aubreyholland.com

Hi everyone. Hannah here. This is my visual journal for you of patterns in Barcelona.

This past weekend Hannah and I took a trip to Trieste. We thought it was about time to take another weekend trip, and after looking through our Italy guidebook for a while we decided on Trieste for a few reasons:

• First off, it’s in the Friuli Giulia region of Italy, and that’s really, really fun to say. Clearly they at least have a sense of humor there.
• Second, our guidebook (Lonely Planet) listed the food as one of the major attractions, focusing on their abundance of meat products and beer, and made several mentions of the local specialty, boiled bacon. Now I know they have a sense of humor. Boiled bacon, seriously?
• They call these restaurants buffets. You mean it’s all you can eat boiled bacon? Let’s get on the next train.

Predictably, our first stop was one of these restaurants. At first we (well, really just me) were disappointed because there was no buffet as we think of it, just a regular restaurant. My stomach was bitterly disappointed until I looked at the table next to us and noticed that the man sitting there was eating something that strongly resembled an entire pig. My happiness increased when I opened the menu and found that pretty much all they had was sausage. We had a great time, drank a few good beers, and I ate so much that I felt disgustingly full until Monday.

It turns out that they have things in Trieste that aren’t food, and it’s really a beautiful place. It’s up in the far eastern corner of Italy, and it’s on the Adriatic and surrounded by mountains/hills, which made for some fantastic views. At the top of the hill that’s closest to the center of town there’s a castle and an amazing church that has some seriously beautiful Byzantine mosaics.

And, yes, of course they had something creepy as well.

In the middle of town they have an old Roman amphitheater. It’s totally dumbfounding to me how old these things are. When you’re standing there in front of a thing trying to count on your fingers how many centuries old it is and you run out of fingers it means it’s really, really old. Here’s a picture of the amphitheater and a few others from our walk around town.

On Sunday we also took a trip to the Risiera di San Sabba, an old rice husking plant that was converted into an extermination camp by the Nazis in 1944. Today there are the well-preserved remains of the place along with a small museum, and it takes no time whatsoever to be confronted with the significance of the place and how absolutely horrifying it must have been. The museum had a good deal of information about the spread of fascism in general and had copies of some of the memos documenting the formation of the camp, most of which were highly disturbing. My overall impression was of how trapped everyone must have felt, not able to leave the country and knowing that they could be picked up at any time and taken to a place like this. You want to believe that it couldn’t happen today except that of course it actually is happening right now in places like Darfur and Iraq.

Ok, it was time for something more lighthearted, and Trieste had just the thing… a castle!!! Castles make everybody happy, right? In 1855, Archduke Maximilian of Austria built a castle in Miramare a few miles (they call ‘em kilometers here) north of Trieste that overlooks the Adriatic, and it’s really something. The castle itself is quite beautiful, and it’s surrounded by a large park with some fantastic gardens. Here are some pictures of the castle and surroundings.

And one last picture… here’s the “what not to do” sign from the park surrounding the castle. Hannah astutely observed that it’s a little strange to forbid people from washing their hands with squirrels, but I guess they wanted to have all of their bases covered.

Burano is another of the well-known islands here in the Venetian lagoon, and Hannah and I took a trip out there this past Sunday. Though the island is well known for the lace that has traditionally been made there, we just went because it sounded like a really cool place. And is it ever. While things here in Venice are generally very old, very ornate, and very grey, Burano decided instead to go with very quaint and very colorful. I think this was a good decision for them, and it makes for a truly beautiful place just a thirty minute boat ride from Venice.

Burano has got to be the most photogenic place I’ve ever seen, and if I had any idea whatsoever how to take a good picture, I’m sure you would be so convinced. As it is, I’ve just got some decent, humble pictures here to share. Here are some of the general colorfulness…

You may notice from a few of these pictures that Burano also seems to be the laundry capital of the world. I’ve never seen so much laundry in my life, or such a uniform display of it at nearly every single house. But I’m digressing. Oh, and they also have tons of cats.

And to wrap this up, here are a picture of my beautiful wife and of Venice in the distance seen from Burano.

By the way, I know that colorfulness isn’t really a word. Promise. I do proofread these things, you know.

Last weekend there was a big art fair in Bologna, so of course I was dying to go, and I managed to convince Hannah to come along. She’s a pretty good sport like that. The fair itself had 240 galleries from all over the place (but mostly from Italy), and it was huge. There’s so much to see that by the end of the day your feet hurt like crazy and you basically have no idea what you’ve just seen. This was my personal favorite, though… I’m a sucker for this pen and ink stuff.

While we were there, we decided to spend Sunday touring around Bologna. I had no idea what to expect, and after spending most of Saturday at the art fair, which is in the industrial part of town, I wasn’t expecting too much. When we got to the city center, though, we found that it is really quite a beautiful place. There were some great things to see, and the fact that it’s a university town seemed to make it seem really ‘alive’. One interesting thing was that almost all of the streets have arcades, like the one here.

Funny how all of these cities seem to have their own distinguishing characteristic. I imagine the city planners hundreds of years ago saying “How can we be different from Florence? I know, let’s build crazy arcade things!” or “I know, let’s build our city in the middle of a lagoon!”

Apparently there was quite a contest going on to see who could build the biggest tower in Bologna, with seemingly unpleasant results. Our guidebook said that there were over a hundred of them but that now they’re down to 15. Not a great success rate, and given the lean on one of the towers that was near our hotel, it’s pretty clear that these things don’t end well. They said that this thing was tilting by 3.5 meters.

We climbed the taller tower in the background of that picture (only 1.5 meters lean) and got a fantastic view of the city.

There was a huge basilica there that was originally supposed to be bigger than St. Peter’s in Rome. I thought this was really funny, but the Pope apparently told them that they weren’t allowed to make it bigger, so they just stopped building it. It’s still pretty darn huge… the third picture here is of the corner of the thing, where they clearly just lopped it off when they had to stop building. It’s also in the center of the first tower view picture above.

Just because I seem to have to add some ‘creepy’ things to each post here, I’ll throw these in. They have what they call an anatomy theatre at the old university, which is where the students would dissect cadavers back in the day. The room was amazingly immaculate, with wooden sculptures of various people, but right in the middle there were these crazy skinless guys. Cool, but creepy!

For anybody not yet aware, Venice is in the middle of the water. Well, technically, it’s in the middle of a lagoon. Sounds spooky, doesn’t it? It turns out that a lagoon is actually just a body of water that is separated from a larger body of water by some land mass (thanks again, wikipedia). In Venice’s case, the land mass is almost entirely made up of the island of Lido, which forms a sort of protective barrier from the Gulf, mostly keeping the water level from fluctuating too wildly here. Here’s a map. Since it’s easily reachable from public transportation, it’s also a great place to go to the beach. Today was, literally, the first sunny day we’ve had since we’ve been here, so we took a trip out there, and here are a few pictures. It’s pretty much just a beach, but I thought I’d post them anyway.