The Val D’Orcia is one of the most famous valleys in the world even though the name itself may not mean much. Tourists have travelled the Roman road called the via Cassia since the 16th century on the Grand Tour, but before them it was trod by pilgrims on their way to Rome and before that the Roman Legions. In fact scenes from The Gladiator were filmed here.

The Grand Tour

The Medici family constructed Post Houses along the road to welcome the Grand Tourists on their travels. We visited the Osteria Grande in Radicofani and photographed its abandoned interior in 2017. Personally I love photographing uninhabited ghostly buildings. Constructed in 1584 , it has welcomed through its doors almost every celebrity to have ever visited Rome before the age of rail. Mozart was here with his father Leopold, Charles Dickens complimented the spacious, carpeted quarters with its open fire. The Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph II, Stendhal, Chateaubriand and many more stopped over.

Medici Post House portico, Radicofani  with rings for tethering horses. Known as Osteria Grossa, the Great Hostelry. The coach house door is at the far end.

The Medici Portico, fountain and horse trough from 1603. The Six Balls are the Medici Arms. This was sketched by William Turner in 1828 when he stayed here.

The Medici Hostelry from the road

The Chilly Interior

Medici Hostelry Entrance Hall scaled by scores of celebrated artists, writers, musicians and dandies.

Kitchen and Dining hall

Radicofani stands at 800m and it was notoriously cold in the travelling season of Spring and Autumn. This was the only fireplace other than the Popes’ quarters so very often  ‘milord’ would sleep in front of this fire with his servants rather than in the door-less, unheated rooms upstairs.  An alternative was to sleep in the basement in his coach warmed by the horses.

The Basement was warmer

stables in basement of Medici Hostelry

The Loggia affords a  fine view up to Radicofani town with its castle above.

stairs leading to sleeping quarters

Popes had it better

The Popes’ apartment had a fireplace with a chariot race fresco above, and even doors. Did the Medici ever let it to lesser mortals?  After all, only two popes ever stayed here, Pius VI  and Pius VII (no relation). Pius VI is one of the real people who features in De Sade‘s  1797 novel ‘Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded‘. His audience with Juliette ends in an orgy involving the pope himself.  The Marquis  also stayed here, could they possibly have met? Napoleon, though notoriously anticlerical himself, imprisoned De Sade for the depravities of the novel for the rest of his life.  Casanova  was also a guest.  And was this the fireplace Dickens described?

Popes had ‘mod cons’,  even a bathtub

Pope Pius VII passed a night 3rd November 1809 suffering from a light fever on his way as a French prisoner to crown Napoleon in Paris.

The art critic Brian Sewell made an entertaining documentary ‘Brian Sewell’s Grand Tour’ in which he reads from entertaining actual accounts of the ‘milords’ who stayed here. We forget how tough travelling was before the railway age,  even for the wealthy. Later he also visits Orvieto where he makes some amusing comments within the cathedral. Highly recommended, unless you find his voice too much – somebody said, ‘He even makes the Queen sound common.’

Read Part One – Grand Tour: Radicofani on the Cassia – here

The post Radicofani and the Grand Tour – Part 2 appeared first on Camera Etrusca Photography Holidays & Workshops in Italy.

In April 2015 we went on a photo tour to the ruined city of Castro.

Castro before destruction painted around 1567

415 years ago a city in Central Italy the capital of the Duchy of Castro was totally destroyed, not by earthquake or flood, but by the Pope himself egged on by his sister in law who had a pernicious influence over him. The malevolent female appears to have been motivated solely by personal spite against her erstwhile neighbours, the Farnese family.

Castro as it is now, just a wooded hill. From here cannon bombarded the city in 1649

Nowadays it seems as though the world is going from bad to worse, but perhaps we just have to admit it is just the usual cycle of civilisation being assaulted from without and within by barbarism; after all 25 years ago we still had the Berlin Wall and the constant threat of nuclear war; 70 years ago the Second World War was drawing to a close, but hundreds of thousands were still to die in the last months; a hundred years ago the Armenian genocide began in the Ottoman Empire, and Italy despite observing the blood letting in France, Belgium, Gallipoli and Russia stood poised to enter the war against its erstwhile ally Austria in May 1915.

Castro, the remains of St Savino church, patron saint of Castro. The bells now hang in St Agnes church, Piazza Navona Rome.

However, things in the mid 17th century were almost as bad with unusually cold winters, caused by decreased sunspot activity and meteor showers resulting in famine all over the world, and widespread wars. Bellicosity is usually attributed to men, but in 1649 a fearsome Italian female was to cause grievous harm purely out of spite. Donna Olimpia Maidalchini was the sister in law of Pope Doria Pamphilj, Innocent X . Venal, mean, unscrupulous, felonious and avaricious as it was conceivable to be, yet she somehow insinuated herself into the Pope’s confidence and possibly his bed as well.

San Savino church, open charnel chambers in the foreground still containing the bones of the forbears of Castro

She was particularly antagonistic towards the powerful Farnese family. She convinced the Pope to initiate a dispute over the placement of a bishop to the Dukedom of Castro, the Farnese seat. The luckless bishop was murdered possibly by Farnese agents and Donna Olimpia now had her excuse.

Patrick Nicholas stands amongst the ruins in 2013 which have now been cleared to beautify the ruined city

The same area now after spending €445,000 of EU funds – a sea of cement.

She convinced Pope Innocent to send his German mercenaries to lay siege to Castro in the summer of 1649. When the city fell the order went out that nothing was to remain more than knee high. Explosives blew up fortifications, cables pulled down principal buildings, carvings and statues were cast down into the ravines. It all sounds horribly familiar, but this was a papal army destroying a Christian city a mere 100km north of Rome.

Restoration at Castro. Faux iron railing beloved of these restoration projects

The surviving population, including its Jewish community, was dispersed amongst local towns, the forest took hold and Castro, a city that had been continuously inhabited since Etruscan times and before, was given the epithet The Carthage of the Maremma.

…but rescue is on the way, public funding, hooray!

However, the destruction has not stopped. The ruins have been plundered of treasures over the last 40 years. Fireplaces from Castro end up in refurbished country houses, 16th century doorways now open onto manicured Tuscan lawns, and frescoes revealed by recent legal excavations of enthusiastic, unpaid volunteers have disappeared onto the international art market, while what remains is being either ‘renovated’ with tons of cement, metres of plastic sheeting, and dozens of pointless mock iron railings, as a way of tapping into Euro-funding, or is disappearing fast through neglect.

Before

……. and half a million €uro after. Note that the paving is no longer there. Probably now in some local councilor’s rockery.

The neglect round the corner is  astonishing – how could so much be spent on a useless ‘restoration’ when round the corner is a scene of utter desolation?

Santa Maria Intus Civitatem, open to the elements and crumbling, is not 25 metres from the ‘restored’ area. The protective plastic sheeting  is all but destroyed.

a modern crucifixion

The frescoes that have not already been stolen are crumbling and fading

shotgun wound

After Castro was completely destroyed the Papal army placed a stele in the middle of what remained of Piazza Maggiore, “QUI FU CASTRO” Here was Castro. Even that has disappeared. Maria has been weeping ever since, but she will not be weeping much longer, she will be gone along with almost everything there was worth weeping for.

fast fading weeping Virgin in St Maria’s church

The post Photo Excursion to Castro on our Photography Tour in Italy. appeared first on Camera Etrusca Photography Holidays & Workshops in Italy.

Near Orvieto on a ridge looking over a deep valley into Southern Tuscany stands a sinister looking castle in the mock-Gothic style of the late nineteenth century. It once belonged to the immensely rich Cahen family, still remembered in Orvieto where a square is named after them. The castle was intended to be the country home of Conte (later Marquess) Edoardo Cahen and his beautiful Anglo-Greek wife Christine, but neither of them were ever to live there. Édouard Cahen d’Anvers died in Rome in 1894 before the castle was completely refurbished; she separated from him and died in Meran in 1884. Now Castle Cahen in Torre Alfina is uninhabited, used only for private functions.

Creepy Places to photograph in Tuscany: Cahen Castle, Torre Alfina, Orvieto, Italy

Edoardo Cahen, scion of the Cahens d’Anvers, belonged to the cosmopolitan Jewish European aristocracy – akin to royalty but with a lot more cash – that moved effortlessly from one country to another, spoke several languages fluently, had branches of the same family in several capitals, and having made their fortunes in banking, commerce and insurance were happy to devote themselves to cultural pursuits rather than huntin’, shootin and fishin’ which were the most common pastimes amongst the older established aristocracies around Europe. The Cahens d’Anvers became rich through the novel idea of using the pigeon post between Antwerp and Amsterdam to steal a march on their stock market rivals. Edoardo Cahen was granted a concession to build part of the Prati neighbourhood of Rome after the Unification of Italy.

Alice (L) and Elisabeth Cahen (R) by Renoir. Elisabeth was murdered in Auschwitz.

Edoardo’s three nieces were painted by Renoir. However, his brother Louis disliked the painting of Alice and Elisabeth so much it was hung in the servant’s quarters; what is more he quibbled and stalled over paying the bill, 1,500 francs (about 10-15,000 Euros today), arousing a previously un-manifested anti-Semitism in the artist. The Cahens may have been notable patrons of the arts, but this incident perhaps demonstrates that their taste was possibly rather arriviste.

Irène’s daughter Béatrice along with her husband and two young children died in Auschwitz as did her sister Elisabeth and other members of the family. The painting became part of Herman Göring’s illicit collection.

Irène Cahen, Eduardo’s neice by Renoir

Edoardo’s father Joseph Mayer Cahen d’Anvers had lent considerable funds to finance the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy, and a grateful nation bestowed upon him the title of Conte. The influence of capital on the fate of nations is often underestimated. Edoardo Cahen then developed a large area of Rome, even before it became the capital of Italy, near the Vatican an area that was to be known as Prati.

After these exertions, he decided to retire with his wife to a tumbledown castle near Orvieto in the wilds of the Umbria-Latium borders. She was Christine Spartali the younger of two highly educated and beautiful sisters who moved in the artistic beau-monde of 1860s London. Christine’s sister Marie was considered by the Pre-Raphaelites, ‘one of the most beautiful women of her generation’. Indeed the poet Algernon Swinburne was so smitten he exclaimed, ‘She is so beautiful I feel as if I could sit down and cry.’ It has to be said however that he was quite wont to weeping.

La Principesse, now in the Peacock Room, Freer Collection, Washington D.C.

Marie Spartali had been painted by Rossetti and went on to become a notable professional painter for the rest of her long life, whilst Christine modelled for Whistler in 1864 – she was the ‘Principesse du Pays de la Porcellaine’ possibly his most famous painting. She was photographed by the most famous portrait photographer of her day, Julia Margaret Cameron sometime between 1865 and 70 probably in the Isle of White where they were neighbours. Exposures were long in those days so it was hard to manifest unbridled joy, but there is no denying that she has a more than usual Pre-Raphelite mournfulness about her.

The long exposures required by Cameron’s photography were as of naught compared with posing for Whistler: twice a week for 6 months till eventually Christine fell ill and had to be replaced with a stand-in to finish the picture. Besides the Whistler picture (which Spartali père did not like and refused to purchase) many of Marie Spartali’s paintings of typically Pre-Raphaelite subjects seem to portray her younger sister. This obsessive interest in one model was common amongst the Pre-Raphaelites.

Christine Spartali, Julia Margaret Cameron about the time she met Cahen

Both Spartali girls were exceptionally tall (Marie was 190cm) and highly educated, but whereas the elder sister studied painting under Ford Maddox Brown and became a noted painter for the rest of her long life, Christine never pursued a career. Marie fascinated Edward Burne Jones who portrayed her in his Cupid Delivering Psyche – in both male and female roles; he was known for his exotic sexual tastes.

Cupid and Psyche, Burne-Jones

Christine married Cahen in 1869 in Chelsea despite the opposition of her Greek Orthodox father, the Greek consul general in London. How did they meet? Did Cahen move in the arty world of the Pre-Raphaelites and their like? We have no picture of him and I cannot find any account of his time in London. One of his brothers, Albert, was a reasonably well-known composer in France who studied under César Franck.

Path leading to the Cahen mausoleum through The Sasseto wood

At first they had enjoyed the cosmopolitan life in Naples, Rome and Paris where their 2 boys were born, but it seems in Rome the marriage began to go wrong and by 1880 she was attempting – unsuccessfully – to divorce Cahen. Her health deteriorated, possibly owing to the depressing prospect of a chatelaine’s life in darkest Umbria, but at least this illness brought about a partial reconciliation with her father. She took to chloral hydrate and alcohol. According to Rossetti’s brother Michael she died miserable and alone in Tirol of catalepsy in 1884, though it is more likely that the chloral carried her off aged just 37.

Edoardo Cahen, lover of Greco Roman art, took the bizarre decision to build himself a mock gothic mausoleum which would not have looked out of place in Highgate Cemetery.

Cahen bought Torre Alfina in 1881, but it took 20 years to make it truly habitable by which time Cahen and his wife were both dead and there was practically nothing left of the original mediaeval building – what we see today is a mock gothic pile.

Cahen Mausoleum

Cahen Mausoleum in Sasseto Wood

Rather like the fictional Moisè Finzi-Contini who built a monstrous sepulchre looking like a set from Aida that all Ferrara’s Jewish community found absurd, Edoardo Cahen lover of Greco Roman art took the bizarre decision to build himself a mock gothic mausoleum which would not have looked out of place in Highgate Cemetery (where incidentally Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Sidall is buried).

It lies in the forest a kilometre or so below the mock Gothic castle which he never lived to see completed – he died in 1894 aged 62.

Peeking through the door to the open tomb

The earthly remains of Édouard Cahen d’Anvers, Born 1832 died, Rome, 3 May 1894 in the 62nd year of his life as it says on the coffin.

His body was embalmed by the Vatican’s own undertaker; his coffin placed on the top shelf in a vault designed to host generations of Cahens, it lies alone. The sons never brought their mother’s remains to the sepulcher. She was buried in the Spartali vault in London. The two sons left Italy with the introduction of the racial laws in 1938 when Jews were banned from owning property amongst other restrictions.

Edoardo Cahen’s coffin amongst on the top of otherwise empty shelves in the Mausoleum

photographer Patrick Nicholas is reflected in the water

The Writing on the Wall

The two Cahen sons left Italy following The Racial Manifesto of 1938 when Jews were stripped of their citizenship, barred from the professions, excluded from banking, education and the civil service; they were also liable to have their property confiscated. Italian Jewry had been emancipated during the process of the unification of Italy between 1860 and 1870, but now Mussolini determined to cement the Berlin Rome Axis by bringing Italian racial laws into line with Germany’s. 6,000 Jews emigrated 1938-1943. Of those that stayed something over 6,000  perished out of a pre-1938 population of  46,500.

Racial Laws in cartoon form with evident racialist stereoptypes in a fascist paper.

Rome Berlin Axis, Castiglione del Lago station, Trasimene

In 1943-4 the castle was used by the Germans as a command centre and suffered bomb damage as a result. The contents were auctioned off in 1969. Neither Cahen sons had children.

During wartime the mausoleum sacrificed its iron railings and recently the tomb was broken into, the grave stone smashed, the coffin desecrated.

The castle until recently belonged to an absentee landlord, the uncouth, corpulent, criminal bankrupt, Luciano Gaucci who starting from humble beginnings with a cleaning business in Rome, graduated to money laundering on a grand scale and onto wholesale corruption in the football business. He lists his enthusiasms as sex, horses and football.

The castle is now in the hands of a trust and is visitable.

The Cahen mausoleum

The abandoned swimming pool in the Sasseto grounds near the castle. Neither of the two Cahen sons had children.

Garden sculpture, the grinning faun in the Hermetic garden

The Hermetic garden

For those who have a taste for the sinister, we can include in our tour of places to photograph in Tuscany, the creepy Castle Cahen and its mock Gothic tomb in the woods.

Contact me for more info.

The post Creepy Places to photograph in Tuscany: Castle Cahen, a Mock-Gothic Style Mansion of the Late Nineteenth Century in Italy. appeared first on Camera Etrusca Photography Holidays & Workshops in Italy.

St John the Baptist’s Church, San Lorenzo Vecchio, Lake Bolsena, from afar

Until the 1920s malaria was the scourge of the Italy. Often entire communities were decimated because the origins of the disease were unknown. The name Malaria comes from the belief that bad air (lit. mal aria) was the cause. In English it was commonly called the Ague.

Church of San Lorenzo Vecchio

One solution was to move the town away from the pestilential air to higher ground, often to a healthy area called piano sano, the healthy plateau.   In the XVIII century much of the lakeside town of San Lorenzo was demolished, its stones transported to the heights above Lake Bolsena and re-erected as San Lorenzo Nuovo with an octagonal piazza. The church of St John the Baptist, however, was spared, though its roof has fallen in.

A mournful view of the church of St John the Baptist

The old town lay astride the pilgrims’ road to Rome known as the Via Francigena, the Frankish Road, which until the Reformation led all the way from Canterbury.

Surviving fresco

The church designed by Pietro Tartarino, and completed in 1590 is unusual. It is octagonal, and occupies a site once sacred to the Etruscan and  for whom Lake Bolsena was the centre of their cult, the Omphalos, the navel of their world. The XVIII century piazza in San Lorenzo Nuovo is also octagonal.

St John the Baptist’s church

Catholic miracles abound in places where the old religion proved particularly hard to eradicate. Nearby Bolsena has not one , but two miracles associated with the town, a sign that adherence to the old religion was particularly obdurate. This church in Val di Lago, close by the Etruscan city of Tyre, may mark the site of the miracle of Santa Cristina. Though not the case here, a church raised on the site of a miraculous defeat of paganism is often dedicated to St Michael and the pagan power is represented as a dragon. However, the octagonal shape, the preferred form of Templar churches, could be significant.

Chancel of St John’s church with surviving roof

The roof over the chancel has survived, as have some frescoes and even some stucco sculpture. There even seems to be some blast damage, a reminder that the war passed through here in 1944. All in all the church of San Lorenzo Vecchio is a miracle in itself, of survival.

The charm of the place lies in its desolate remoteness among the swamps near Lake Bolsena. However a quite useless fence was erected in 2012, and mock cast-iron lamp-posts were scattered about. A case of European Union largesse being sprinkled  on ostensibly worthy projects perhaps? It would not surprise me if some over enthused local politician were to raise European Union funds to erect a concrete roof, re-stucco the building and spray paint it his mistresses’ favourite colour of tasteful pork pink. It would not be the first time.

St John the Baptist’s has a lugubrious beauty in winter

May Patrick Nicholas’ photographic workshop: Tuscany, Orvieto, Lake Bolsena and Barabbata festival.

May festival at Lake Bolsena, Italy

 Start the summer with Camera Etrusca’s Barabbata Festival Workshop with led by patrick Nicholas. Held every year on May 14 on the shores of Lake Bolsena. This joyous festival with pagan origins has colourful floats drawn by men and animals through the picturesque fishing village (the womenfolk just cast blossom from the balconies) is held to mark the beginning of summer.
As usual we would like to offer a discount to all the people that want to start the summer season with us.

The post Hidden treasure to photograph: Octagonal Church Ruin in Val di Lago, Bolsena appeared first on Camera Etrusca Photography Holidays & Workshops in Italy.

Orso Orsini was a prince of wild ways. Wayward brother of the cultured condottiero Niccolò, he married the beautiful Eleanora degli Atti di Morlupo, whose name was long but her life short. He strangled her in a fit of unfounded jealousy in 1575 on the bridge outside Pitigliano and threw her body into the ravine.

Bower sculpted from the volcanic rock

The recently completed Parco Orsini  thus came to be known as the lugubrious Parco degli Strozzoni, Stranglers Park.

Crumbling thrones overlooking the valley in the Orsini Park, Pitigliano.

And yet the park had been planned as a place of quiet contemplation, a ‘locus amoenus’ along the lines of the nearby  Bosco Sacro or Sacred Wood of Bomarzo (below), built about the same time in 1552.

Bomarzo, “Ogni Pensiero Vola” (“Every Thought Flies”, but games, even hide and seek, picnics, photography – all forbidden)

This had been laid out with grotesque and massive sculpture on the orders of Vicino Orsini, a distant cousin of Orso and Niccolò. Vicino had had the garden designed on Hermetic principles by Pirro Ligorio,

Bomarzo

architect of genius (he was responsible for the water works at Villa Este in Tivoli and was also the first Italian to design buildings specifically to resist earthquakes).

The sculpture was designed to amaze, and it still does though the garden is not what it was and the water element is now completely missing; Bomarzo also has the stroppiest, most belligerent and gratuitously discourteous custodians I have ever encountered, anywhere. Bomarzo is now a major tourist attraction visited by the likes of Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalì and Antonioni. It even featured in  film version of ‘Alice in Wonderland’.

not perhaps what you might think but the remains of a reclining goddess

Parco Orsini on the other hand has no custodians at all, is difficult to find and what is more the statuary is largely overgrown, crumbling and un-cared for – it is just like stumbling upon an enchanted secret garden.

the reclining goddess from the other side

The statue of the Orsini family in Pitigliano, Tuscany.

Orso Orsini who quite apart from strangling his luckless wife also had a neighbour of his Galeazzo Farnese murdered during a hunting party. He got his comeuppance when he was himself slain on a bridge by Prospero Colonna.

The model is trying the pose for  “Carpe Diem” on one of the several thrones looking over the Lente valley

At the end of the escarpment there is a belvedere carved out of the rock with a fine view across the Lente Valley towards Sorano. I have used this enchanted wood in two my pictures  This Autumn Evening and Carpe Diem (in which you may notice a transposed Orsini bear).

an out-take from the This Autumn Evening shoot

Rather optimistically the local municipality, at considerable expense, built a recreation area with scores of wooden picnic tables. However in true municipal style they neglected to create access or a parking area, so now it is as overgrown, out of sight and unknown as the Orsini Park itself – which does not exactly break my heart.

The post Hidden treasure to photograph: an enchanted secret garden, Stranglers Park in Pitigliano, Tuscany. appeared first on Camera Etrusca Photography Holidays & Workshops in Italy.

Cycladic statue

The interior was frescoed, a semi circle of  the apostles, but these sadly were brutally hacked off  (you can see the signs above the arch) and sold illegally in the 1960s. Thankfully they were later recovered and they are now in the Ischia di Castro Museum.
Some frescoes survive mainly over the alter. These manifest the close ties between the ancient church and the popular beliefs still prevalent in the Italian countryside.
Worship is an inaccurate word for the pagan rites that took place here, it implies adoration of an omnipotent God whereas the rituals that the Etruscans and others practised were more about celebrating oneness with nature and the cosmos. The deities could have been several: Turan, the Etruscan Venus; Minerva; or the male deity Fufluns, the Etruscan Bacchus. Bacchanalia are usually associated with the Romans (and parties organised by the Italian Prime Minister) but similar rites are  common to all antique cultures and survive even today in aboriginal peoples.

curious (for a Christian church) frescoes above the altar

In pre-Christian Italy it was common practise to hold rites in a Sacred Grove. Making music was integral: drums, tambourines, castanets, pipes, trumpets and dancing to the point of ecstasy. Singing too, even yelling were part of the ritual. The ancient world was much darker and almost silent by modern standards – and a lot more dangerous; thus the sense of hearing would have had a much greater importance in respect to sight. A place like the sacred glade would have been chosen for magical rights because of its extraordinary acoustics.

cascade from above

Scientists in the field of archeo-acoustics from Princeton University have recently found that the resonance found in caves, grottoes and amphitheatres like Stonehenge have a  frequency of 110 Hz which in turn has an effect on the left hemisphere of the brain, damping it and causing an asymmetry in the pre-fontal cortex leading to a predominance of the right side. The result is a diminution of the centres of language and a heightening of the emotions. This would have strengthened the emotional charge of those participating in mystical ceremonies.   If alcohol and possibly other drugs were added to the alchemy then it is easy to imagine participants becoming entranced and feeling they were passing from one dimension to another.

I have shot a number of pictures in the sacred glade, for example Nacht und Träume
and Bacchanalia

The post Poggio Conte – Part 2 appeared first on Camera Etrusca Photography Holidays & Workshops in Italy.

“Sunrise glowed red as I climbed along the gorge; when I reached the grove, I saw the altar slab all scattered with brightness, like the harper’s robe. I put down my load, and prayed to Apollo.”

Poggio Conte will appear immediately familiar to anyone who has read Mary Renault’s The King Must Die, a novel based on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, in which she describes in detail a Sacred Glade.

The Sacred Glade, the cliff church is just visible top left.

Poggio Conte is in a remote corner of northern Latium on the borders of Tuscany.

It is quicker……………. and easier in the Land Rover

Most visitors must leave their cars by the road (where the signpost is usually absent) about 5km from the site, walk along the Fiora valley through a bucolic idyl of grazing cattle amongst scarlet poppies.

The last stretch before the wood, the glade is among the trees ahead beneath the cliff

With the Land Rover we can however get much closer before having to leave the vehicle to follow a footpath along a cutting through the cliffs. As we approach the glade we begin to hear an enchanting sound, the tinkle of water cascading onto a blue-black pointed rock.

Sacred Glade cascade

There are Etruscan tombs cut into the cliffs though most have disappeared as the sides of the ravine have collapsed over millennia. However, the cliff church though losing it’s portal to erosion by flood-waters, has survived in the cliff above the concave dell.

Etruscan tombs in the ravine leading to the glade.

Patrick Nicholas has used this location in several of his pictures in the Belle series , for example Lilith.

More about the sacred glade and the hermitage church of San Colomba in the next blog coming up soon.

This is one of the several Photo excursion location that we normally include in our photo workshops and photo tours .

The post Poggio Conte – Part 1, The Sacred Glade appeared first on Camera Etrusca Photography Holidays & Workshops in Italy.

Much of what is now known as northern Latium north of Rome on the borders of Tuscany was until the 1930s a veritable wilderness.

The cliff dwellings of Ripatonna on the Tuscan Latium marches, a veritable wilderness until fairly recently.

Saracen pirates had scourged the area and malaria had done the rest.

The Roman single span bridge over the river Fiora. The arch, an Etruscan invention, is still standing with absolutely no maintenance.

Not surprisingly the region was infested with bandits and outlaws, but also with hermits, lepers, outcasts, monks and nuns. Many of latter led a troglodyte existence hollowing out dwellings in the soft tufa cliffs along the river Fiora.

a picnic in the Selva Lamone forest before we set off.

Ripatonna Cicognina was inhabited by a community of about 200  between XV and XVII centuries. There was a church which once had frescoes by the Sienna School depicting Sant’Antonio Abate, the first Christian hermit.

Archana from Bangalore photographs the interior which still has most of its plaster  embellished by generations of graffiti.

It is a steep but not a hard climb up to the cliff dwelling. The tufa volcanic rock is soft and easy to excavate but then oxidises and hardens, an ideal building material.

The hermitage probably is an enlargement of an Etruscan necropolis going back about 2500 years.

A great place for kids to explore

The post Hidden Treasure to photograph: the hermitage of Ripatonna, South Tuscany. appeared first on Camera Etrusca Photography Holidays & Workshops in Italy.

This dream was to come true when my wife and I moved to Castel Gandolfo in 2002. We rented a flat in the grounds of a villa once owned by Visconti, bought when he was working on his masterpiece The Leopard  in 1962.

Diana’s Baths or The Nymphaeum of Bergantino, Castelgandolfo

One day Lucia told me she had discovered a large cave in the cliff running along the edge of Lake Albano full of garden rubbish. When we investigated further we made out amongst the bushes another bigger opening enclosed by wall with a rusty gate. This was the Nymphaeum of Bergantino built on the orders of Domitian in the grounds of his vast palace now in the gardens of the pope’s summer palace of Castel Gandolfo. The gate was unlocked and I was amazed by what I saw within. The arch is 17 metres across at the opening.

Piranesi Diana baths, Castelgandolfo Rome

Domitian was fond of a barbaric form of gladiatorial entertainment known as the Naumachia, or mock naval battles involving real combatants and it may be that Domitian watched from the shelter of the nymphaeum.
Piranesi drew the Nymphaeum in his inimitable manner in 1762 with nano figures to exaggerate the size of the arch.

Excavations in 1841 revealed mosaics of a gorgon and of Diana drawn in a chariot by four tritons as well as the remains of a marble sculpture of Ulysses slaying the Cyclops. None of which remain on site but are to be found in the private chambers of the pontifical palace. The marble walls and other sculptures disappeared in antiquity.

niches for statues

The Baths of Diana are not open to the public but you can visit them on a Camera Etrusca workshop in Rome or you can contact www.diakronica.it who organise guided visits.

I have recently shot one of my Belle pictures entitled Anima Mundi in this unique location which I will post soon in November 2013 on www.photonicholas.com

The post Hidden Treasure to photograph: Diana’s Baths in Castelgandolfo, Rome appeared first on Camera Etrusca Photography Holidays & Workshops in Italy.

Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard (written in Stoke Poges)

The drift from the land from the 1950s onward has left many Italian villages without any of their original families, resulting in abandoned ‘campo santi’, the village cemeteries. Chianti has become gentrified and just as Gray’s farming village of Stoke Poges has become the abode of bankers and stockbrokers, mean Chianti cottages are now owned by wealthy Florentines as holiday homes, or more commonly foreigners – the Italians do not call this area Chiantishire for nothing.

The cypress avenue in Castellina in Chianti (SI)

I came across this cemetery near Castellina in Chianti and only spotted it because the oak wood around had been thinned for firewood. In fact it was the cypress avenue I spotted first. The cypress has symbolised mourning since its branches were used to garland statues of Pluto, god of the underworld.

Cemetery gate with the funerary chapel at the end

A campo santo is melancholy at the best of times, but one that has no one left to visit it, to tend the graves, to leave flowers, not even on occasion of the day of ‘i morti’, All Hallows, when Italians traditionally return to the graveyard of their forefathers, especially so.

Tin wreaths inside the chapel

In the middle of the chapel floor is the disk that covers the charnel chamber where the bones from the campo santo outside would have been  brought in to release space.

Charnel house

I lifted the lid to reveal chamber below. As Hamlet said while musing on Yorick’s skull in the graveyard “….to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come”

In a cathedral or important church it cost more to be buried within the church, dearer still in the chancel near the saint’s relics before the altar: thus the expression ‘the stinking rich’.

In the cemetery I found the mournful memorial to Valeria Baroncelli, beside a posy of faded plastic flowers.

The stone says she died aged only 17 after a long and pitiful illness on 5th November 1940. I reflected that it would be quite selfish of me to dread my own death after a comparatively long, fruitful and interesting life when Valeria had been taken so young.

Valeria Baroncelli’s ceramic ‘santino’ or momento mori portrait

She was from a family of obscure Chianti  rustics but I find her image hauntingly beautiful. As I wrote this last line I heard quite by chance Dowland’s ‘Lachrimae’ on the radio.

Contact me for a guided photo tour round Tuscany and its hidden treasure

The post Hidden Treasure to photograph: the campo santo, a gem found in an abandoned cemetery in Chianti appeared first on Camera Etrusca Photography Holidays & Workshops in Italy.