very narrow venice alley

It's been over a year since our big trip abroad and I'm still stumbling across pictures that I enjoy. This was the narrowist alley I've ever seen. It was sprinkeled with little grafitti stickers everywhere, but you might not be able to see them at 500 pixels wide.

narrow canal

I like this photo because it looks so old. I'm not sure if that is a good reason to put it up, but I've been a little short on time lately. Looking through old photos is fun but time consuming.

Venice Canal and Courtyard

Venice was unbelievable. By unbelievable, I mean that it doesn't look real. It looks like a place made by someone at Disney that was hired to make something that looked very much like Venice.

This effect was heightened this particular day by the fact that the cloudy sky was almost completely white. I grew up with skies like this, and the effect it sometimes has is that the world looks fake - everything stops at the sky, and the sky really isn't a sky at all, but a flat white canvas that hasn't been finished yet. Venice seems like that in this picture, a painting someone started but left incomplete.

venice alley

Another picture from our trip to Italy. We went other places, but I haven't had the chance to go through the photos yet. I love this one, from our rainy first day in Venice.

fountain in faenza

In the never-ending quest for Italian ceramics, Sandy and I made our way down one evening from where we were staying in Ravenna to Faenza, a city of which I had never heard. We arrived just in time to dash about before the 7pm closing time and ended up buying two pretty amazing clocks. More amazing was how well Sandy spoke Italian to the shop owners. I shot a picture of this fountain on the way to find Madge (our car).

two more from como

Ok, I didn't have the patience to post one a day. Two more from our wild ride up Lake Como.
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photos from lake como

The next three days I'll post photos from a portion of our trip to Italy. These aren't the best shots, but they were taken on a really memorable trip driving up the west side of Lake Como. It was fun to share the stereotypical thin thread of road with ragingly fast Italian drivers. On at least two occasions we had to bend in the side mirrors of our mammoth Volvo to make it possible to pass between another vehicle and a sheer rock wall or building. Because of all the impatient cars breathing down our necks we didn't have the chance to stop and take a photo as often as we would have liked.
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aosta hotel

This is another shot from our long trip a few months ago. This was our first night in Italy, in a town called Aosta. This hotel was really gorgeous and run by some very nice people. I asked about the history of the building and they said it had been around for 10 years, but shortly after it was built the owners went bankrupt and it sat empty until just recently. Hard to believe. Not a really great quality photo, but it's nice to remember being there.
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venetian gondola

Venice is almost beauty overload. It almost looks like something created to look like Venice. It's kind of Disney perfect. Too many souvenir stands, though.
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italian countryside

Taken while driving through Lombardy in our diesel Volvo wagon with the lovely GPS system we fondly named Maggie.

ravenna church

In Ravenna, Italy. I got to see some of my favorite mosaics in this church, but none of the photos of Justian and Friends turned out.

susa square

Taken from our table on the balcony of a restaurant in Susa, Italy.

scooter

Taken while in Lake Como, IT.

pantheon

My first try at posting a photo since the big move. I hope it works. One of many photos I took while in Italy just about a year ago.