After a week of travelling around I’m back from my holiday in Italy. I did not take any digital camera, except for the one built into my mobile phone 😉 so it will take a moment till I post some photos.
I have tried myself with a twin-lens-reflection Yashica Mat — a 6×6 MF camera, a lovely thing the size of a shoebox. I love it. Silent shutter — [click] and it’s there — no mirror slap, no viewfinder blackout, you shoot from the waist level, so you the perspective is better when shooting people, it’s discrete and it’s got a — 6×6 — bright matte screen. If all you have seen till now were APS-C class dSLR viewfinders you better sit before you have look into one like this here 🙂
Sure, it’s nowhere close to the ,,top”, mainly since there’s no ,,top” — you can make it better if you put more money in, period.
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blah, blah on technical BS, but it’s not why we went for a trip, isn’t it?
Okay, the time was short and we wanted to see a lot, so it was kinda intense. We started by going to Milano, but we stayed there only for several hours, had a look around the cathedral and a bit of the old town and then we moved to Pisa. We spent the first night in Italy there, actually I screwed the organisation a good bit — we could have had a night view of Pisa, but hadn’t, because I haven’t had checked the buses beforehand and it turned out, that we’d have to walk back to the hostel (located in the outskirts…). Anyway, we slept and refreshed we took a sturm on the Pisa’s Leaning Tower, had a peek into the Baptisterium and a short rest at the ancient cementery. We walked across the oldtown and had a dinner at a small restaurant. In the early afternoon we moved on to Firenze. The hotel owner, Bettricia, picked us up at the railway station and gave us a ride to the place we were to stay.
After we stuffed our luggage there and had a quick shower we left for an evening round through the city. Charming. Pisa looked small and old, Florence looked big and old. Both felt like an old city living, unlike Rome, where I had the feeling, that people try living a modern life on ruins of an ancient, long dead civilisation. Well, whatever.
We’ve had as much look of Firenze, as we could, on the following day. We stayed there in total two nights and on Tuesday morning left for Roma.
Roma disappointed me… Maybe I have just expected too much, or maybe ist’s destiny of every old, huge agglomeration, but it felt to me like new life was trying to live around the artifacts of the ancient empire rather than enjoying it. You know, like an owner of an old house, who feels burdened by the need to keep the original look of his property rather than wanting himself to preserve it. I don’t know if I can make this feeling clear…
Whatever. The main checklist had to be read, we’ve been thru it all — Colosseo, Palatinat, Forum Romanum, San Petro, the famed museum of Vatican (hey, do they have any descriptions for their collections, or they themselves don’t have a clue of what they show?! No map, no tags, either go study art’s history before or feel dumb like we did), San Angelo, and, and, and. We stayed for three days and we could just as well stay another month, it wouldn’t be enough really to see it all. We were running low on time and wanted still to see Venezia, so we left on Thursday evening on a night train heading north…
Venezia! This was really a pearl of our trip. Two days went by REALLY fast, the city is beautiful and if you avoid the surroundings of San Marco — almost tourist free (sic!). Although the city gets visited by more than 20 Million tourists a year, they mostly stay in the city center and avoid geting lost in the labirynth of small streets, bridges and channels. Just forget that map you have, we had like three of them and none really listed all streets correctly. There street names repeat, there are many places called just the same, not all bridges are marked and some marked turn non-existing. Houses are not numbered by streets, but by districts, and pretty at random if we’re at it. good luck, the trip will be lovely! Just start looking for a way out something like an hour before you need to depart, you can get to the station from just about wherever in the city within one hour so no worries 😛
Well, Venezia was our last stop, we just took a sleeper back to Germany from there. As soon as I have my photos developed and scanned, I’ll post some…