Matera is a small city in southern Italy, near the top of Italy’s boot heel. Its claims to fame are its cave dwellings or sassi, which were named UNESCO World Heritage sites in 1993. With its striking chalk-colored rock walls and winding stairways, the city was a perfect photographic point of interest for me on a whirlwind tour of southern Italy in 2016.
Because of the modern-day wonder of AirBNB, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to stay in a sasso. Yes, I used a website to stay in a cave.
Of course, when you stay in a cave you have to make some concessions, with one of the main ones being that we had to park our rental car about half a mile away from our lodging and schlep our belongings down Matera’s maze-like stone stairways, but even that was a fun adventure.
That night, unencumbered by our suitcases (which we left in our modernly furnished cave) we took a quick hike across a small but steep canyon cut by the Gravina River to the other side, where we watched the sun set. The scene was amazing. The heavenly voice of a children’s choir, from a weekend concert somewhere in town, filtered through the city and reverberated over the valley, creating an eery but magical scene as slowly the city lights turned on and the sun continued to sink below the horizon.
“Matera twilight cityscape,” a low light panorama sweeping over a UNESCO World Heritage Site, summer of 2016. Click to view full size. Prints and licensing available. Contact me for details.
Technical details: This panorama was taken with my Fuji Xpro-1 and a Rokinon 12mm f/2 lens, with a fairly significant crop to deal with the relative width of the lens. The final cropped pano size was 7,807 x 2,602 pixels.
In June of 2016, I had the privilege and pleasure of spending a couple of days in Rome, Italy with my family. During the day we sweated our way around the city, cooling off with some gelato and the occasional trip to one of Rome’s many fountains. One evening, however, I had the opportunity to grab my little Fuji Xpro-1, my Benro tripod, and my Sunwayfoto CR-30 pano head and hop on the metro. My destination? Back to the Colosseum.
Ordinarily I would choose one or maybe two of these photos to post, mostly because I dislike having multiple shots from the same location (that were taken on the same evening) in my portfolio. However, in this case I thought that the changing light, the changing angles, and even the people I happened to capture in these scenes were different enough that posting all of my panoramas would be a fun change of pace. Plus, I’m really missing Rome and thought I’d slake my thirst for travel with some photo editing.
So without too much further ado, here are my panoramas, as taken in chronological order.
Temperatures cool and the crowds clear slightly during a summer sunset at the Coloseum (Il Colosseo). At far right a nearly full moon can be seen. Please use the “Contact Me” form to inquire about prints and licensing.
The day’s light fades at Rome’s famous Colosseum, as street vendors go to set up for the evening. Please use the “Contact Me” form to inquire about prints and licensing.
The mid-day crowds subside during a summer sunset at the Colosseum, Rome. Use the “Contact Me” form to inquire about prints or licensing.
Clouds lit by sunset streak overhead at the Colosseum. Please use the “Contact Me” form to inquire about prints or licensing.
Both the Colosseum and Constantine’s Arch can be seen in this wide panorama. Please use the “Contact Me” form to inquire about prints and licensing.
Lights begin to turn on in and out of The Colosseum during blue hour. Please use the “Contact Me” form to inquire about prints and licensing.
Last year, during a trip to Italy with my family, we spent a few days at a bed-and-breakfast on the side of Mt Vesuvius, up-mountain from the coastal town of Herculaneum. When we first arrived in our tiny rental car, entering through a large motorized swinging gate after being buzzed in, an elderly Italian woman who spoke no English greeted us. She lived onsite, on the upper floor of their impressive tri-level square house, with its acre of land and an impressive garden. The middle and lower floor (where we stayed) were dedicated to lodgers. The house was a gigantic white box with a square white roof, black railings, and a circular turret facing the west that offered commanding views of Mt Vesuvius, Herculaneum, Naples, and the Bay of Naples.
On our first night there, I entreated the woman who owned the house to allow me to take some photos from the roof. She spoke almost no English, and my Italian was limited to around 20 words, exactly zero of which had anything to do with photography, but I waved my camera and pointed and bastardized some Spanish words until I got my point across. She stopped her gardening, wiped her hands on her housecoat, and led me up a creaky wooden staircase on the interior of the house. At the time, I didn’t realize this would require going through her third floor—I assumed the roof could be reached via an exterior tightly-wound circular staircase. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.
As we got closer to the top of the stairs, I could hear a baritone voice belting out something in Italian. We walked through her front door and she shuffled ahead quickly, attempting to close the gaping bathroom door before I got an eyeful of her husband (or lover?), who was doing his best Pavarotti impression in the shower. Regret filled me to the bursting point. I did my best “Oh hey, what’s that on the ceiling?” impression, and she quickly waved me through the kitchen and out onto a balcony overlooking the garden, where I found the circular staircase leading to the roof.
So the next day, during an approaching storm, I was more than reluctant to ask her if I could go back up on her roof. Instead, outside of the gate of their property and a few hundred feet down a gravelly street was a large, unfinished concrete structure—three floors! All I had to do was jump across a ditch, avoid various construction supplies laying around, and climb its skeleton structure to the second floor, which was conveniently sheltered from both rain and lightning (I thought, anyway).
Watching the storm roll in over the bay around sunset was surreal. I spent over an hour on my concrete perch, watching the day turn to twilight with the glow of orange-yellow city lights flickering to life, and finally to night. So much seemed to be happening: The sun setting, with its residual glow, cruise ships entering and leaving the bay, and an endless stream of car traffic. Lightning crashed around me the entire time. Eventually I left and ran to get my wife and kids, despite it being past their bedtime. The show was too good to miss.
Herculaneum, the Bay of Naples, and Naples, as seen from the second floor of an unfinished house on the side of Mt Vesuvius. (Click for full size.)
During the final days of my family’s trip to Italy, we stayed at an apartment set directly in the middle of a dusty olive grove on the outside of Vieste, on Italy’s Gargano peninsula. The place was so clean and new, smelling so strongly of fresh paint, we suspected we were the unit’s first occupants, a suspicion confirmed when we discovered that the owners had forgotten several items of importance, including a trash can.
Despite the seemingly endless beaches just a mile away, one of my fondest memories of the trip was sitting outside of our apartment in 90-degree heat, eating sliced tomatoes drizzled with olive oil that had been pressed the day before by our host family.
But my second fondest memory involved the afternoons my wife and kids and I spent hiding under brightly colored, oversized umbrellas and occasionally risking splashing around in the shallow waters of the Spiagga del Castello (Castle Beach). I was captivated by the beauty of the vertical white cliffs that erupted from the seaside to support the city’s old town, as well as the iconic beach monolith Pizzomunno, which stands around 80 feet tall.
While lying on a recliner on the beach I wasn’t entirely sure that I could get up to this photo’s vantage point. But one morning, while in a delirium after a full night of long-exposure photography, I decided to attempt a sunrise photo.
The first step was to find a place nearby to park my rental car, which proved to be a harder task than I first realized on the one-car-wide cobblestone streets of the old town. After parking, it was just a matter of walking uphill and occasionally checking Google Maps. I then found myself at a 6-foot-tall iron gate that blocked off the parking area of a condominium.
Not being one to balk at gates, especially in the pre-dawn of one of the longest days of the year, I climbed over and walked into the apartment’s parking lot. The parking garage itself was couched in the side of the hill, so again I scrambled up the dirt on the side of the garage before I found my way up to its roof.
And there was my view. I cautiously picked my way through some thorny weeds, approached the edge, set up my tripod, and began to shoot. After a series of panoramas, I began to imagine the small section of land I was standing on cleaving and falling 120 feet to the beach below, which led to me losing my nerve a bit.
I decided to get out before I got kicked out, so I packed up my gear and turned to go, only to see an old woman sitting on her apartment balcony. Apparently, she had been watching me the whole time.
The resort town of Vieste unfolds below this clifftop view. Click for larger view.
Cityscapes and architecture
