Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
Description, courtesy of Wikipedia:
In 1861, part of the facade collapsed, damaging the atrium. The whole front of the church was then rebuilt to a design by architect Errico Alvino in a richly decorated manner drawing on Italian Gothic and especially Arab-Norman styles, similar to but more ornate than the original.
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Construction began around twelve centuries ago, but most of what a 21st century visitor sees when looking at Amalfi Cathedral (aka “Duomo di Amalfi” and “Duomo di Sant’Andrea”) is of much more recent vintage.
Allegedly, it has housed the “relics” of St Andrew (Sant’Andrea) since not long after “Crusaders” delivered them from Constantinople to Amalfi in 1206 CE.
Many a “landmark” Italian church has a “medieval” exterior, now ill-matched with a lavishly reworked, much more ornate, “Baroque” interior.
Over the centuries, Amalfi’s cathedral has become a riotously eclectic hybrid of very different styles. (and of different buildings, joined together, repaired, and re-imagined)
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Its “permanent” population of circa 5,000 people is around the same size as Naracoorte’s, or circa half that of the Australian Portland.
Naracoorte is a prosperous South Australian country town; Portland is Victoria’s oldest “European” settlement.
The post’s actually-European town is very much older than any Australian one.
its population and power peaked circa one thousand years ago.
Its eponymous republic was then a significant maritime power, trading in many “things”, including enslaved humans.
Tourism-wise, its “peak” is circa right now, and it is stratospherically beyond Naracoorte’s or Portland’s wildest dreams…or nightmares.
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Venerable and majestic as it is, the pictured river red gum is neither the tallest, nor most massive, nor oldest example of the Australian mainland’s most widely distributed and most widely-loved eucalypt species.
The pictured tree, however was “the hero” in the most famous photograph ever taken of Eucalyptus camaldulensis.
87 years ago one of the most influential Australian photographers saw this tree, standing on a sparsely vegetated plateau, with Wilpena Pound’s flanks behind it.
The tree has stood there for at least several centuries; “the Pound” is circa 800 million years older.
Harold Cazneaux (aka “H.P. Cazneaux”) captioned his 1937 tree portrait, The Spirit of Endurance.
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At 3. 50 pm we climbed back into the warmth of the 4WDs and began the drive back down from the Stokes Hill lookout.
At 3. 51 pm we suddenly had very good reason to stop the vehicles, to brave the wintry gusts, and take careful aim with all available binoculars and cameras.
Elevated places are always the best vantage points for humans who like to observe raptors in flight.
The wedge-tailed eagle is Australia’s most massive raptor, and the most widespread.
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This post’s photo is this series’ final “from Stokes Hill” landscape image, albeit its penultimate “from Stokes Hill…” shot.
All the landscape shots were taken within the space of 12 minutes.
This one looks west-ish, toward some of the mightiest of Wilpena Pound’s ramparts.
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This chapter’s featured image was taken six minutes after the #15 one in this series.
I invite you to revisit the #15 image, and follow its sunbathed ridgeline, along to the right hand side of the photo.
There – as “minor details” – you can see some of the very same “grass trees”, and the same more distant range and ridgelines that are the “heroes”,here.
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This chapter’s photo was taken less than a minute after #19’s in this series.
For #19 I used a “short” lens (46mm); for this one, I wheeled around, circa 100 degrees to my right, and deployed a much longer (400mm) lens.
The photo looks a little south of due east, towards vast, increasingly flatter, drier expanses.
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Shortly after I photographed #18’s “bush tomato”, I forsook the long lens, in favour of a shorter, wider one, which I pointed north.
Undulating, “arid zone”, outback Australian places really “sing” when they “bathe” in dappled winter light.
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Whilst rotating through the full 360 degrees, and admiring/photographing splendid vistas in every direction, one should also pay attention to whatever is immediately in front of one’s feet…
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