Terry and I arrived in Rome Wednesday for a two week stay after which we will go to Venice for two more. We have an apartment in Trastevere close to the Tiber River.
We walked across the bridge to Castle Sant’Angelo with the other Untours participants for our event on the first day. I felt all eyes were upon me…not real eyes but these eyes…
Even lovelocks!
And inside was a big colossus.
Almost to the top of the castle was an angel by Raffaello da Montelupo that had been at the very top until it got hit by lightening and was moved down. It had my favorite wings.
Then at the very top is the bronze Michael the Archangel by von Veuschaffelt done in 1753.
As we left we used our eyes to view the Vatican in a display.
As luck would have it, each time we take the bus we are watched by this neighborhood poet. (Belli)
Thursday we visited the Palace of the Legion of Honor to see their “Monet, The Early Years” show.
When we started from home it was a drizzle and it stayed that way all across the city.
When we got to the museum there was no parking except miles and miles down the road. Two positives from that were adding multiple steps to our Fitbits and we were so far down the road we got the best view of the Golden Gate Bridge, ever.
The museum was more crowded than I had ever seen, so my pictures were hard to get. I was dodging around stationary people listening to handsets. Later we found out that it was a free day for KQED members. Oh, and it was Spring Break so there were lots of kids around. A sampling of the art when he was young:
Fishing Boats, 1866
A Hut at Sainte-Adresse, 1867
The Seine at Bougival, 1869
The Porte d’Amont, Etretat, ca. 1868-69
Still life with Flowers and Fruit, 1869
Camille on the Beach, 1870.
The Pont Neufchâtel in Paris, 1871
Argenteuil, 1872
Still Life with Melon, 1872
The Port at Argenteuil, 1872
Regatta at Argenteuil, 1872
The last one really shows him developing into Impressionism. The reflections on the water are delicious.
After wending our way through the legion of crowds, we drove over to Land’s End for lunch at the Cliff House. Didn’t get a table by the window, but that was ok, we got popovers…
Very happy that we made it home without a traffic jam and before a very big storm.
Second day into the new year and the fun just keeps happening…Saturday morning trip through San Francisco, over the Golden Gate Bridge and to Sausalito for tile samples at Heath (planning a new backsplash). Got finished so quickly at the factory store that there was a lovely hour for wandering the bay side harbor. Brisk, but beautiful, on the second day of the year…the sky was particularly lovely this day, what with all its pelicans and all…
Treasure Island and the San Francisco skyline from across the Bay…
A spit just covered with pelicans and cormorants…
Then to lunch on the theme of Italy, once again…which reminds me I need to revisit my photos from our trip to Italy in September/October to continue the story…
Girona, which is about 60 miles from Barcelona, is a short train trip away. It has an annual flower show in May. Our trip coincided with the last couple of days of the festival, and we decided to exercise our train skills and spend the Saturday in this picturesque town when it would be festooned with petals. The entire town has floral displays…shop window displays, entryways, nooks and crannies, empty vestibules…you name it they stick a flower in it…even the river has its displays. We wandered and wandered, up church steps, across cobblestones and bridges, peeking into entrances. It was a lovely day, but windy. Catalan flags (the election was a week away) were furiously flapping. After getting off the train we followed green stenciled foot prints on the sidewalk up to the old part of town, passing community created floral displays (kids art!) and gazing at the town from a picturesque bridge (one of many). The town even has a bridge built by Gustave Eiffel…in the famous color of the Golden Gate.
We started our morning in the train station…note: there are ham stores everywhere in Spain…
This is Girona…
A slide show of bridges, churches, flower displays and the highlights of the lovely town: (don’t forget to click the square in the lower right hand corner to play it full screen)
I know I said I would not post any more food pictures, but in Girona it was the only time we went to something as unusual (for us) as a gastrobar. So really I am compelled to share. (I have to admit that I have been known to watch the Food Network…you know, foam…)
The restaurant is called Bubbles…
We started with Cava…
Their “award-winning” tapa that included a poached egg, froie gras foam and thyme bread…
This is coca bread, served and eaten at practically every meal in Catalona. Coca bread is spread with garlic, fresh tomato drizzled with olive oil, and lightly sprinkled with sea salt. So good!
Croquettas, steak, flat bread with tuna, and quacamole…yes, we kept walking…trying to assuage our guilt…luckily, we had more of the city to see and it was a long way back to the train station for the trip home to BCN.
Touring Barcelona includes roof walking. The genius Gaudí neglected nothing in his designs. Every detail was his to control, and he did. The roofs were well thought out to contribute to the function of the building as well as visually contributing to the joy and craftsmanship. I am not sure at the time who got to enjoy these roofs, but current tourists get an eyeful. Chain link fences and railings are newer additions so tourists don’t fall down the skylights. Sometimes I did shoot down toward the street but I really wasn’t in danger of joining the crowd below.
Just a note for future tourists of Barcelona: you can purchase tickets for the attractions on the internet even before you leave home. You can print the tickets out and then you do not have to wait in the long lines to get in the structures. (This does not mean there will not be lots of other tourists around…it is very difficult to get photos that do not include strangers.) If you do not want to plan that far ahead, and if you have wifi where you are staying, you can also purchase the tickets the night before and take the copy of the ticket with you on your iPhone or device. At the door they read the bar code of the ticket and you jump the long line. Casa Batlló, Casa Milà, and Palau Güell have audio guides (Casa Batlló had the newest and best…it includes a small video screen so they show you antique photos and animations along with the narration.) We did not use the audio guides in other places, just enjoyed the experiences unfiltered…
Casa Batlló
Sagrada Familia
Gaudí’s Cathedral, still being built. Two tickets required…one for the main church and one for the elevator up into a spire and then walking down a spiral staircase. This picture of the facade shows the spires, the elevator is inside on the right and then you walk the bridge behind the green tree of life sculpture (with white doves on it) and all the way down the staircase there are slits and small windows where you can see tops of towers and decorations.)
Oh, yes, there will be many parts to this topic…watch this space!
The art that drew us to Alcatraz…an exhibition of the work of the Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei.
From the catalog: “At first blush, @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, a major exhibition that pairs a politically charged Chinese contemporary artist with a landmark American national park, seems just as incongruous. Ai, a superstar in the international art world who helped design the “Bird’s Nest” stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, is currently forbidden by the authorities to leave China. Alcatraz—over the years the site of a Civil War-era fortress, a military prison, a notorious federal penitentiary, and a momentous Native American rights protest—is now a popular national park site and refuge for waterbirds. But it is exactly the pairing’s intrinsic conditions of contradiction that bring the two parts together-and make for the possibility of soul-stirring art.”
After arriving at the dock, we walked up to the New Industries Building which was originally a laundry and manufacturing facility.
“Both delicate and fearsome, the traditional Chinese dragon kite embodies a mythical symbol of power. Ai Weiwei unfurls a spectacular contemporary version of this age-old art form inside the New Industries Building: a sculptural installation with an enormous dragon’s head and a body made up of smaller kites. The sparrow-shaped and hexagonal kites scattered throughout the room feature stylized renderings of birds and flowers—natural forms that allude to a stark human reality: many are symbols of nations with serious records of restricting their citizens’ rights and civil liberties. The work references some thirty countries, including Cameroon, China, Indonesia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Uzbekistan.
…By confining the work inside a building once used for prison labor, the artist suggests powerful contradictions between freedom and restriction, creativity and repression, cultural pride and national shame. He also offers a poetic response to the multi-layered nature of Alcatraz as a former penitentiary that is now an important bird habitat and a site of thriving gardens.”
With Wind (Installation, 2014. Handmade kites made of paper, silk, and bamboo)
Somebody I know was looking for birds out those windows and admiring the view to the Golden Gate…
In the next large room:
Trace (Installation, 2014. LEGO plastic building blocks)
“The viewer is confronted with a field of colorful images laid out flat across the expansive floor: portraits of over 170 people from around the world who have been imprisoned or exiled due to their beliefs or affiliations, most of whom were still incarcerated as of June 2014.”
“From the New Industries Building’s lower gun gallery, where armed guards once monitored prisoners at work, visitors peer through cracked and rusted windows to glimpse an enormous, multifaceted metal wing on the floor below. Its design is based on close observation of the structure of real bird’s wings, but in place of feathers, the artwork bristles with reflective metal panels originally used on Tibetan solar cookers…this piece uses imagery of flight to evoke the tension between freedom—be it physical, political, or creative—and confinement.
Refraction (Installation, 2014. Tibetan solar panels, steel)
We walked through lush gardens up to the Cellhouse.
Inside was Blossom (Installation, 2014, Porcelain, hospital fixtures)
Fixtures in hospital ward cells and medical offices are transformed into fantastical, fragile porcelain bouquets.
There were other parts to the exhibit inside but it was time for use to go look for birds in earnest…
Now I have run out of episodes with titles I can use the word “prisoner” in, so now I must bring this chapter to a close…
Wednesday morning, 8:00 a.m., we left for San Francisco so we could catch a 10:00 a.m. ferry to Alcatraz Island.
When I think back on this year since last October, it has been a year filled with more ferries, water taxis, vaporettos, and water conveyances than all of my sixty-six years before that. Last October it started in Venice and went to Lake Maggiore in July. Now it has come to San Francisco Bay (actually twice this year, because we took a ferry to a San Francisco Giants game in August…Go Giants, by the way!). At 8:00 in the morning, traffic is a bear, but since it was Wednesday and not in the summer, parking was easy and directly across the street. Plus, the island did not get very crowded during our time on the rock. As we proceeded on our cruise we certainly hoped that Alcatraz would not have us licked.
It was a beautiful day with great views of the Bay Bridge on the way over to the island.
Our approach to the dock included water towers, guard towers, and a view of the prison…
This island is frequented by many bird varieties…
The Officer’s Club has deteriorated but makes for some interesting photographs…
The Quartermaster Warehouse and the power plant…
Apartments for the guards…
The Warden’s residence next to the prison and lighthouse viewed from the Parade Grounds…
The water tower still has remnants of the American Indian Occupation…
A great view of the Golden Gate with Hawk Hill on the right, across the Bay…
The San Francisco skyline…
We toured the cell block and that put us on a higher level to get closer views of the Warden’s Residence and the lighthouse…
We walked through the exercise yard and were impressed with the view the guards must have had while they supervised…
We wandered back to the dock through the Agave Trail and had our picnic before boarding the ferry to go back to the city.
We were allowed to escape from Alcatraz…
There was a model at the ferry landing of what Alcatraz looked like before the buildings started to crumble…
First Saturday in October we were on a bird walk for Terry’s master birding class. As luck would have it, the trip was to his old stomping grounds, Fort Chronkite and Hawk Hill in the Golden Gate National Seashore. Because of his involvement with the banding of hawks with GGRO we have been to this area many times and I have posted pictures from here often over the years. The difference this day was that it was 90° and crystal clear…no fabled San Francisco Fog to be seen. The first time I had seen this landscape with this bright light…
The birders got to work…
Some birds were particularly cooperative…
After investigating Rodeo Lagoon and the headquarters buildings we ventured up to Hawk Hill…
The blue patch on the right is Rodeo Lagoon from above…
and we could see out to Lands End (I have posted pictures of those same rocks from a different angle here…)
There was a lot of boat activity this day…
and raptor activity…
I, however, started looking for shady spots to get out of the sun…no lack of antique battlements here…
and no lack of killer views of the Golden Gate…
This is possibly the best picnic spot in the Bay Area…or maybe the best picnic…I saw the food they brought in as they passed me on the path…
The money shot…Golden Gate, Alcatraz, Yerba Buena Island with the Bay Bridge and Oakland behind it all…! On a clear day you really can see forever…
After walking to the rear of the Parliament Building so we could see the view and the Aare River (muddy because of all the rain), we continued our stroll down-elevation past banks (lots of them…it’s Switzerland!) and casinos (in this case casino means opera house.)
Also saw the sophisticated suicide barrier on the bridge…
Our walk swung over to the center of the peninsula that is Bern so we could enjoy the Zytglogge. I am not an expert on world-wide clock towers, but this one seems to me to be one of the most special. It dates from 1530.
The street artist was also fun…
Walking to the rear of the tower puts you in the Kornhausplatz.
There is the Ogre Fountain (child-eater). Possibly it was meant to scare mis-behaving children.
We elected to stroll down Kramgasse a wide street that gives the sense of the arcades plus the cellars below that are also retail shops…
Zähringen Fountain…a bear in full armor…
The house where Einstein lived in 1905 when he developed the theory of relativity right here in Bern…
The Samnson Fountain…
We also walked around Bern’s 15th century Münster (Cathedral)…
I could not get far enough away to get a full picture so you will have to piece it together in your brain…
If you live in one of these houses in Bern…
You get this as your yard…
One more fountain (there are more than we actually walked past) before we went across the bridge to the BärenPark…of course, it was Justice…
“Time is the justice that examines all offenders.”~Shakespeare
(Snapseed app, Image Blender, Stackables, and Vintique)
Lois Reynolds Mead 