19 4 / 2012
Post scriptum 3: Top 10
It’s pretty much impossible to select and rank best experiences from a month long trip in varied locations - but I did it anyway. ;) In order to try to sum things up and create some sort of a closure for the blog too. So, here’s a list of top 10 experiences from a month in the European spring:
- Kleine Scheidegg - Truly epic landscape at the height of 2km was one of the strongest experiences I’ve ever encountered traveling
- Rome - On previous trip 10 or so years ago I hadn’t realized how wonderful city this really is. Not just the amazing amount of history, but the even fellinesquely lively nightlife, great food & wine and contemporary culture make Rome one of the greatest cities in the whole world.
- Montreux - Absolutely clear blue sceneries of Lake Geneva & the Alps
- Andermatt - St. Moritz - Bernina Diavolezza train ride - Hard to choose from all the gorgeous train rides in Switzerland, but this one had probably the most varied sceneries among some of the most stunning ones
- Bologna - Surprisingly urban, modern & artistic vibes in gorgeous red-brick old town setting. One of the places from this trip I definitely want to return to!
- Lyon - Large city with the heart of a little town, France at it’s best!
- Siena - Still one of the most beautiful Italian cities
- Perugia - Eccentric mixture of medieval castles, renaissance palaces and early 1900s buildings on a hilltop setting with a lively university scene
- Avignon - Fascinating mediaval buildings with zig-zagging narrow streets filled with inviting restaurants and cafes
- Nice - A city that seems to really love food. Throw in world-famous sea views and some great art collections and you’ve got a perfect destination for a long weekend.
This compilation is very probably the final post to this blog, so to keep up to date on my photos in the future you should look me up on Flickr and follow me on Twitter for generic ramblings and occasional insights.
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12 4 / 2012
Grande finale @ Roma
A month long trip is coming to an end. And no better place to celebrate the finale of the journey than Rome, where great food and wine are plentiful. I had a healthy overdose of truly excellent red wine, cheeses, pasta, meatballs, grappa and ice-cream on the last two days here. The photos here are a more or less random sampling of the snaps taken during those days, wasn’t anymore focusing effort or energy into photography at this point…
11 4 / 2012
Modern art at Rome: MAXXI & MACRO
It’s nice to have stayed long enough in Rome altogether to be able to take some time off from checking out the most important historical landmarks, and focusing for more contemporary offerings of the city for a while. It’s crazy how many big & important exhibitions there are in Rome at the same time, rivaling the cultural metropoles like Paris and New York easily. Helsinki would be considered lucky to be able to host just one of those exhibitions per year. Right now there would have been displays of American modernism from Guggenheim collections, Miro, Dali, Russian avant-garde, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Steve McCurry - just to mention the biggest names.
We checked the two new museums for modern & contemporary art in Rome: MAXXI and MACRO. Both are interesting not only for the exhibitions but also for their architecture. MAXXI is at least architecturally better known of the two, being designed by the superstar Zaha Hadid. On the outside it doesn’t look too special, but the insides are very interesting and also highly functional - there’s a good flow inside the building leading from one exhibition hall to another. Content-wise there’s an interesting mixture of architecture, installations, paintings, video works and photos in display at MAXXI. Also there are preparations on the way for the setting up the installation from recycled clothes by the Finnish artist Kaarina Kaikkonen, whose exhibition we miss by just two days.
MACRO is quite a bit more confusing as an exhibition space than Zaha Hadid’s building, but at least as interesting visually with bold shapes and colors. We actually came here for Steve McCurry’s photo exhibition, only to learn that it was at the other MARCO location (yes, apparently there are two…). But the works in display were worth the walk anyway: interesting samplings from the permanent collection and massive video/installation works in one of the largest exhibition halls I’ve ever seen.
All and all glad to see that the contemporary culture in Rome is alive and well to say the least, on top of the couple of millennia of history….
07 4 / 2012
Rome
Saturday-night in Rome, Easter-weekend. Love the fellinesque vibrancy of streets filled with shiny, happy people. First a great dinner in Trastevere with Nina, then walking back to the hotel - drunk on good food, wine, company and the city. And then there’s this impromptu jazz show on a bridge connecting Trastevere to the center. Great jamming in the night, on the river, admired by people passing by and stopping to listen to the rhythms filling the Easter weekend night in the eternal city. ♥ Roma!
14 3 / 2012
First train trip: Roma - Orvieto, 1.5h
The tracks begin here. From Roma Termini to be exact. Feels good to me on the move!
First trip is an easy 1,5h regional train ride to Orvieto. Again amazed by the low prices & high quality of Italian train system - the regional train 2nd class has more space and better seats than 1st class long-hauls in Finland, and the cost of 7,30€ couldn’t get you past the metropolitan area from Helsinki.
13 3 / 2012
Tempus fugit
The Thing about Rome for me is that you can end up looking at a piece of historical beauty at any random corner of the city - be it from the ancient Rome, medieval times or renessaince. So it really is a city filled with layers upon layers of history unlike any other place - the Colosseum, Pantheon, Trevi, St Peters are just the tip of the iceberg.
And that kind of omnipresence of 3000 years of human history is quite chilling. The monuments seem to speak: about the continuous will and success of the powerful to leave their dent in the universe, about the kind of power & wealth it must have taken during its time and about the inevitable eradication of even the tallest monuments. They seem to be challenging the spectator: what will YOUR dent in the universe be!? Or maybe it’s just my upcoming mid-life crisis talking to me, not the history ;)
12 3 / 2012
La notte Romana
Got to the hotel in the early afternoon, and had planned to visit either Colosseum or the Sistine Chapel on the day of arrival - but in the end I was way too exhausted due to not nearly enough sleep the night before, so ended up taking a nap at the hotel instead. And then a loooong photo walk around the city a few hours before & after sunset. There aren’t many other things I like better than walking with a camera in a new urban location: everything seems visually so fresh and different when you see it the first time, all your senses seem enhanced - for an example you never notice the unique smell of a city like on the first day there. Rome smells like smoke, tar, fruits just about start to rot and gasoline (and something else, maybe it’s history?).
Photography is a great excuse in many ways: it gives myself a good excuse to look at things, even odd things, more closely. It also gives me an excuse in the eyes of the others to be in unusual locations like apartments hallways or dead-end alleyways.
The first night ended with what was quite possibly one of the best pastas I’ve ever had: a very simple Amatricciana in a cheap trattoria in Trastevere with the ridiculously low cost of 5€.
