Glory

I won’t say how long it has taken me to finally finish this video; too long. And having finally finished it, I went down to the river this evening to see the starlings, but I was too late, by about 5 minutes, and the weather was too bad, by a thunderstorm.

Rome’s publicity often leaves a lot to be desired. So when friends invited me to the Ara Pacis on Saturday night, I had no idea there was anything special going on. As we shuffled forward in the line (one person on duty to sell tickets for a special occasion) you could see something rather special. [...]

It’s been an exciting week. Monday night, the frangipani blossoms first opened, and I almost pitched myself over the parapet trying to photograph them. When the leaves first stirred I remarked that they were early and how wonderful it would be if the flowers were early too, so The Squeeze could experience them. Six weeks [...]

Easter Sunday, so off to Anzio and lunch by the beach. They’ve been promising awful weather for today and tomorrow since last Thursday, but it wasn’t actually howling a gale so we decided to take the risk, and were glad we did. Anzio is a lovely port, despite the destruction in 1944, and the walk [...]

Just a quickie, as we make our way under the railway tracks between Porta Maggiore and Porta Tiburtina and one of the most beautifully preserved stretches of wall. I was pretty excited to see work by The Great Artist. Again, there’s no way I would have noticed that as a driver. I thought (on the [...]

The best part about walking the Aurelian Walls is that one is one foot. Porta Maggiore is a scary nightmare of about 8 lanes of traffic (lanes being a completely inappropriate description, because it denotes a certain measure of order) going in four or five different directions. I had driven through Porta Maggiore many times [...]