Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
The featured image shows a very relaxed, aged, large canine resident of Civita – an attractive, historic, and spectacularly located Calabrian hill town.
Visual evidence – over five enjoyable weeks in southern Italy – suggests that Italian dogs are well-loved by their human “owners”, but that dog owners comprise a smaller percentage of the Italian population than the Australian one.
On Italian streets, however, one’s feet are almost never far from “fresh”, soggy dogshit.
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For an observant “stranger in a strange land”, local signage often proves a rich source of amusement and/or misunderstanding – sometimes, the latter, therefore the former.
The pictured sign ensures that monolingual English-speakers do “get” the intended message; nonetheless, you are looking at the winner of my personal award for “our European trip’s most amusing signage”.
Many tourists walk the feline monarch of Alberobello’s street.
Almost all are obedient, so the king – or queen – usually sits on his/her “throne”, undisturbed.
Q: Why do tourists from all over the world flock to this small town in Puglia, southern Italy?
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Almost everywhere we went in southern Italy, cats were abundantly evident.
Generally, they roamed freely, and were neither belled nor tagged.
Their state of health was hugely variable; it was often impossible to know whether an individual was a “feral” or (notionally, at least) a “domestic” cat.
I suspect that the above circumstances have more than a bit to do with another surprise, at least to us: that birds are usually strikingly less evident/abundant/diverse on southern Italian streets than on West Australian ones.
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This post’s subtitle reads like it had been written by Spike Milligan for The Goon Show.
Its every word, however, is literally true.
Most humans – even those who do not like to drink coffee – enjoy coffee aromas.
Most insects detest them.
As an insect repellent, coffee is most effectively deployed, as illustrated – as an “incense”, most especially when the igniting flame is applied to unused coffee grounds.
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If you are looking for two-legged “sharks”, success is guaranteed in Capri – onshore and offshore.
Oligarchs’ “yachts” abound in its fabled, azure waters, whilst the island-proper is a case study in over-priced-everything, far too many tourists, and strikingly inadequate/inept infrastructure.
Narcissism, greed, rank opportunism and inanity are inescapably evident, in every direction.
All that said, Capri’s intrinsic beauty is still apparent.
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Italy’s largest lagoon is offshore from Trapani, running down to Marsala, on Sicily’s west coast.
”White gold” – salt – has been commercially produced here for literally thousands of years.
As well as its salt-extraction pans, the lagoon has open waters; shallow, flat, and reliably windy, they have become Europe’s premier destination for exponents of a sport/activity that only began in the last quarter of the 20th century.
The lagoon is also a globally significant waterbird refuge; a substantial chunk of it is RAMSAR- listed, and protected by the WWF since 1996.
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Smaller but wealthier than Pompeii, Herculaneum suffered the same fate: “destroyed” by the 79 AD eruption of Mt Vesuvius.
Whilst the volcano really did extinguish all human life in both places, its ash – which buried them – in fact made them the two best-preserved of all ancient Roman towns.
Their “secrets” are still being uncovered.
In Italy, even working archeologists can display an uncommon amount of “style”/ “attitude”/“flair”.
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Perchance the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers happened upon the pictured sign, they’d likely have impulse-emigrated to Italy!
After having seen several such signs on the exterior walls of Italian bottle shops, I wondered whether something was being “lost in translation”….
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As previously noted, Mt Sonder is relatively modest in altitude and bulk, but it is particularly beautiful, especially when the sun is not too high in the sky.
What makes it even more beautiful – and this true of almost every mountain, hill, gorge and creek in and around the MacDonnell Ranges – is the fact that it sits within such beautifully-vegetated country.
Almost anywhere you look, it just gets better and better, the more closely you look.
You should never fail to look closely at all layers of whatever landscape you find yourself within – foreground through to horizon.
If you look at the watercolours painted by this region’s most famous artist, you can see that Albert Namatjira (1902-1959) understood this very well.
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Photo is copyright Doug Spencer.
No fakery involved. Taken at 1.04/pm on 14 June 2023 in Emily Gap.
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