Photofile 08.22: A trip to Italy
A monthly retrospective via my camera lens.
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Imagine this: A summer on bicycles, the long days spent between laps in the pool and dining family-style under the shaded groves of olive trees where an old wooden table awaits adorned with olive oil made fresh from the very canopy above, oven hot bread, juicy red tomatoes, and blood-red wine.
This is the trip I have desired for quite some time.
Since watching the film Call Me By Your Name, Italy has been at the top of my travel list. It has also been a trip Alex and I have fantasized about doing since we’ve been together—to rent a house in the country for three weeks or more, or for whatever we could afford. It would be required to have a pool, stone architecture with arching doorways, a big bathtub, and enough rooms so that any and all of our family or friends could join us if they’d like. It would be our treat. But only if you brought more wine.
Alas, my first trip to Italy has now come and gone, and though the experience was rich in all aspects of bike riding, food and wine, it was a trip of a different nature, with a different itinerary than one of just sitting around and gorging grapes. And I loved it just as much.
About a year ago, my parents asked if Alex and I would be interested in joining them on a two-week trip to Italy. It seemed my mom had gotten the bug, not unlike what I had gotten from Call Me By Your Name. She had been convinced by the stories and pictures of a close friend who had only just returned from a vacation of her own. My mom said the plan would be to use her friend’s itinerary as a skeletal structure for our own; and as soon as Alex and I said we were obviously on board, they even ended up hiring the same travel agent, eventually tweaking the fine details to our own tastes and preferences.
Our trip lasted fifteen day and consisted of visiting the cities of of Venice, Florence (and Tuscany), Pisa, Rome, Pompeii, and finally, Sorrento and the Amalfi coast, including the wonderful island of Capri. For fifteen days, we lived off a diet of pasta, pizza, calamari, gelato, limoncello, Aperol spritz, olive oil, red wine, white wine, and more and more wine.
For mom, it was her first time in Europe ever. For dad, it was the first time outside of business trips, and never had he been to Italy. Only Alex had been—once for a school trip, and then she just so happened to be in Florence two weeks prior to our departure on a business trip of her own.
I could, for sure, write on about each day of our trip in what would easily become tiresome detail. I could regale you with descriptions of the awe-inspiring Michelangelo’s David, the Vatican and Colosseum in Rome, the ruins of Pompeii, the pasta-making class we took in Florence, or the bike and wine tours in Tuscany, the boat tour off the island of Capri.
But let us avoid the long drag and instead, for those interested, let me simply leave you with a small selection of photos (from the almost three-thousand captured) to speak for themselves.
I am beyond grateful to my parents for the experience—to have shared it with Alex—and to be left with an album and mind full of memories. I dovhope you enjoy.
If you liked these photos and want to see more photos, check out my Instagram where I posted a lot of B&W street style photos during the time we were there: @conktales