Santa Maria Della Consolazione

It’s a well know problem for people who live near famous or desirable tourist attractions: they never visit them.

I used to ride my motorcycle or even drive my car past this distinctive church innumerable times in a week. It’s on the edge of the city of Todi which is the nearest town to my village, a commercial and social hub. From my village 12 miles away  it is a clear landmark on the horizon: 

You come into town and there it is “the Consolazione” an old familiar blob by the side of the street. 

They were closing when I arrived but she squeezed me and my camera in at the last minute. I guess I must have been in there before but honestly I can’t remember so my breath was quite taken away by the beauty inside the church. 

In the old days the church was a bit of a head scratcher as no one knew who was responsible for creating it. I know it’s hard to imagine but the Papal States (which were dissolved only on September 20th 1870) were absolutely littered with these kinds of churches monuments and ruins and the Papal bureaucracy was much less efficient than the secret police. They just lost track of this stuff. 

The authorities used to say the temple was “attributed to” Donato Bramante (1444 - 1514) a wildly successful Papal architect. You may have heard of the cathedral in Rome known as St Peter’s, he was commissioned to design that masterpiece to mark the place where St Peter was martyred. In a list of his buildings you probably won’t find the Consolazione. However nowadays there is the tourist trade to consider so his hand in the design of this church is now definite… in 1508. He was a busy man as St Peter’s was designed in 1503 and Michelangelo started work in 1506. 

Apparently this is a Renaissance church built more as a square with a dime reminiscent of St Peter’s. But what it makes me think is how stuff there is lying around Italy, so much art and history that the origins of a building as particular as this can essentially get lost. 

That and the fact that tourism has arrived in the backwater where I spect my childhood. Not only can you get pizza delivery nowadays…

…but back at home banal public buildings are now labeled as historic sites for the benefit of the passersby walking these villages to discover their heritage. 

I wandered around a bit outside the church at Todi pondering the benefit of the internet which makes what was obscure well known suddenly. 

And had I known all those years ago riding to band practice or coming to market, would this 21st century knowledge have made a difference? I’d like to think I’d have stopped and pondered things more and not taken these beauties for granted. But I was a callow youth and I had no Google! 

Central Italy By Moonlight

It was quite the night to be abroad in the hills of Umbria when the moon was full and the hills were quite atmospheric.


We were walking along a path when I took these pictures through the trees and it was a lovely warm night.


Later we got in the car and started driving not quite aimlessly while we watched the last of the sun go down,


This is the Tiber valley at sunset and one can just see the river between the folds of the hills. My wife's breath was literally taken away by the beauty of it all. Most gratifying.


We drove across the valley planning dinner at Todi, the city on the hill. The city is famous for it's domed cathedral and no one knows who designed it. The say it's "attributed to Bramante" and that name means quality.


The dome is called Our Lady of the Consolation, la Consolazione, and it is quite beautiful.


It was the perfect night, warm and enticing, so naturally I started playing with my camera. This was a three second exposure.


This one was a ten second exposure.


It was a indeed a great night for photography.


Todi is a small market town, and frankly far too much like Key West in some respects, when this was where I came to do my shopping, to buy my newspaper and occasionally to see a movie an escape from a winter night in my dank cold home in the village.


Everyone knows everyone in this town and that wore me out when I was a youngster.


I try not to overdo the sepia with my camera setting but these I couldn't resist.


We drove through town, and somehow the evening lost some of is magic.


A narrow street, construction,street lights glaring and thus we were back to reality.


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Morruzze By Night

I was invited to Giovanni's fiftieth birthday party at his parent's summer home in the country. It was a busy affair and I got rather tired as being introduced as the one from America so I chose my moment and buggeredoff into the cold June night to take some pictures and relax:

When we were kids Giovanni spent his summers at this end of the street and I lived in the castle at the other end, which I photographed by day:

The weather was actually crap, rainy and gray and about 50 degrees (10C) after the sun went down. Walking the village by night this June reminded me of many long lonely winters I spent in the unheated house:The family mansion has been empty since I left and it was sold to some businessmen who had grand ideas for the grand structure that they have managed to do absolutely nothing with. There it sits dominating the village and deteriorating as only grand old homes know how. It looks like someone is in the downstairs study, but its just a street light reflected in the glass.

That picture evoked for me the endless winter nights sitting by the fire reading and waiting for the short cold days to pass. It was not a happy time for me. Not many people live in the village, even fewer than when I lived there and nowadays most of them are temporary, the equivalent of snowbirds in Florida. The empty square damp with June's extravagant rainfall I found had all sorts of angles for the camera:

I thought this shot of the village church had something of the Hollywood Mexican about it. Once a year on the feast of St John the Baptist I climbed the tower and helped ring the chime on the big bell: The village was dedicated to the proposition that grain harvested had to be stored so they built large stone warehouses to pile the stuff into. Just because the buildings had a purpose didn't mean they couldn't be stylish:And off the main piazza there's a road leading down to the back of the village where a few more hardy souls live, year round.And of course there is a little shrine in the wall, the sort of shrine one sees anywhere in the world, even Key West. I photographed a similar display one night on Flagler Avenue and published the picture in this blog. Here's the shrine in the wall in Morruzze, taken with a flash:And speaking of shrines this isn't the only one. The bigger of the shrines is at the entrance to the village, a chapel sized building surrounded by boxwood hedges and live oak trees:The altar cloth was providing a snug residence for a couple of locals seeking shelter from the unseasonable rains:My front door looks out on the main piazza and it was for many years my garage door as my first Vespa lived inside the door in a vestibule under the stairs as did all my early mopeds and motorcycles when they were small enough to fit:Later I took to parking them in the main courtyard under the house, an area I stuck my camera in and fired off a flash. The "new" owners don't seemed to have developed a grasp of what to do with the space. I had the same problem:Just looking at the pictures makes me miss my snug little 800 square foot berth on a canal in the Lower keys. Less is best, it turns out.

Both my sisters continue to live in large converted farm houses and both of them complain they are too big and cumbersome. Elizabeth lives in the house in the middle distance:

Her twin Patricia lives in this house that she is planning on renting in the future:

And from here the view across the Tiber valley to Todi, a medieval hill town in the best Italian tradition, full of romance and movie theaters and market days for the desperate peasants stuck in the surrounding countryside. This view was the back drop to my youth:Architecture, History and Art, and I turned my back on it all. There's a proverb that comes to my mind when people ask, breathlessly why I left. "Those with teeth don't have bread while the people with bread don't have teeth." The bread for my teeth lies in the islands off the tip of Florida, not in the mountains of Umbria. Weird but true.