away by car is the coastal city of Termoli. In August of every year the old town has a night festival that lasts for two weeks. Here is the main pizza in the center of old town Termoli, decorated with lights. Festivities last well into the night, with all main roads closed off for music and food.

I forget who the saint is in lights here, but very much a common sight in Termoli at that time of the year.

Late night discussion in front of the old church in Termoli’s old town piazza.

Festivities also include sidewalk shows. Here is a show in the old town piazza in Termoli.

Inside an abandoned lighthouse at the Tremiti Islands.

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.

Bonefro is both an ancient town and one filled with a largely older generation.  Since the end of World War II, many villages in these parts of Italy have dwindled in population, with many “dead” villages sprinkling the local landscape. Many of its young generation have moved onto larger cities or other parts of the world. For example, the Bonefrani population in Canada alone is much larger than the actual population of  Bonefro itself.

This is a picture from Termoli, one of the two largest cities in Molise. I have been spied upon many times from people sitting in their windows and observing those walking its narrow streets.

Not sure what to make of this picture, but it was taken in Termoli’s central piazza in the old town. These two kids had been playing around with me and my friends hollering in Italian. I caught this photo of them pointing toy guns at each other.

In Bonefro, the old buildings are somewhat crude yet somehow beautiful, with the rock tiled wall of this edifice.

Bonefro claims to have been founded over 2,000 years ago. While these steps are certainly no where near as old, they have certainly stood the test of time.

In 2002 a terrible earthquake struck Molise, with the epicenter located in Bonefro’s neighboring town of San Guiliano di Puglia. 25 children and 1 teacher died when the ceiling of their school collapsed on them, many of those children coming from Bonefro. In addition to the human tragedy of the earthquake, many of its buildings such as churches and other buildings were damaged beyond repair.

A typical street in Bonefro.

A popular past time in Bonefro, when not hanging out in the piazza, is to play cards in one of the town’s 4 pubs. Here three Bonefrani play cards in front of a mural of Bonefro from over 100 years ago. On the left side is the center of the piazza without the trees that decorate it today.

Children playing in front of the convent in Bonefro. Some of these kids will grow up and remain in Bonefro. Many others will move away when they are old enough.

On the way to the piazza!

UPDATE:

I have added a second photo essay on Bonefro & Termoli. Click here to view it.

The Photographic Dictionary

My favorite picture so far is vacuous.

Enjoy!

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.

International Year of Astronomy 2009 Trailer

Marienplatz is the heart of Munich. It serves as a meeting place for friends, for street performers to earn their keep, demonstrations, taking in a tan by the water fountains and for tourists and their fascinations with Glockenspiels. It’s come a long way from originally serving as a square for jousting tournaments back in the Middle Ages.

During World War II, most, if not all, of Germany’s cities were flattened by Allied bombing runs, especially at the war’s end. I have read that one of the few buildings that consistently survived in any city was the city’s “Rathause” or City Hall. Why? They served as navigation beacons for bomber pilots coming in to drop their payload. In this picture is Munich’s City Hall. No GPS in those days…

Munich’s ‘Frauenkirche‘ or ‘Cathedral of Our Blessed Lady’ just off of Marienplatz. You ever wonder why a church devoted to the virgin Mary has two bell towers?

Something that you’ll see every spring and summer in Bavaria (and Austria) is the rich display of flowers hanging from every balcony. And all year around is the pigeon nets that hang around every statue…

Munich is a city rich in architecture both ancient and modern. But some of it can be rather bleak in nature, some of it next to the most beautiful architecture the city has to offer.

The main attraction in Marienplatz is the Glockenspiel. Every few hours of the day, the clock reenacts portions of Munich’s history. It might be a good idea if they retune the bells every few decades or so.

Street performers in Marienplatz is a constant year round. Expect anything from conservatory students hacking through crowd favorites to Mongols, xylophonists, accordianists, folk musicians, the unusual and so much more.

Munich has one of the best subway systems in the world. During my five years living in Munich, I never had to own a car, as the subway, trains and trams took me everywhere I needed to go. If only the US had such transportation…

Munich is an old city, this year celebrating its 850th birthday. The original boundaries of the city contained a series of gates that allowed people in and out of the city. This gate, at Sendlinger Tor, was first build in the year 1318.

One cannot talk about Munich without mentioning the high amount of rainfall every year. It has been said that Munich has more rain in a year than that of London, which I find almost impossible to believe. But when it rains in Munich, it often pours and hard. London’s rain is a bit more spread out… But to live in a city with the 8th best quality of life in the world, one learns to live with it.

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…”

Additional Reading:

• Trabant car listed at number 27 on Time’s 50 Worst Cars of All Time.

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…

Related links:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/12/venice_under_water.html

http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~alexawan/islavista/