Barb and Dave's Holiday in Italy
The back of the Capitoline museum looks down onto the ruins of the forum, the temples to the gods, the senate, the house of the vestal virgins and more important runis per hundred yards than any other place I can think of.
posted by Barb and David @ 7:18 p.m.
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We left Barberino Val d'Elsa after a wonderful week and drove down to the big city. We parked the car at the airport there and caught a cab to our apartment. It was a white knuckle ride down the Appian way. We found ourselves at our Rome apartment and (as before) it was very nice and right in the heart of medeival Rome. I read that our street was created during an Urban renewal project in 1425. The picture at left was taken in a neighbourhoood a ten minute walk from our apartment. In one picture you can Rome in several periods. The amptheatre was built for Marcus Aurelius. Those are people standing near the base. It's been housing for a millenia now and those are condos along the top (Sophia loren owns one, I hear). At the right of the photo is a medieval church. That's not a hill between it and the tower, the rubble of a thousand years is why the two buildings are at different levels. Apparently that church was packed with Jewish attendees every Saturday because this was also the jewish ghetto. the pope ringed the ghetto with churches and made attendance mandatory. The yellow building in the background is the synagogue of Rome. In a small piazza between the collumns and the synagogue, the Nazis rounded up the jews in 1944 and gave them an ultimatum. They needed to gather 50 Kg. of gold within 24 hours or they would all be sent to concentration camps. They and many other citizens of Rome worked together and they amassed the gold. A few weeks later the Nazis began deporting them anyway.
posted by Barb and David @ 6:42 p.m.
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Not as big but much more art. No camera flash allowed so a small tripod was realy handy.
posted by Barb and David @ 2:33 p.m.
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Barb and Wayne behind a wedding party that was leaving the town hall and heading to their wedding dinner. Bride and Groom were at the head of the pack.
posted by Barb and David @ 2:21 p.m.
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The rival of Florence, Siena has much of the art and was not nearly so crowded as Florence.
posted by Barb and David @ 2:18 p.m.
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But an exact copy that stands in the same place the original occupied for hundreds of years. Compare it to the Venus beside it.
posted by Barb and David @ 2:12 p.m.
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...and you'll see the amazing art of the renaissance. You can see bigger images if you click on them. This one's worth it to see the mastery of 3D perspective and how some of the angels and saints appear to let their feet dangle over edges.
posted by Barb and David @ 2:03 p.m.
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Good thing that Barberino was such a cozy quiet place (except for the church bell every half hour), it was good to come home to. Florence was hot and swarming with tourists. Florence has amazing art, but if that's what you're going for, I recommend going in the Winter unless you want to sweat while jockeying into position to see what you're looking for.
posted by Barb and David @ 1:52 p.m.
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I took this from a bedroom window. It's the picture I'll put on my wall at work.
posted by Barb and David @ 1:28 p.m.
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If you walk across to the other side of town, this is the view from the other side of the ridge line. That's Tavarnelle de Pesa on the next ridge over. The bushes are olive trees and tightly lined crops are the grape vines.
posted by Barb and David @ 1:04 p.m.
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There's another tiny hill town in tthe center of the photo.
posted by Barb and David @ 12:53 p.m.
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This was a sunrise. spending our mornings and evenings relaxing out here was a highlight of our trip. I took a buch of pictures and I'll post a few of them.
posted by Barb and David @ 12:48 p.m.
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On the table is the Palm and foldable keyboard that I used to blog (when I could find wireless internet)
posted by Barb and David @ 12:41 p.m.
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Looking southward, this gate is called the "Sienese" gate because it points toward Siena
posted by Barb and David @ 12:33 p.m.
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As promised in the description, our apartment was part of the medeival wall of Barberino Val d'Elsa. Our apartment was on the top two floors and included the middle part that sticks out and the two windows to the right of that. Our narrow balcony is just visible above the power line.
posted by Barb and David @ 12:25 p.m.
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We caught the bus out of Venice to take us back to the airport. That's where our rental car was waiting. I was extremely nervous about driving in Italy, having heard many stories about maniac drivers there. However to their credit, they were fast drivers with great discipline, and I never saw any of the multiple lane changes or passes on the right that are common around Toronto. With a brief stop at the Ferari factory (Bill's goal of his vacation) which entailed getting completely lost twice, we made most of the trip on an ultra-modern expressway. Since I've spoken so much about this little village where we spent our middle week, I'll describe it and put up a bunch of photos. The old walled village of Barberino is what you can see in this photo. Since the town runs along a ridge line, it is narrow (Only three "streets" wide). The road in the foreground is the Via Cassia (the 2000 year old road from Rome to Florence. The photo doesn't show the hundred yards or so of the town to the south, but the taller tower to the right in the distance is about 30 feet tall and is at the North end of the town. In all, the village is an oval shape one quarter mile long and one hundred yards wide at the most.
One more thing, our apartment is in that building almost directly about the blue pedestrian sign.
posted by Barb and David @ 12:19 p.m.
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David hates sending mail, so consider this your postcard, dammit.
