Roccasparvera

A quiet scene on a small road in Roccasparvera, a small seemingly deserted village high in the Italian Alps and where my great great grandmother was born in 1881 and lived before immigrating to San Francisco around 1906. There was a holiday that day, though you would not know it except for the colorful streamers flapping in the wind stretched from awning to awning around the town square. It seemed a moment frozen in motion and time. Ours were the only footsteps along the roads and the only voices echoing down the hills on which the precarious town is built. There was simplicity, history, and a quiet resilience in those walls.

High Tide

Taken at San Marco square at high tide. This has always been my favorite view of Venice; the bobbing gondolas tied to old algae covered posts along the dock. From here a few dozen gondolieri perch on the bow of their boat or lean ever so nonchalantly on the pier railing cat calling to tourists with the ever familiar Italian nod and jerk of the head and the stiff fingered wave of “step into my office.” It is one of those more romantic things in life to float through Venice’s inner canals lined with high walls, open windows, and lines of laundry above your head—if you are willing to pay the price that is.