You are looking at the Umbrian countryside, from the hill town of Orvieto, just behind the Cathedral. When my friends and I discovered it, during a 1983 drive, I thought (and still think) it was one of the most beautiful landscapes I had ever seen. In this post I'll show the first legs of our trip, which started out in Rome with eight of us, and continued on to Sicily and Greece, finishing up in London.
As I mentioned in my last post, I took no photos at all in 1982. To fill in the blank, so to speak, I'll publish here a professional photo which very recently a friend discovered and gave to me. It shows an event in Milwaukee in April 1982, and I appear in it--somewhere.
Someone had wanted to create a record for the Guinness Book, and so word went out for musicians to gather in Bay Shore Mall. I went down with some friends, we were handed our parts for "Stars and Stripes Forever" in the proper key for our instrument, and we somehow followed the conductor through it, in an era long before gigantic video monitors.
Before the trip to Europe I did take some photos in winter/spring 1983. I'm sorry to say they're among the worst photos I ever took with the Nikon, but I'll include them here because they show some friends I have no other photos of, and some of you might like to
see them. My slide box reveals that I took out the camera in early '83 for a few "art" photos, starting with this one of a geranium seen against snow in my back yard (actually my neighbor's, since my property at that time went only up to the fence in the foreground). I also tried creating a "still life" of a copper tea kettle (a housewarming present from Gloria, as I recall) with some other kitchen items. (The spice shelf was a recent Christmas present.)
One evening I threw a dinner party, and among the guests were Dick and Kathy Flannery (Dick had replaced Royce as our campus political science professor). Here they are in my kitchen, at some point earlier in the evening; apologies for the poor focus and dim light. (I now wonder why Kathy was looking less cheerful than Dick when I took the photos.)
I'm especially sorry that a photo of Dick and me is focused only on the main course, since it would have been a good one of us. What you're seeing at the bottom of the photo is a meat pie (as yet uncooked): I was following a recipe in a "Shakespeare" cookbook (original Elizabethan and Jacobean recipes followed by "translations" into instructions with measurements, oven temperatures, and so forth). This was a capon deboned and stuffed with ground meats, artichoke hearts and lots of spices, wrapped in pastry. Here is the result just out of the oven:
On another occasion that winter I went to Oshkosh--according to the labeling on my slide box, since I remember seeing a show at their art museum around that time but not anything else. Here are a couple of 'mystery' photos:
The person on the left is Sally Melgaard, a friend from those days, as the couple on the right must have been, but I can't remember their names or how I knew them--nor can I quite read the inscription on the rock. I'd greatly appreciate an ID of the couple or the site.
The other photo I took that day (it follows next in the slide box) is of a lighthouse, no doubt on Lake Winnebago--but I couldn't name the person (child?) raising his or her arms at the sight of it. On a later occasion Sally and the couple were at my house, with a guitar even, making me now feel even worse about not being able to ID the couple:
That spring Jean Tobin and I briefly had a talk show on the local TV cable channel. I think
this project originated through a friend of mine named Bob who worked at TV8, in the early days of cable TV, when headquarters were in a building on the south side. (Later they moved to my campus.) Here you see the crew setting up for one of our shows, in which we talked about new movies and maybe other things. And here we are with Bob. It looks like we had borrowed my copper teapot for a decoration, along with my cups. The photo on the right is the better one for publicity purposes, if that's why I had someone take the photos.
For at least one of the shows our friend Roberta Filicky-Peneski joined us, probably as a moderator. Neither of the photos with her catches all four of us fully camera-ready:
The only other photos I took that spring were one of another friend, Ginny, in a characteristic pose, and one of the willow tree on our campus (where Bookworm Gardens now stands) just starting to have leaves:
That semester my friend Max (too many BOXES to list here) had the great opportunity to be teaching in Rome at his South Bend campus's extension. A plan evolved: at the end of the semester several friends, including myself, would meet up with him in Rome and after a few days all travel up to Tuscany. Then Max and I would drive down to Sicily and eventually over to the Adriatic coast, where we would sail for Greece and meet up with our friend Dede in Crete.
I was the first to arrive. (I had found a cheap flight to Brussels, and spent part of the day there--I recall a fine lunch of chicken and frites with a tarragon sauce drizzled over both--before taking an overnight train to Rome, as I had done on my first trip to Europe in '69.) I took no photos en route: my first of the trip was a view from my hotel window (or maybe it was a college residence hall that Max arranged for me): not a view fit for a postcard but still, it was Rome:
My second photo strikes me as very Rome: a Renaissance church dome, a plain stuccoed apartment building, and a much more ornate building with a garden rooftop
I had a day or two to settle in before the arrival of the others, namely Wayne and Zivile (formerly of Evanston, now living in Rochester), his daughter Marty and former sister-in-law Suzie, our mutual Chicago friend Rich, and a Rochester friend of Wayne and Zivile, named Janet. Here, a little bit out of order, are a few photos I took of the "crowd" during those first days in Rome. The first pic shows, from left to right, Rich, Wayne, Janet, Marty and Zivile, who all look like they're having a fine time:
And here are Rich (pointing his camera at me), Suzie, Marty, Janet, Zivile and, sitting on the wall, Max, with the dome of St Peter's in the background.
The bit of glare on the left comes from the fact that I had dropped my camera, causing the back to burst open, exposing some of the film. I had the roll developed as soon as I finished it to make sure the camera was still working properly, and found that I had completely lost only three photos, but had damaged a few more. Digital scanning has allowed me to crop the above photo to get at least a half-decent image. And here are two other damaged photos, both taken on the Piazza Navona. The one of the Fountain of the Four Rivers, with its famous figure raising a hand toward the St Agnes church in the background, has a streak of exposure, but maybe it adds a little drama. The other is a glimpse of another part of the Piazza.
As always, I regret that I took so few photos of friends (maybe there were more in the lost photos), but here are two more: one of Max and Wayne in a garden I can't identify:
. . . and another of Wayne, Zivile and Max as we strolled through the Roman Forum:
Since we're in the Forum, I'll slip in the one other shot I took there:
But I took many fewer shots than I had during previous visits to Rome (BOXES 30-33, 63-64, 77-79), partly because I was just caught up in the excitement of our group of eight, some of whom had never been to Italy. Here are my remaining Rome photos, beginning with two of Sant' Ivo, which I recall was one of Wayne's favorite baroque churches:
This would be a good place to mention that the grimy look of Sant' Ivo was extremely typical of everything we saw in Italy on this trip (and didn't think about at the time). When I revisited some of the same cities in 2001 everything was strikingly cleaner--or, I should say, I was shocked when I dug out my 1978 slides and compared them to my 2001 photos, in which the buildings were gleaming white or golden compared to their sooty state in 1978. (You can see for yourself by Googling Sant' Ivo or other buildings I will be showing--e.g., click here.)
Another Rome shot from '83 was taken from a terrace on the Spanish Steps, looking down on a street:
We must have walked from there to the Villa Borghese Gardens that overlook the Piazza di Popolo. Since I had photographed that vista and the gardens themselves on previous trips, I just took this picture of a villa--surrounded by beautiful Roman pines--on the other side of a ravine to the north. Once again I would appreciate an ID:
My only other Roman photo on this trip is of acanthus leaves: both the stylized ones on the capitals of a Corinthian column and the real ones that grow in the Mediterranean region, including Rome. I was excited to see real acanthus plants growing next to a ruined column in a park:
After our days in Rome the eight of us rented two cars from an agency near Termini, the main train station of Rome, and began our drive up toward Tuscany, first making stops in the Lazio region north of Rome. One stop was in Viterbo, at the Papal Palace and its handsome loggia:
Another stop, just outside Viterbo, was the Basilica of Santa Maria della Quercia, whose doors have ceramic lunettes (1508) by Andrea della Robbia, and whose grand cloister was very handsome:
We had wanted to see the famous Renaissance gardens of the Villa Lante nearby, but it was closed for the day by the time we got there. I took this picture from the gateway:
I don't remember where we stayed that night, but I took a photo of a church and its bell
tower that might be a clue. Once again, please ID it if you can. The next day we set off for the hill town of Orvieto to see its cathedral. We parked our cars somewhere behind and below the cathedral on a steep slope that I found a challenge to navigate, and walked uphill to the point where we got our first glimpse of the stunning façade of the church:
The piazza in front of the church was too shallow for me to get a photo of the whole façade, since I didn't have a wide-angle lens attachment. But here are a few details:
And here is the north side of the church, with its striped layers of stone that recall Siena's Cathedral (though we hadn't seen it yet):
The interior too--strikingly plain in decor--featured the same stripes. Sorry about the soft focus. The second photo does catch a bit of the glow from the sun on the wall from one of the windows.
As we walked around the church we discovered a parking lot with a fantastic view overlooking the countryside beyond Orvieto:
The top of this post shows one view from that terrace; here is another:
And here, to finish this post, is a another shot of the countryside taken later in the day, either from Orvieto or from someplace as we drove from this corner of Umbria into Tuscany:
In my next post I'll show some of the Tuscan towns we visited.
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