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May 10, 2019March 3, 2024

Of Emperors and Onions

Last Tuesday we went to a town near us called Bevagna. There had been some unusually cold weather for May, so as we bounced along atrocious Umbrian back roads in bright sunshine, through the vineyards, olive groves and spring wildflowers of the Martani Hills, we could see fresh snow on the Apennine peaks across the valley.

Apennines from Colli Martani — The Apennines from the Colli Martani. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Sonnar CF 150 lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).

Bevagna sits on the north-eastern side of the Colli Martani where the hills come down to what is now a fertile plain, but which, before being drained in the Middle Ages, was marshland. Across the valley are the towns of Spello and Assisi. Like many towns here Bevagna has exceedingly ancient pre-Roman beginnings, but in Roman times it was called Mevania and lay on the western branch of a principal military road, the Via Flaminia, the route of which still runs through the town.

After the end of the Roman period, being on the Via Flaminia ceased to mean that you were on the route by which the legions marched north, but rather that you were now on the route by which invading armies marched south (more on that one day). So Bevagna would have seen Goths and Lombards in the Dark Ages. In the early Middle Ages it was part of the Lombard Duchy of Spoleto, and in the later Middle Ages it was on the route of several campaigns by the Hohenstaufen Emperors in the struggles between Papacy and Empire (whose factions were the Guelphs and Ghibellines, respectively).

During some of these later incursions, the town was largely destroyed a couple of times, so although there are a few Roman remains, including some temple pillars which survived through being incorporated into a medieval building, these days the general air of Bevagna is of the (middle) Middle Ages. It sits within a medieval town wall, the River Clitunno (the Clitumnus of the ancients) flows past, and you enter through one of the town gates. It’s very pretty, and deservedly a member of I Borghi Più Belli d’Italia.

Bevagna San Silvestro Rear — Bevagna – the rear of the Church of San Silvestro. Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge)

If you enter the town from the south you cross a bridge over the Clitunno and there below is a weir which creates a reservoir for what Lou identified as a public laundry, surrounded on two sides by a stone wall with a flat top on which to pound the clothes.

Bevagana Public Laundry — Bevagna – The Public Laundry on the River Clitunno. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).

The main piazza is particularly attractive, surrounded by several medieval buildings including two 12th Century Romanesque churches – both built by a local master craftsman by the name of Binello – and a Gothic town hall from the 13^th Century. All were damaged in the 1997 earthquake which so badly damaged the Basilica of Saint Francis at Assisi, but have now been restored. On the front of the church of San Silvestro is a stone bearing an inscription saying (I think; medieval Latin is not my strong point) that the church was commissioned in AD 1195 by the Emperor Henry, and built by Binello.

Bevagna Inscription on Church of San Silvestro — Inscription on the front of the Church of San Silvestro, Bevagna. Nokia 6.1 phone camera (click to enlarge)

The Henry in question would have been the Emperor Henry VI Hohenstaufen, son of Frederick Barbarossa and father of Frederick II “Stupor Mundi, the wonder of the world”, who was the child of Henry’s marriage to Constance de Hauteville of Sicily. I mentioned Constance in the post on the Normans in Sicily.

San Silvestro isn’t always open, but if it is you should definitely have a look inside. It is one of the most beautiful little Romanesque churches I have seen (NB: in architecture, “Romanesque” has nothing to do with the Romans, and “Gothic” has nothing to do with the Goths.)

Opposite San Silvestro is the church of San Michele Arcangelo which has around the door some wonderful carvings of the eponymous archangel taking on the devil in single combat. The stone carvings are original; the wood carvings are relatively modern, being a mere 500 years old.

Bevagna San Michele Arcangelo — Church of San Michele Arcangelo at Bevagna. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Planar C 80mm lens, Fuji Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).

Not far from Assisi, Bevagna is the location where St Francis is supposed to have preached his famous sermon to the birds. There is a church dedicated to the saint elsewhere in the town – at some point (presumably either in the 17^th or the 18^th century) the interior was comprehensively renovated (or comprehensively ruined, depending on your taste) in the baroque style.

Apart from its being historic and beautiful, good reasons to visit Bevagna are its gastronomy and oenology. Although the wines of this part of Umbria are not particularly famous, apart from the Sagrantino of Montefalco, they are pleasant and good value. The reds are mostly based on the Sangiovese grape, while the whites, which are very good, are made from a grape called Grechetto which I have not seen a lot elsewhere in Italy. I have read that Grechetto was the grape used to make wine round here in antiquity, but I am not sure of the authenticity of the claim.

There are some good restaurants here. I have tried a couple, but the one we will come back to is “Antiche Sere” in Piazza Garibaldi. It is a small trattoria with a limited menu, but the food is very good and made from seasonal ingredients, which is as you would expect, since it is affiliated with the Slow Food Movement . Last time we visited, in October last year, I had an omelette with black truffle and Lou had pasta with pumpkin. This time I had fresh mozzarella with Cantabrian anchovies and Lou had strangozzi pasta with freshly-gathered wild asparagus, which is much thinner than the cultivated stuff. You see people gathering it at this time of year beside the roads.

Just down the road from Bevagna is a town called Cannara which is famous for its strongly flavoured onions. The picture below is of a poster for a shop in Cannara which sells them, and which was on display in the Antiche Sere. In translation, it reads “there are more tears in a Cannara onion than in a hundred love stories”.

Note: I updated this post in June 2022 to include the interior shot of the church of San Silvestro.

April 30, 2019May 25, 2025

The Paradox of Old and New Italy

For the history nerd, Italy and Italian history are a powerful drug. From where I am writing this, I can look out of the window and see a largely surviving wall that was built as a town fortification when Emperor Frederick II was in these parts, around 1250.

Somewhere beneath me, the foundations of this building sit on parts of a town wall built in the late Roman period (around 400 AD) when the Goths were invading. And I need only walk a hundred metres or so to see substantial remains of an Etruscan-Roman wall, dating from the 2^nd Century BC.

This is heady stuff, particularly if one comes from a “young” country like Australia (I put that in quotation marks to acknowledge a non-indigenous perspective). But even people from “old” countries like Britain and Germany, when visiting Italy, are aware that they are surrounded by places that witnessed the events, the people and the art that they read about at school. As Samuel Johnson said in the 18^th Century, “a man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see”.

To have rectified that deficiency is a powerful intoxicant and you do rather get drunk on it at first, like grand tourists of three hundred years ago. The first time we came to Italy, two decades ago and in somewhat less style than 18th Century grand tourists, the time taken to drive from Rome Ciampino airport to our accommodation in Umbria was extended by my desire for frequent stops to take photographs of landscapes that looked as if they belonged in the background of a painting by Leonardo. And indeed I read somewhere (my apologies for being unable to attribute the quote) that part of the appeal of central Italy to visitors is its familiarity, their having seen it before behind the madonnas and saints painted by Perugino, Pinturicchio, Botticelli, Raphael and the rest.

For the photographer, the fascination is not only a result of the potential subject matter, but the light itself. On that first visit, I recall driving between Pienza and Montepulciano in a late afternoon in August, and reflecting not just that I was looking at some of the most beautiful places in the world, but that God had obligingly slipped an 81C warm-up filter over the sun.

Here are some pictures taken on that first visit when I was giddy with the beauty of it all. All are very conventional, and all were taken on a Canon EOS 50E camera with either a Canon 28-80 zoom lens or a Sigma 70-300 zoom lens, and Fuji Velvia 50 35mm film.

Sant'Antimo — Sant’Antimo (click to enlarge)

And yet – returning to the present – if I look through my window, in the distance down in the valley beyond the 13^th Century wall I can see modern supermarkets and factories, and trucks speeding along a motorway. If I turn on the TV in the evening I can see adverts for mobile phone providers interrupting the cheesy quiz shows. Last year I was looking at a landscape that the Etruscans would have walked upon, when a high-speed train shot through the middle of it.

When I first started coming to Italy, this juxtaposition of old and new was unwelcome. I winced at graffiti on medieval walls, advertising billboards in otherwise historic scenery, and light industry in front of Renaissance towns.

In my photography, I often still strive to capture the old Italy to the exclusion of the new, for aesthetic reasons. One of my favourite pictures, of Urbino, was greatly improved by a morning mist that hid the bus station which would otherwise have been in the foreground (I won’t reproduce the picture in this post, because I plan to make it the subject of a future “history in focus” post). Edit: here it is. And the modern supermarkets, factories and motorway that I can see from my window are likewise often hidden in the early morning by a low mist that turns all the medieval villages on the high ground to islands in a timeless sea.

But the paradox is really only in the mind of the beholder. In fact, in seeing the paradox, one is committing the same offence that Luigi Barzini (see below) attributes to the Grand Tourists of the 18^th Century, who saw the Italians as not entirely worthy custodians of Italian history:

“The concentration on art, nature and the remnants of Roman antiquity was perhaps one of the reasons why the rest of the Italian scene seemed to interest travellers so little” (writes Barzini). “They watched the contemporary life of the people with the absent-minded detachment with which Egyptologists consider the mores of Fellahin in Egyptian villages. The people crowding the streets in their colourful costumes were seldom described and then only as if they were not really alive, but quaint wooden puppets in a vast Presepio (note 1)”.

Later Barzini quotes a particularly offensive passage from Ruskin that I am too ashamed to repeat here.

Modern Italians are justly and deeply proud of their heritage, and conscious of their responsibility to it, yet they do not wish to be considered as just museum-keepers. Theirs is also a modern country, although they would repudiate the Italian artistic movement called “Futurism” at the start of the 20th Century which went so far as to call for the destruction of museums, libraries and ancient monuments. While its violence was fortunately more a matter of cafe rhetoric than action, the movement’s fascination with war as the agent of cleansing destruction, and its association with the proto-fascist poet Gabriele d‘Annunzio, has led it to be associated with fascism. But in the 1920s and 30s the communists were just as enthusiastic in their denial of historical Western culture, as indeed are today’s political extremists.

The solution to the paradox is either to ignore it and only see the old Italy, or to embrace it, and see and love them both – the country that produced both Botticelli and Berlusconi, both a Madonna of Filippo Lippi and the 1980s-style dancing girls gyrating on nightly TV. Loving the new takes more effort, and isn’t for everyone. So I don’t despise the tourists I see wandering around gaping in delight at the beauty of the old Italy; to do so would be doubly hypocritical, not just because I was once as they are now, but because when I see perfect light falling on a perfect medieval scene, or wander by chance into a roadside church and see a Perugino fresco, I still feel a bit of that intoxication that I first did. And I hope that people keep visiting Italy for generations to come, and feel it too.

A while ago I posted on the pleasure of old travel books on Italy – which, by and large, do fit within the tradition of venerating the past while treating the inhabitants of the present as character actors in walk-on parts. So what modern books are there which might better manage the task of capturing the old and the new? There is certainly no shortage of contemporary books on Italy in English. But many of them fall into two categories, described with only slight overstatement by Beppe Severgnini (note 2) as follows:

“Almost all modern accounts of the country fall into one of two categories: chronicles of a love affair, or diaries of a disappointment. The former have an inferiority complex towards Italian home life and usually feature one chapter on the importance of the family and another on the excellence of Italian cooking. The diaries take a supercilious attitude towards Italian public life. Inevitably, there is censure of Italian corruption and a section on the Mafia.

“By and large, the chronicles of love affairs are penned by American women, who display love without interest in their descriptions of a seasonal Eden, where the weather is good and the locals are charming. The diaries of disappointment tend to be produced by British men, who show interest without love. They describe a disturbing country populated by unreliable individuals and governed by a public administration from hell.”

I will recommend two books which fall into neither category, both, as it happens, titled The Italians. The first is by Luigi Barzini. Barzini (1908-1984) spent part of his youth as a journalist in America, during which time he developed an easy and approachable writing style in English (regrettably, the ornate quality of written Italian, if too faithfully captured in translation, can come across to English readers as turgid and ponderous). Published in 1964, The Italians is necessarily a bit dated, but feels a lot more modern than H.V. Morton’s A Traveller in Italy, published in the same year.

Italian History - The Italians by Luigi Barzini — A scan of my own copy – it is is very battered by having been carried back and forth between Australia and Italy in my carry-on bag.

The second book is by John Hooper, published in 2015. Hooper is, or was, the Italy correspondent of The Guardian and The Economist, and his writing is as good as you would expect from the latter. There is an article by him regarding the book on the Guardian website.

The Italians by John Hooper — A much better copy, bought here in Italy and never having travelled

Barzini was in Italy during the Second World War and was interned by the fascists. As a journalist in Italy for 15 years, Hooper saw plenty of the grittier side of Italian life. So neither of them is inclined to sugar-coat their descriptions. But to me both accounts manage, to use Severgnini’s terminology, to combine both interest and love.

Note (1) Literally a “manger”, a presepio is a nativity scene. By convention the tradition of constructing model nativities was started by St Francis. They often include quaint scenes of daily Italian life in addition to the official participants. See here for an article about them.

Note (2) In Severgnini’s book “La Bella Figura”. Confusingly, it is also published as “An Italian in Italy”. Annoyingly, I have acquired copies under both titles, believing, on the second occasion, that it was a different book.

April 25, 2019July 28, 2024

Norman Sicily

There are all sorts of reasons – geo-political, cultural, artistic – why the brief period of Norman rule in Sicily should be better known than it is. There are not many histories of the subject in English, and by far the best is that by John Julius Norwich, originally published in two volumes (The Normans in the South 1016-1130 and The Kingdom in the Sun 1130-1194) and later as a single volume titled simply The Normans in Sicily. This is one of my favourite books and I would recommend it to anyone just for the quality of its writing, but it is an absolute necessity for anyone who wants to understand Italy in the 11^th and 12^th centuries.

Cover of “The Normans in Sicily” by John Julius Norwich. Penguin edition, 2004.

Lord Norwich’s writing is as elegant and engaging as always, but it is also an extraordinary story. How did one of the younger sons of a minor and impecunious family in Normandy, the de Hautevilles, found a dynasty that – almost a thousand years ago – synthesised French, Italian, Greek and Arab cultures into a sophisticated and tolerant regime? A dynasty that dictated terms to popes, built some of the most beautiful buildings anywhere, and which – through the female line – produced the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen, a polymath known as Stupor Mundi, the wonder of the world.

Well, Norwich takes two rather substantial volumes to tell the story, so I’m not going to do it in a blog post. But here’s a very quick sketch.

In the former Lombard duchy of Apulia (the modern Italian region of Puglia), temporarily re-absorbed into the Byzantine Empire, the Lombards were trying to take back control and sought the assistance of some Norman knights returning from the Holy Land. Word got around back in Normandy and one of the adventurers who appeared was Robert Guiscard (“the crafty”) de Hauteville who soon started carving out his own dukedom in the South of Italy. One of the Norman knights who joined Guiscard was his younger brother Roger.

Sicily was then under Arab rule and in due course Roger mounted an expedition to take control of the island. After several years of campaigning he succeeded. Roger only ever held the title of count but his son, Roger II, was recognised as King of Sicily by the Pope.

Rather than exterminate, exile or marginalise the Arabs and Greeks on the island, Roger I and Roger II allowed free exercise of religion and employed members of both communities, along with northern Europeans, in their governments.

Roger was followed by William the Bad (not really that bad) and William the Good (not really that good, but his reign was marked by peace). During the reigns of both Williams the most powerful courtier was a cleric whose name has come down in Sicilian history as “Gualtiero Offamiglia”, but that is an Italianisation of his real name, Walter of the Mill – he was an Englishman. You never know when knowing that fact will come in handy.

William II died without direct heirs, and the throne passed to his aunt, Constance, who had married Henry, the son of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (see post on Val d’Orcia). Constance’s son became Frederick II, on whom I will write a separate post one day. I’m still looking for a really good biography of Frederick II in English.

The Normans ruled the whole island in the end, but their major architectural legacy is in the northwest – places like Palermo, Monreale and Cefalù. I had assumed that this was because their power was centred on Palermo, but I suppose it could be possible that over the centuries earthquakes in the southeast have destroyed any Norman buildings that were there.

But what a legacy it is. The combination of huge Norman buildings with Byzantine and Arabic decoration is extraordinary and the visual demonstration of this syncretic culture is more eloquent than many thousands of words.

Cappella Palatina, Palermo. Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Planar 80mm lens, Fuji Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge)

And the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Yes, Byzantine mosaicists were better than their western European contemporaries in the 12^th Century, but in the giant images of Christos Pantocrator in Monreale and Cefalù they were not creating images in the formal, mystical and remote eastern tradition. They were working to a very different brief – showing the western preoccupation with the humanity of Christ, and they succeeded in a way that other European artists would not even begin to approach until Giotto came along two hundred years later, and perhaps not even then.

We started with the Palazzi di Normanni in Palermo, with its Cappella Palatina or palace chapel, then later visited the cathedral in Monreale, in the hills overlooking Palermo.

Monreale Duomo, Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Planar 80mm lens, Fuji Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).

In the picture of Monreale below, you can see a portrait of King William the Good himself, presenting the church to the Virgin. Presumably this was done during his lifetime or shortly after. And what an exotic oriental monarch he looks! His great-grandfather was born in a small manor house in Normandy, but the figure here is far from the conventional image of a Norman thug in a chain-mail hauberk.

Later we visited Cefalù on the mid-north coast – built on the orders of Roger II to house his sarcophagus, but despite that his heir buried him in Palermo.

Cefalu' — Exterior of the cathedral in Cefalù , Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Planar 80mm lens, Fuji Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).

Cefalù interior, Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Sonnar 250mm lens, Fuji Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).

There are two places in Palermo of which I wish I had photos to show you. One is a church called the Martorana, which was closed for restoration when we were there. The other is an absolute jewel box in the Palazzi Normanni called “King Roger II’s room”, which we did visit, but since I seem to be one of the only people in Italy (tourist or local) that obeys “no photography” signs, you’ll just have to visit it yourself. But here’s a hint – the illustrations on the cover of Norwich’s history, shown above, come from there.

Update: In July 2024 we revisited Palermo and I was delighted to find that the “no photography” rule in King Roger’s room no longer applied. You can find a post with photographs of it, and updated photographs of other places mentioned above, here: A Return to Palermo.

March 30, 2019November 19, 2023

A Storm in the Val d’Orcia

Some of the most dramatic photographs can be made when there is a combination of sunlight on your subject and dark stormy clouds behind. Under those conditions the light can take on a particular intensity and clarity. I have encountered this in central Italy at several different times of year. In spring and early summer the effect on the young vegetation can produce some extremely vivid greens, while in late summer or autumn you will often get some very warm and rich browns.

These four photographs were all taken in early June from the belvedere outside the walls of the town of Pienza, overlooking the Val d’Orcia. On the other side of the valley, from San Quirico d’Orcia to Monte Amiata, a thunderstorm was building, and for a brief period the closer part of the valley remained in sunlight while the distant part got darker and darker. The film I used – Fuji Velvia 50 – is sometimes criticised for the intensity of its green colours, but in this case it only served to heighten the drama.

I recall that I only just made it back to the car before the storm hit (Hasselblads are not particularly waterproof) and we drove back to Umbria in heavy rain.

I posted another photograph of one of the iconic Val d’Orcia views as part of the History in Focus series of posts.

March 28, 2019April 8, 2024

The Wild West of Sicily

Sicily has a “Wild West”, or at least it seems like it.

The landscape – especially in the nature reserve of Lo Zingaro and the north-west corner of the island around the fishing port of San Vito Lo Capo – is dry and desert-like, with some spectacular scenery. There are places where it would not feel all that surprising to see Terence Hill and Bud Spencer¹ride over the hill to the accompaniment of an Ennio Morricone score.

The light is harsher, the colours are brighter and it has an edgier feel than does the softer, more pastel-coloured southeast.

And of course, there is the Mafia, the malevolent roots of which penetrate more deeply here, it is said, than elsewhere in Sicily, especially in towns like Trapani.

But – and here the Wild West comparisons are best set aside – it has layer upon glorious layer of history going back to the remotest antiquity, which causes the classier sort of travel writer (ahem) to use words like “palimpsest”. Here you will find remnants of Ancient Greek, Phoenician, Carthaginian, Roman and Arab, and that short-lived but wonderful hybrid of Arab, Byzantine and Norman cultures that emerged during the reign of the Hautevilles in the 12^th Century. Much less of this survives in the east and south-east of Sicily, due I suppose to earthquakes.

I described our arrival in Sicily and settling in to our accommodation near Castellammare del Golfo in “Il Miracolo di San Bagagio“.

San Vito Lo Capo

Next day, we set out from Castellammare and headed for San Vito Lo Capo. There is no direct road from Castellammare to San Vito – such a route was once mooted but would have gone through the nature reserve of Lo Zingaro and, despite being backed by companies with reputed Mafia connections, it was defeated by a local popular movement, which was a pretty big deal under the circumstances. So we headed across the peninsula to Trapani, whence we headed up the coast. There was still a howling hot wind coming in from Africa a short way to the west, and after a long hot summer the country was very stark and desert-like – a bit like Central Australia, only with steeper mountains and bright blue sea.

Looking NW from Erice — Looking Northwest from Erice towards Monte Cofano and San Vito lo Capo in the distance. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Fuji Velvia 50 film, Zeiss Sonnar 250mm lens (click to enlarge)

Why were we going there? We had established that this would be the weekend of a sagra or food festival. These are held all over Italy and generally celebrate the local speciality. In the case of San Vito lo Capo their local speciality is couscous – obviously it is a dish of North African origin, but here you are closer to Tunis than you are to Rome or even Naples, and the Sicilians have absorbed it into their own cooking traditions along with much else from the Arab world. And rather than a simple sagra, this had built itself up as a big multicultural festival and rather than simply “la sagra del couscous” it goes by the rather grandiose name of “Couscousfest”. There were two reasons why we were going. One was that we had had opportunities to go to sagre before but chickened out. The second was that our landlord had been very keen that we should and neither of us would have been game to admit that we hadn’t.

San Vito lo Capo was heaving with people, it was dreadfully hot and we had to park a kilometre or so away and walk. We finally got into town and worked out what we had to do – buy a ticket which entitled us, at one of three locations, to a bowl of couscous, a glass of local wine and a typical Sicilian sweet (while stocks lasted).

When we got to one of the venues, in a series of brightly-decorated tents set up on the beach, I decided that I liked the sound of one of the couscous on offer, and asked the person serving for some. She wasn’t sure who was serving that one, but was pretty sure it wasn’t hers, and directed me down the line. The same happened twice more until I got to the end of the line, where I was directed back to the first bowl. There was a different person serving there now, and he was certain that what he had was what I wanted, and served me some. It wasn’t. Still, it was a fish couscous which was quite representative of local cuisine, and Lou and I swopped. I ended up with Busiate alla Trapanese which is a local pasta in a local sauce which I had been intending to try, and it turned out to be delicious, so all was well. Trapanese sauce is olive oil, tomatoes, basil, garlic, pepper and parmesan.

As we left San Vito it was still desperately hot, with the tents drumming and flapping under the onslaught of the scirocco, but mercifully, that night the scirocco eased, and was replaced by weather which was still pleasantly warm, but which could surprise you with the occasional sudden thunderstorm.

Segesta

Not far from Castellammare is a place called Segesta, with a very fine Greek temple and amphitheatre. During the great period of Greek colonisation around 500 BC, Greek city-states were established along the east and south coasts of Sicily. The Carthaginians settled the west coast. Although Segesta isn’t on any of these coasts it marks the furthest extent of Greek culture in Sicily. The Greek cities showed no sense of ethnic solidarity, and fought some extraordinarily vicious wars among themselves.

We paid an initial visit to Segesta one afternoon when there were a few tourist buses in the car park, and it took a bit of artful composing to get pictures that did not include their passengers.

Segesta Amphitheatre — The amphitheatre at Segesta, with interesting meteorology in the distance. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Fuji Velvia 50 film, Zeiss Planar 80mm lens (click to enlarge)

We have noticed that while the Romans built their towns down in the valleys, around here the Greeks often built theirs on hilltops. Doubtless this was as a result of their perennial warfare, but it does make for some spectacular views. From the amphitheatre we could see the weather changing constantly around us – there was a warm moist wind from the west and on the lee side of a mountain a boiling mass of dark cloud was continuously forming.

Despite the crowds it was an opportunity to scout for further photographs and with the aid of a compass I established that there would be a good chance of the temple being illuminated by the rising sun, and that there was a dirt road at a suitable distance where I would be able to set up my large format camera.

A couple of days later, therefore, I got up very early and drove back to Segesta. The satnav suggested a shorter back way to get there – but I should have known not to trust it. The Italy maps don’t seem to distinguish between good metalled roads and tiny goat tracks and one must be ever on the alert for attempts to send you down the latter. Which it did, on this occasion, and before long I was making slow and very tentative progress along a “road” of a type that was almost certainly not covered in my car rental contract. Every now and then I would pass an early-rising local who would watch in amazement, presumably wondering when James May and Richard Hammond would appear.

Eventually I emerged at Segesta, found my pre-chosen spot, and set up the tripod and the camera while waiting for sunrise. A couple of farm dogs came bounding up barking furiously, but when they saw I had a large format camera they sat down and watched proceedings quietly and with interest. I often notice that a large format camera has this effect. It was a bit cloudy to the west, but the sun found a gap to shine through which illuminated the temple.

History of Sicily - Segesta Temple — The temple at Segesta. Horseman 45FA large format camera with 6x12cm rollfilm back, Fuji Velvia 50 film, Fujinon 120mm lens (click to enlarge)

In the history of Sicily, the Ancient Greek colonies of Southern Italy (“Magna Graecia”) had some genuine cultural glories – they were part of the broader Hellenic intellectual world, and being provinces did not necessarily make them “provincial”. Even quite recently art works of considerable sophistication have been found, fished up in nets from the sea bed.

That history, however, is also replete with tyrannical rulers, wars, acts of treachery and appalling cruelty. Behind the temple of Segesta is a deep ravine. When Segesta was sacked by the tyrant Agathocles of Syracuse, a reported 8,000 of the inhabitants of the town were killed by being thrown into the ravine. Segesta came under Carthaginian protection, but during the Punic Wars it treacherously murdered the Carthaginian garrison and changed allegiance to Rome. The price for Sicily of the Pax Romana was that it declined into an agricultural backwater.

I was going to make this a combined post on both the Ancient Greeks and the Normans in Sicily but there is far too much to say about the Normans, so will write on them separately in due course.

edit: I have now done so and you can find the post here.

Note¹: Terence Hill and Bud Spencer appeared in a number of so-called “Spaghetti Westerns” in the 1960s and 70s. Their real names are Mario Girotti and Carlo Pedersoli, respectively.

Recommended further reading on the History of Sicily: Blue Guide Sicily, edited by Michael Metcalfe, Sicily, Three Thousand Years of Human History by Sandra Benjamin, and Sicily, A Short History from the Ancient Greeks to Cosa Nostra, by John Julius Norwich.

March 7, 2019November 19, 2023

On the Pleasure of Old Travel Books

Note: in June 2019 this post was republished on the excellent website TheLocal.it as a guest post. The editor, Ms Jessica Phelan, made some well-judged changes to the original post, and I have updated it to reflect those changes.

All armchair travellers and lovers of Italy surely enjoy travel writing on Italy – such books extend the pleasure of the actual journey for weeks and months beforehand, and afterwards as well.

But for the lover of travel and history, there are two particular pleasures. One is reading books by people who travelled many years ago, and whose writings about their experience are therefore descriptions both of the places they visited and the era in which they lived.

The second pleasure is reading books by more recent writers who are knowledgeable about history themselves, and who tell you interesting things while sharing the experience of the travel. The golden age of this sort of writing was probably in the 1930s to the mid-1960s, so to an extent the two categories do tend to merge into one another. Elsewhere I have written on some more modern equivalents.

So I have quite a few on my shelves. Some like Dickens are classics and still easily found; others are out of print and the result of happy discoveries in second-hand bookshops. Here is a selection.

A Traveller in Italy, by H.V. Morton, Methuen, London 1964

“One of my first impressions was that the Milanese walk twice as fast as the Romans, and, while walking, can tell a story or pass on a piece of scandal without stopping and blocking the pavement. The sound of the voices was different. The Milanese speak a more measured, less impetuous Italian; and I noticed everywhere a number of fair-haired women. Perhaps a Teutonic strain in the Milanese is responsible for those fair heads; if not, I recalled how noted Milan and Venice were during the Renaissance for hair washes, bleaches and dyes. In one of her letters, Isabella d’Este wrote to her Milanese brother-in-law, Ludovico Sforza, asking how he managed to change the colour of his hair so quickly.”

Travel writing on Italy - A Traveller in Italy by H.V.Morton — A Traveller in Italy, by H.V. Morton

Henry Vollam Morton (1892-1979) was a prolific travel writer who specialised in books about Great Britain and the Holy Land. He did however write three books on Italy – this one, A Traveller in Rome (1957) and A Traveller in Southern Italy (1969).

A Traveller in Italy would have been better titled A Traveller in Northern Italy as it is mainly about Lombardy, Veneto and Emilia-Romagna, with an excursion down to Tuscany and Umbria. Morton is charming and urbane, and wears his learning lightly, telling the story of the career of St Ambrose in the late Roman period in as chatty and engaging a way as he describes meeting an English typewriter salesman in Milan who is astounded by the engineering designs of Leonardo da Vinci. He has a gift for the happy phrase – observing the vegetable market in Padua being set up at daybreak, he reflects that it is “obviously joined to the Middle Ages by a continuous string of onions”. Elsewhere he remarks on how appropriate it is that St Anthony is the patron saint both of travellers and of lost property. The waiter at the (then as always) eye-wateringly expensive Florian’s cafe in Venice serves your coffee “with the air of some grandee doing it for a wager”.

Music, Men, and Manners in France and Italy 1770, the journal of Charles Burney, Folio Society, London 1969

On Florence: “This city has been longer in possession of music, if the poets and historians may be credited, than any other in Europe… Historians relate that Lorenzo il Magnifico, in Carnival time, used to go out in the evening, followed by a numerous company of persons on horseback, masked, and richly dressed, amounting sometimes to upwards of three hundred; and the same number on foot, with wax tapers burning in their hands. In this manner they marched through the city, till three or four o’clock in the morning, singing songs, ballads, madrigals, catches, or songs of humour upon subjects then in vogue, with musical harmony, in four, eight, twelve, and even fifteen parts, accompanied with various instruments; and these, from being performed in Carnival time, were called Canti Carnascialeschi.”

Travel writing on Italy - Men, Music and Manners in France and Italy by Charles Burney — Music, Men, and Manners in France and Italy 1770

Charles Burney would be known to literary history even without this book. He was part of the intellectual circle of Samuel Johnson, and therefore features in James Boswell’s classic biography of Johnson. He was one of the first scholars in the field of what we would now call musicology, and travelled through France to Italy in order to collect material, especially copies of old musical manuscripts, for a ground-breaking General History of Music. And he was the father of Fanny Burney, who became a celebrated novelist and journal-writer herself.

Burney comes across as a most likeable fellow. He puts up good-naturedly with the discomforts of travel through France to Geneva, Turin, Milan, Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples, and many historic towns in between. He writes not just of music but of art, architecture and the many people – Italian aristocrats and scholars, and English visitors – he encounters.

Travels Through France and Italy by Tobias Smollett, 1766, Folio Society, London, 1979

“Our young gentlemen who go to Rome will do well to be upon their guard against a set of sharpers, (some of them of our own country,) who deal in pictures and antiques, and very often impose upon the uninformed stranger, by selling him trash, as the productions of the most celebrated artists. The English are more than any other foreigners exposed to this imposition. They are supposed to have more money to throw away; and therefore a greater number of snares are laid for them. This opinion of their superior wealth they take a pride in confirming, by launching out into all manner of unnecessary expence: but, what is still more dangerous, the moment they set foot in Italy, they are seized with the ambition of becoming connoisseurs in painting, musick, statuary, and architecture; and the adventurers of this country do not fail to flatter this weakness for their own advantage.”

Travel writing on Italy - Travels Through France and Italy by Tobias Smollett — Travels Through France and Italy

Smollett, in contrast to Burney, was a real curmudgeon, arguing with every innkeeper on the road and usually ending up damning their eyes for rascally rogues. But he had wide interests and an eye for detail, ranging from descriptions of the food and local produce of the regions through which he travelled, to their industries and their art.

Pictures from Italy by Charles Dickens, 1846. Penguin Classics, 1998, or free e-book here.

On Genoa: “It is a place that ‘grows upon you’ every day. There seems to be always something to find out in it. There are the most extraordinary alleys and by-ways to walk about in. You can lose your way (what a comfort that is, when you are idle!) twenty times a day, if you like; and turn up again, under the most unexpected and surprising difficulties. It abounds in the strangest contrasts; things that are picturesque, ugly, mean, magnificent, delightful, and offensive, break upon the view at every turn.”

In 1844 Dickens took time off from writing novels and made an extended trip to Italy, basing himself in Genoa but visiting other principal cities. A couple of generations younger than Burney and Smollett, and moreover someone who personified the social reform movement of Victorian England, his is a very different lens through which to see Italy, but his writing is as witty and diverting as you would expect, as he describes Italy on the eve of the uprisings of 1848 which ushered in the Risorgimento.

Travel writing on Italy - And So to Rome by Cecil Roberts — And So to Rome by Cecil Roberts, London, 1950

And So to Rome by Cecil Roberts, London, 1950

I had never heard of Cecil Roberts (1892-1976) before coming across this book in a second-hand bookshop. It turns out that he was a war correspondent in World War I, and during the Second World War he worked in the British Embassy in Washington. Wikipedia is not kind to him, describing him as a name-dropping old bore, whose many novels are almost entirely and deservedly forgotten.

While all that might well be true, this account of a visit to Rome shortly after the war is erudite and quite entertaining. The gossipy nature which seems to have made Roberts a bit trying in person shows itself in some diverting accounts of historical scandals, including that of the pretty young wife of the aged and exiled Bonnie Prince Charlie and her lover, the poet and dramatist Antonio Alfieri.

Perhaps Roberts will be rediscovered one day.

February 26, 2019March 18, 2025

History in Focus: The Val d’Orcia

Sometimes it all comes together – a successful photograph of a beautiful scene with a rich history. For those few fortunate conjunctions I have decided to create posts based on a single image, and call them “History in Focus”. I will start with the image of the Val d’Orcia that I use as the header for this site. If you are looking at this on a desktop computer or tablet, please be sure to click on the image to see an enlargement – it’s worth it.

There is a spot on the strada provinciale (SP) 146 between San Quirico d’Orcia and Pienza from which a thousand calendar and coffee-table book photographs have been taken. Setting up your camera there, you are putting your tripod feet into the holes worn by hundreds of landscape photographers before you, including some of the greats like Joe Cornish, Lee Frost and Charlie Waite. It is for many foreign visitors the perfect Tuscan landscape of rolling hills, topped by picturesque farmhouses at the ends of avenues of cypresses.

The place

Val d’Orcia runs south-east from below Siena. To the west are mountains, tallest of which is Monte Amiata. To the east is a lower range of hills which divides the Val d’Orcia from the Valdichiana.

The difference between the two valleys is marked: until relatively recently the Valdichiana was full of lakes and swamps, and is now extraordinarily fertile. The Val d’Orcia, on the other hand, is more gaunt; the bones show beneath the skin, as it were. The area was heavily forested in antiquity, but denuded of its trees by the Etruscans and Romans. The resulting erosion seriously degraded the land, and by the early 20^th Century this area, which we now think of as a land of milk and honey, was in fact in the grip of dreadful poverty. Its recovery, and the creation of the landscape we see today, is due to a program of agricultural reform and partial reforestation started in the 1930s and 40s by an Italian aristocrat called Antonio Origo and his wife, Iris.

Iris Origo – Anglo-Irish-American aristocrat, landscape gardener, writer of scholarly historical biographies, and war heroine, deserves a post of her own at some stage.

Edit: here is that post.

The history

Down the western side of the Val d’Orcia runs an ancient road. In places it lies under the route of the modern SP2, and in places it wanders off by itself, a quiet unpaved road among the wheat fields, cypresses and oaks. Modern travellers on the autostrada and high-speed rail line follow the Valdichiana to the east, but in medieval times that route would have been hard to travel due to swamps and lakes, not to mention dangerously malarial. So if you were on a pilgrimage to Rome, or leading an army there, you might well have come this way. The route was generally referred to as “the road out of France”, or the Via Francigena.

The Val d’Orcia has always been a border region. It lies at the southern margin of what was republican Siena in the Middle Ages, later incorporated into the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. The hilltop fortress of Radicofani, visible from pretty much anywhere in the valley, marked the northern edge of the Papal territories. You can see it in the photograph as a flat-topped hill on the horizon with a tower on it.

Here, in the year 1155, the army of Frederick Barbarossa paused in its southward march, while Frederick waited for emissaries from Pope Adrian IV.

These two men were among the most forceful personalities in medieval history. Frederick was determined to assert all the historic power – and more – of the Holy Roman Empire to which he was heir. Adrian (born Nicholas Breakspear, the only English pope) was elected to replace an unworldly and vacillating predecessor at a time when both the religious and temporal authority of the Church were facing multiple threats. Frederick’s army approached the papal domains from the north. The kingdom of Sicily, under its Norman rulers, pressed from the south. The aristocratic families that ruled Rome were asserting their historic independence, both from Pope and Emperor. And the greatest challenge of all was spiritual, in the form of a monk by the name of Arnold of Brescia who preached against the worldly wealth and power of the Church.

Adrian decided that his best approach was to make common cause, at least temporarily, with Frederick. He would agree to crown Frederick as Emperor, in return for Frederick’s help dealing with his various problems. After some careful preliminary negotiations with Papal legates here in the Val d’Orcia, Frederick and his army moved south until they were just across the border into Papal territory. There, after some protracted and prickly meetings between the principals, they moved south to Rome where the Roman senators were comprehensively outmanoeuvred, and Frederick was crowned Emperor by the Pope before the senators realised it was happening.

Later, after signing a treaty with Sicily, Adrian changed sides, and united the northern Italian cities against Frederick in what would become the Lombard League.

The biggest loser in all of this was Arnold of Brescia, who, deprived of Imperial protection, was condemned by the Church and hanged, his body burnt, and his ashes thrown in the Tiber. Allowing no bodily relics to survive was intended, in the Middle Ages, to ensure that a person did not become an object of popular veneration or even a saint. Arnold’s back-to-basics message was not all that different from that of St Francis of Assisi in the next century, but Francis lived in a more politically propitious time, and was more fortunate in his Pope. Therein lies another post, one day.

Recommended reading: The Popes, A History, by John Julius Norwich, London 2011, Chapter XI.

The photograph

We were staying in the Agriturismo Cretaiole, just outside Pienza, only a few minutes’ drive away along the SP146. It was April, cool enough for morning mists, and when the sunrise is late enough that the aspiring dawn photographer does not need to get up in the middle of the night. It is also early enough in the year that a camera set up to take this view would be shooting into the sun. That would make things tricky in terms of contrast and lens flare, but on the plus side, any mist might be dramatically backlit.

I set the alarm for about 5.30am and crept out. It was still pitch dark. What’s more, I realised, there was a thick fog. I decided to put my hope on the fog clearing a bit when the sun hit it, and continued to the spot I had chosen earlier. I was going to use the Horseman 45FA large format camera, with a 6x17cm Kang Tai panoramic rollfilm back. I chose a standard focal length, which meant my Nikkor 150mm. On the assumption that the sky would be a good deal lighter than the ground, I also fitted a 0.6 neutral density graduated filter. This reduces the difference in brightness between the sky and the land to something that colour film or digital can manage without losing detail at either end of the range. As with all filters, the test of whether you have done it right is that it should not be possible to tell from the finished image.

No other filter was used. I say this because some people have seen this image and assumed that the pink colour is due to a filter. No, it is all natural.

By the time I had got all that set up, the sky was beginning to lighten and the fog had lifted enough to see the tops of the hills sticking out. I made the final adjustments to the composition on the focusing screen, then removed it and replaced it with the panoramic film back, loaded with ISO 50 Fuji Velvia. Then I waited. The sun rose, and very quickly the mist started to thin. I removed the dark slide, cocked the shutter, and got ready to take the picture. Just at the last minute I realised that the filter had completely fogged up with condensation from the mist. After quickly removing it, wiping it dry and replacing it, I shielded the lens from the direct sunlight and took the shot.

Time to set up: about 15 minutes. Time waiting for the light to be right: about 40 minutes. Length of exposure: 1 second.

The resulting 6x17cm positive image was then scanned on an Imacon Flextight II film scanner. Post–processing in Photoshop was limited to making the scanned image as close to the original as possible. I have printed this image at a width of 86cm and it is completely sharp.

I took several more photographs after this one, which I have made the subject of a separate post here. And you can find more pictures of the Val d’Orcia, taken from Pienza, here.

February 22, 2019August 14, 2024

Crocodile Dundee Shoots Large Format

Since this is supposed to be a blog about photography as well as history and travel, I suppose I ought to talk a bit about cameras, in particular large format photography. It’s a bit geeky so feel free to skip it if you are just here for the travel and history posts.

Small format is where the image size on film or on a digital sensor is 35mm or smaller (the so-called 35mm format is actually around 36x24mm in size).

Medium format comes in standard sizes of 6×4.5cm, 6x6cm, 6x7cm, and 6x9cm.

Large format is anything larger. Standard sizes for sheet film are 4×5 inches (approximately 10x13cm) 5×7 inches and 8×10 inches. 6x12cm and 6x17cm (using roll film) are also considered large format.

The vast majority of digital sensors are small format – some are called “full frame” which equates to the same size as 35mm film, to distinguish them from the even smaller APS-C format. Note that while there is a relationship between the number of megapixels and the physical size of the sensor, they are not the same thing.

There are a small number of cameras which use medium format digital sensors, such as those made by Hasselblad or the Fujifilm GFX series. Anything which approached large format digital would be colossally expensive and limited to military or scientific (including astronomical) applications.

I got into large format photography about a dozen years ago. The Royal Australian Air Force School of Photography had gone digital and was selling off its analogue equipment. I bought a Horseman 45FA camera with a Nikon 150mm lens (in large format, 150mm is considered a “standard” lens, equivalent to 50mm in small format). It is what is often called a “view camera” or “field camera”. Although it looks very old, the 45FA was introduced in 1984, and stayed in production until at least the 1990s.

Large format photography - Horseman 45FA — Horseman 45FA camera with Fujinon 210mm lens and 6x12cm rollfilm back. It was about to take the picture of the Temple at Segesta shown in this post.

This picture of my Horseman shows the design principles for most large format cameras. The lens is attached to the front bit, which is attached to the back bit by light-proof bellows. You move the front bit forward and backwards to focus the image. The front and back move independently of each other. If you move them up and down or from side to side while keeping them parallel, that can alter perspective and is often used in architectural photography to correct the converging verticals or “leaning back” effect when you photograph a building from ground level. If you change the angle by tilting either the lens or the back plane away from the vertical or horizontal, it does funky things to the depth of focus, according to a rule of optics called Scheimpflug’s Principle after its discoverer, an artillery officer in the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire who was investigating the use of photography for reconnaissance from balloons. If you tilt the front standard forward, you can increase the depth of focus considerably. If you tilt it backward, you decrease it considerably, which has the effect of fooling your brain into seeing objects as much smaller than they really are. The latter effect can be simulated digitally, and is often referred to as “tilt and shift”, after the physical movements which originally created it.

I have several large format lenses in a range of focal lengths. Some are made by companies like Nikon and Fuji. Others, like Zeiss, Schneider-Kreuznach and Rodenstock, are more associated with the fields of medical and technical imaging.

To take a large format photograph on sheet film, you do the following:

Decide what lens to use, take the front and rear caps off, and clip it to the front standard. The aperture and shutter mechanisms are attached to the lens, not the camera.
Open the shutter. Focus by moving the front standard backwards or forwards while observing the image (upside down and back to front) on the ground-glass screen on the rear standard. Make any alterations to the geometry in accordance with the Scheimpflug principle. For accuracy you will probably want to use a magnifying loupe. If it is a bright day you might need to use a dark cloth over your head.
Set the aperture and exposure, manually, on the shutter. You will have established this either by using a hand-held light meter, or by calculating it in your head (which is not as hard as it sounds, when you know how).
Close the shutter. This is really important and forgetting it is one reason why novices ruin their shots.
Insert a film magazine between the rear standard and the ground glass screen. The magazine might hold one or several sheets of film, but you will have pre-loaded it earlier, either in a completely dark room, or using a changing bag.
Remove the dark slide which protects the film from the light. Forgetting to do so is reason number two for novices ruining their shots.
Make the exposure by cocking the spring-loaded shutter and pressing the shutter release cable.
Put the dark slide back (yes, reason number three…).

All the processes described above are totally mechanical. A large format camera contains no electronic components because there is nothing for them to do. Assuming that the light is cooperating, I would say that it typically takes about 15-20 minutes to set up and take one large format photograph. So it is not something you can do on the spur of the moment; I tend to select my spots in advance and then come back, usually early in the morning or late in the evening when the light is at its best. Originally I used to carry a compass so I could estimate where the sun would be at sunrise and sunset, but these days you can get some clever smartphone apps to do that part for you.

So what is the attraction of large format photography? The first reason is that size does matter. For a given density of silver grains in the film emulsion, or pixels on a digital sensor, the larger the size of the image, the more of them you will have. Moreover, the larger the image, the less magnification you are asking the lens to do, and the less you will be pushing the limits of the resolving power of focused light – limits which show themselves in things like chromatic aberration. All this means sharper images for a given enlargement size.

The second reason is that being forced to slow down and think about what you are doing is no bad thing when it comes to photography. It makes each image more of an individual artefact, and the taking of such an image into an act of craftsmanship.

There is a third, far less noble reason to enjoy large format photography. It’s fun turning up to a famous beauty spot and setting up your large-format camera next to some hotshot with the latest Canon or Nikon and a lens the size of a bazooka. “That’s not a camera, son. This is a camera…”

Update: 18 March 2022: Yesterday I took a big step and traded in all my large format gear for a Fujifilm GFX 50R mirrorless medium format digital camera and 32-64mm zoom lens. So this post is now of somewhat historical interest. But for my current life, travelling style (and age), large format gear is just too bulky and heavy.

February 22, 2019November 19, 2023

Il Miracolo di San Bagagio

Approaching northern Sicily by air is spectacular. No photographs or TV programs about travel in Sicily will prepare you for the landscape of big rugged mountains right beside very blue sea.

At Palermo airport there was the usual Italian muddle, where it took about three quarters of an hour for our bags to appear. There were a lot of teenage girls waiting for their bags and the warning buzzers kept sounding on alternate belts, whereupon the girls would all shriek and run to that belt. While they shrieked and ran I just stayed put by the original one and eventually the miracle of the baggage occurred. Having had a couple of bad but not catastrophic luggage experiences in Italian airports, we always regard it as slightly miraculous when the bags do arrive. We have taken to calling it Il Miracolo di San Bagagio.

After finding our way to the off-airport car hire depot, we drove west for about forty minutes along the coast to the town of Castellammare del Golfo, where we met our host, whom I shall call Candido (I don’t have his permission to use his real name, and I wouldn’t want to annoy him; being Sicilian he might have influential friends).

Candido was actually charming and urbane, and while we were getting shown around the house I asked him where the nearest supermarket was. He not only gave me detailed instructions on how to get there but rang the owner to see if it was open, because he had “two Australian tourists who needed supplies”. The owner – one Franco – apparently replied that he was closed and having his lunch but that he would reopen at 4pm. This did not surprise us as outside big cities (and even in them, to an extent) Italian businesses tend to close in the middle of the day so the owners and employees can go home for lunch.

So we did a bit of unpacking then when 4pm came we headed out. We weren’t too surprised to find that at about a quarter past four the supermarket wasn’t yet open, because we were pretty sure that the owner would be running on Sicilian time, so we went for a bit of a drive in the immediate area which has a famous scenic attraction in the form of a disused Tuna factory (yes, really) in a village called Scopello. The Mediterranean tuna stocks are almost all fished out now, by Spanish and even Japanese fishing fleets, but until the 1960s the migrating tuna would be caught off western Sicily by blokes in small boats. The tuna factories are now mostly ruins, or like this one have been converted into picturesque restaurants and B&Bs.

Scopello – Horseman 45FA large format camera with 4×5 inch sheet film back, Fuji Velvia 50 film, Fujinon-W 125mm lens (click to enlarge)

On return we found the supermarket open. It was a pretty small place with the sort of limited stock that you would find in an Australian holiday resort, except that it had quite a good bottle shop stocked with obscure (to me) local wines and a delicatessen filled with most interesting things. Apart from various essentials we also bought some olives and some magnificent pecorino stagionato (aged sheeps’ milk cheese). As we queued at the checkout the proprietor was quizzing the two German (or Dutch or Danish) girls in front of us about whether they had far to travel in the heat with their cold goods and whether they needed an insulated bag. They spoke no Italian and he spoke nothing else so there was no mutual comprehension going on, and I stepped in and translated into English for them.

I’m not sure I helped much but that formed a bit of a bond with the proprietor, and so I said in Italian “excuse me, are you Signor Franco?”. Yes, he said, cautiously. I explained that we were staying with Candido. Light dawned. “Candido, yes, he telephoned.” More light. “AAAH! AUSTRALIANI!” he bellowed. There was a brief shocked silence in the supermarket, as heads turned. It turned out that Franco has an uncle in Sydney. Or possibly four uncles, we were having a bit of trouble following him at that point. Anyway, on the strength of that indissoluble link between us he suddenly ducked off as we packed our groceries, and reappeared with a bottle of fortified white wine which he pressed on us as his welcoming gift. Sicily is that sort of place, we think. We tried the wine later and it was an excellent dessert wine, a bit like an Australian liqueur muscat but lighter.

We were closer to North Africa than to the Italian mainland, and that fact was clearly shown that night when the Scirocco started blowing. That is the hot wind from the Sahara, and it is very hot, and it is a very strong wind. It fairly whistled round the eaves all night. I don’t think it got much below 35 degrees all night.

The next day we visited Castellammare. The town itself is built around a pretty little port of considerable antiquity. The fort on the headland is originally Arab, with Norman accretions, but doubtless there would have been something there before the Arabs arrived.

Castellammare del Golfo – Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Fuji Velvia 50 film, Zeiss 80mm Planar lens (click to enlarge)

Castellammare del Golfo in the evening – Horseman 45FA large format camera with 6x12cm rollfilm back, Fuji Velvia 50 film, Fujinon-W 125mm lens (click to enlarge)

We ate a memorable meal – not very expensive, and for me at least, the second most enjoyable dish I have ever eaten in Italy (the best was an octopus stew in a coastal trattoria south of Otranto). “Spaghetti in Sicilian sauce” may not sound like much, especially when Sicilian sauce turns out to be just tomatoes, garlic, parsley, olive oil, roasted almonds, pepper and salt, but it was intensely flavoured and really delicious. Lou had a very typical Sicilian dish – Busiate (a kind of curly pasta) con Sarde e Finnocchi – pasta with sardines, wild fennel, pine nuts, currants and tomato. The currants are very much an Arab influence.

February 18, 2019April 3, 2024

A Room with a View – Buying a Property in Italy

A year ago, after agonising for years about buying a property in Italy, we took the plunge.

The idea had occurred to us several years ago, and in 2015 we actually planned a trip around a reconnaissance mission. But after that trip we shelved the idea, largely because we were intimidated by the ferocious reputation of the Italian bureaucracy.

But circumstances changed. After retirement I needed a project, and if I could make it my full-time job perhaps the bureaucracy might prove penetrable. Some quick research showed that property prices in the region we had looked at in 2015 were still low – or indeed still falling – and although the exchange rate between the Australian dollar and the Euro was not as favourable to us as it had been, we could still aspire to buy somewhere that could be lived in, for about the cost of a lock-up garage in inner Melbourne or Sydney.

We found a place in June 2018, and bought it a couple of months later. It is a small apartment in a town in central Italy, with a magnificent view. We spent several weeks in it in the latter part of last year, and propose to spend a few months each year there.

Thanks to the long-standing tradition of English people buying property in Italy, there are a good many resources available. This book – “Buying a Home in Italy” by David Hampshire is written for an English readership, but the terminology used is sufficiently similar to what Australians are used to that it is still very helpful.

There are also online forums aimed at expats where you can ask questions – this is one that I have used.

This is not going to turn into a blog on the theme of “English speaker moves to charming place in Italy, meets charming locals and eats nice food” (although all of those things do indeed apply in our case). I have no desire at present to enter what is already a somewhat crowded field. Nor do I wish to presume upon the good nature of our new friends and neighbours by compromising their privacy, even under pseudonyms. Lou is reading an e-book by an American lady in Italy which started out as a blog in which she thought she had anonymised herself and others, but she was pretty quickly busted.

It will however allow me to make observations on Italian life based on a slightly deeper acquaintanceship than are the necessarily superficial impressions of the traveller who is just passing through.

February 18, 2019November 19, 2023

Vicenza Virgins

I don’t know why it took us so long to get around to visiting Vicenza.

Actually, I do. It was ten years ago when we were first in those parts, and we were in the grip of a bad case of medieval snobbery, and weren’t prepared to look at anything built after about 1450. I blame John Ruskin.

Nowadays we are much more broad-minded and are prepared to embrace quite modern stuff, up to about 1600. And Vicenza is essentially a late-Renaissance city. In fact it is irrevocably associated with one great architect – Andrea Palladio – who gave his name to a whole style of architecture. Palladian architecture takes the idea of a classical Roman temple and applies it to churches, country houses, council chambers, bank offices, you name it. And since his architecture was much admired by British gentry doing the “Grand Tour” of Italy, he influenced many British architects such as Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones.

Palladio was a local boy who got his big start when he won a competition to design a new façade for the basilica in Vicenza. Over time he more or less cornered the market – in Venice he got commissions to design churches like the very famous San Giorgio Maggiore which features in a million gondola shots, and in Vicenza he did palazzi in town and villas (i.e. large country houses) in the surrounding countryside.

In those days Vicenza was in one of the wealthiest parts of Italy (indeed it still is) and wealthy Venetian families built villas round here to spend time in summer or during disease outbreaks. They got Palladio to design them, or if they couldn’t afford him, one of his cheaper imitators.

The Euganean Hills – Hasselblad 501C/M with CV50c digital back, 60mm Distagon CF (click to enlarge)

We were staying in the hills south of Vicenza. To the north, the alps rise up quite suddenly, steep and rugged. To the south is the flat Po Valley, but there are a couple of lumps which are outliers of the alps. One lump is the Euganean Hills which are reasonably well-known in English literary writing, partly because the Italian medieval poet Petrarch retired there. You can still visit his house, which we did; rather bizarrely it contains a mummified cat which is claimed to have been Petrarch’s own pet. The other reason the Euganean Hills are a bit famous is that the poets Byron and Shelley, during their time in Venice, repaired there in summer when the heat and stinks got too much. In those hills, Shelley wrote a magnificent elegiac poem about the state of Italy as seen through early 19^th-Century Romantic eyes, with hope for its regeneration. Byron, more practically, sent his illegitimate daughter to live there in the healthier climate.

Beneath is spread like a green sea
The waveless plain of Lombardy,
Bounded by the vaporous air,
Islanded by cities fair;

Percy Bysshe Shelley – “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills”

The other lump of leftover alps is the Berici Hills, and it was there that we were staying, in the grounds of an old manorial farm which still produces its own wine and oil. The air is clearer and cooler up above the plain (Byron and Shelley were right!) and it is a pretty, rolling landscape which produces a lot of fruit and some impressive wine. Apart from a sprinkling of Palladian villas, a distinctive feature of the landscape is that most of the villages possess very tall and slender campanili, usually in pastel colours. The overall effect is of tidy elegance and discreet wealth. There are a good many cherry orchards, and since we were there in season, there were lots of signs saying vendita ciliegie (cherries for sale). We stopped at a particularly picturesque one where a couple of friendly old ladies were sorting cherries into punnets beneath a campanile on the hill behind. Lou bought some cherries and declared them a memorable experience, for all the right reasons.

Getting into Vicenza by car was not hard – we found an underground car park on the edge of the old town, and continued on foot. We wandered down the main street (now somewhat unnecessarily renamed the Corso Andrea Palladio) which has some excellent cafes, and took a detour down to the main square to see the basilica that started it all, now renamed the Basilica Palladiana – anyone would think they were proud of the chap. This looks onto an extensive piazza surrounded by more excellent cafes, where locals meet and chat on Saturday mornings.

Basilica Palladiana, Vicenza – Hasselblad 501C/M with CV50c digital back, 60mm Distagon CF lens (click to enlarge)

There are quite a few Palladian and sub-Palladian places in the town, but also a good bit of older Venetian Gothic that Palladio didn’t get to modernise. Vicenza was part of the Venetian Empire for a long time so not only is some of the architecture very reminiscent of Venice, but there are winged lions of St Mark in various places, including on a column in the main square. Napoleon took most of the lions down as a symbol of liberation from servitude, however as soon as he had gone the citizens put many of them back, which shows how they felt about it.

We had a major objective in mind – the celebrated Teatro Olimpico (Olympic Theatre). Note that this has nothing to do with the Olympic Games which had to wait another four hundred years to be revived. No: its name, and its fame, derive from the fact that (a) it was the first attempt in the Renaissance to create a space for theatrical performance as a form of high art as in Ancient Greece, (b) it was the first covered theatre ever built, (c) it was designed by the boy himself, Palladio, although he died before it was completed, and (d) it has a celebrated false-perspective stage set designed by Vincenzo Scamozzi to represent a street in Thebes – doubtless in order to put on the plays of Sophocles. This, although only a few feet deep, looks to be much longer than that. If you were to walk to the back of the “street”, you would be walking up a slope and when you got to the end you would look like a giant. The Renaissance was fascinated by perspective, in pictures and in sculpture, because it was the first time (again, since antiquity) that it was possible to show that you could describe the real world through mathematics, thereby suggesting that there was an underlying natural order waiting to be discovered. It is not a coincidence that the first name for Physics, when it emerged as a distinct academic discipline, was “natural philosophy” – the description of nature by the application of intellectual theory.

Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza — The false-perspective stage in Teatro Olimpico – Hasselblad 501C/M with CV50c digital back, 60mm Distagon CF (2 images, stitched in Photoshop) (click to enlarge)

Just how advanced all this stuff was is brought home forcibly when you look at this highly sophisticated building and reflect that it is contemporary with, or even slightly predates, the half-timber and thatch affair that was Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London, with which we are all familiar from schoolbook illustrations, and the modern replica.

As we approached the main theatre we were just congratulating ourselves that we had beaten the crowds, when a side door opened and a tour group of elderly Italians speared in, led by a voluble tour guide. Since most of the group were in their late hundreds it was relatively easy for us to pick our way through them and climb up to a clear space where we could enjoy the view while the guide held forth below.

After a while another tour group arrived – this one a group of Italian adolescents led by an equally determined tour guide – one moreover who was inspired by the sacred calling of pedagogy and who obviously considered herself a cut above a mere tourist-wrangler. As the first tour guide continued her peroration and the adolescents checked their phones, the second guide stood by, looking at her watch and adopting increasingly theatrical poses of impatience. It was clear that things were going to get ugly and Lou and I started edging for the exit. Eventually guide #2 enlisted the aid of one of the museum officials who intervened loudly – guide #1 responded not by curtailing her spiel but by redoubling the speed and volume of delivery, which had a few of her charges checking their hearing aid settings. We made our escape.

Our next port of call was the nearby Palazzo Chiericati – a museum of art and sculpture run by the city council in an authentic 16^th-Century Palladian building. Our initial impressions of the collection were a bit qualified – there was some late 17^th-Century sub-Caravaggio chiaroscuro stuff on biblical themes and a few so-called veduta di fantasia paintings. This was a genre which specialised in pictures of imagined ruins, usually with a few people in the foreground striking poses. These pictures got churned out in their hundreds to sell to wealthy tourists, and like statue-busking, the first person to do it was pretty original, and the rest weren’t. After that there was – inexplicably – a collection of unremarkable books and amateur photographs left to the city by a 20^th-Century aesthete. As we left each room we tried to head for the exit, only to be intercepted by an enthusiastic official and ushered on to the next part of the tour. The guards took their responsibilities very seriously and were keeping in touch with walkie-talkies: “two tourists heading for the top floor: make sure they don’t escape without seeing the collection of 1960s road maps”. In the basement there was some anodyne modern sculpture.

Palazzo Chiericati, Vicenza – Hasselblad 501C/M with CV50c digital back, 50mm Distagon C lens (click to enlarge)

These impressions, however, did not do full justice to the place, as we were shortly to find. When we finally made it back to the foyer we were making a beeline for the exit but the chief attendant leapt out from ambush and with an air of triumph shepherded us into the last couple of rooms. And we were very glad she had, because it was by far the best bit: rooms with very elaborate ceiling frescoes of mythological scenes, all painted from a bottom-up perspective which is an apt description as it was often an excuse to show the rude bits. The obvious pride in the collection shown by the attendants proved quite justified, and is something we have seen many times in Italy.

A summer thunderstorm broke and, umbrellas up, we dodged from arcade to arcade to get to the next museum which is the official Palladio Museum and which might a bit too funky and edgy for some tastes. There are lots of lighting displays and wall projections, clearly intended for the short attention-spans of the social-media generation. Nonetheless it had a number of very excellent plywood scale models of Palladio’s villas, palaces and churches, some with cutaways, which explained quite a bit about his design principles and gave one the sense of having collected a larger set than we had seen in real life.

There are many excellent places to eat in Vicenza, but one place we returned to was “Osteria Al Ritrovo” which is in Piazzetta del Duomo. Lou had one of the house specialties: saor dishes of prawns, cuttlefish and sardines, followed by a fish called orata, cooked with olives, tomatoes and potatoes, which she pronounced to be excellent. I had asparagus and local cheese on toast with prosciutto, followed by pasta with finferli (chanterelle mushrooms). Earlier we had aperitivi in the “Gran’ Caffè” in the Corso Andrea Palladio, which is grand indeed, with elegant pale green décor and many equally elegant old ladies.

Vicenza Paneficio – Hasselblad 501C/M camera, CV-50c digital back, 60mm CF Distagon lens (click to enlarge)

Elegance is something of a theme in Vicenza – elegance and self-confidence. Not unlike the architecture of Palladio, come to think about it.

June 6, 2017February 22, 2024

History and Photography in Italy

Welcome to a site specialising in the things that interest me – travel, history and photography in Italy.

About twenty years ago, while posted to England for two years by my Australian employer, I started a website to share my photographs with family and friends. The website was first created in hand-rolled HTML on a text editor (on an Amiga computer!) and although I later used various website authoring tools, it retained a fairly basic “Web 1.0” look.

On return to Australia, I migrated the website to my new ISP, but work got busier and busier and after a few years I stopped updating the website. Eventually I changed my ISP plan, the free web hosting stopped, and the website disappeared.

In more recent years, while travelling for work or pleasure, I would send e-mails, often with pictures attached, to my late parents, to whom were then added my wife’s parents, then our respective siblings, and so on.

I have now entered a phase of life where I will be working much less, and only on things that interest me. I have therefore decided to start again, combining the two aims of sharing my photography and my writing about travel and history, this time using more contemporary web technology to create a site about history and photography in Italy.

My photography has evolved over time as well. The earliest pictures I posted were taken on a Minolta X-300 35mm SLR film camera. That was replaced by a Canon EOS-50e, then by a Canon EOS-3. Then, at about the time when digital was really starting to take off, I had a long think about my photography, and decided to go in the other direction – back to basics. I bought a Hasselblad 500 C/M camera, with no electronics or built-in metering, and started learning to take photographs without artificial assistance.

But I was on a slippery slope, and as more and more professionals got out of film, like many amateurs I was tempted by the newly-affordable second-hand professional film gear that was coming on the market. A series of medium-format rangefinder cameras complemented the Hasselblad, and then I saw an advertisement for a Horseman 45FA large-format camera that took 4×5 inch sheet film images. For several years after that I was of the view that the only real cameras were ones with bellows on the front, and on which one composed upside-down and back-to-front on a ground glass screen. In bright light, one had the additional pleasure of doing it under a cloth, to the embarrassment of one’s wife.

Recently, and ironically just as film started its resurgence, I finally used my impending retirement as an excuse to indulge myself with a 50 MP digital back for my Hasselblad system.

My current (active) photographic gear consists of:

Hasselblad 501 C/M medium format camera, with A12 and A24 film backs, a CFV-50c digital back, and 40, 60, 80, 150 and 250mm lenses.
Horseman 45FA large format camera, with 4×5-inch sheet film back, and 6x12cm and 6x17cm roll film backs, and 90, 125, 150, 180 and 210mm lenses by Schneider-Kreuznach, Rodenstock, Fuji and Nikon..
Nikon Coolscan 9000 and Imacon Flextight II film scanners.

Update: 18 March 2022: Yesterday I took a big step and traded in all my large format gear for a Fujifilm GFX 50R mirrorless medium format digital camera and 32-64mm zoom lens.

Update: March 2023: I found myself using the Fujifilm GFX 50R far more than I did the Hasselblad, so I sold the Hasselblad gear after almost 20 years and bought a Fujifilm X-Pro3 rangefinder and several lenses.

You can find a post about my large format system here.

And the blog name? It isn’t a direct reference to the Homeric hero. The Patroclus was a ship of the Blue Funnel Line that made the run between Liverpool and Hong Kong in the early 1960s. I travelled on it as a small child.

Of Emperors and Onions

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The Paradox of Old and New Italy

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Norman Sicily

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A Storm in the Val d’Orcia

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