Like a David Caspar Friedrich painting, this monument stands atop the mountain at Ještěd, near Liberec, North Bohemia, the former Sudetenland and centre of Bohemian crystal manufacturing.

Searching for snowscapes we travelled up the mountain to Ještěd  at the summit of which stands a futuristic tower designed by the architect Hubáček during the Communist era in 1963 and opened in 1973. It looks like the sort of building one might find on Mars, or at this frozen time of year, perhaps Uranus.

The hyperboloid Ještěd tower designed in 1963, is a futuristic structure within and without, like something out of Kubrik’s 2001, A Space Odyssey (1968). Gagarin, the first cosmonaut, made his Vostok mission into space in 1961, the first ever.

A Cosmonaut sat at our table,

while outside sat a lost, freezing, weeping Martian.

The central staircase column is studded with solid Bohemian crystal glass lamps designed by Libensky and Brychtová to look like meteorites zooming through the cosmos. This was designed in the late sixties, at the height of Soviet-American competition in space. The tower boasts a hotel and restaurant, a giant pendulum, as well as TV transmitter.

If you would like to do a Bohemian Winter Workshop please get in touch.

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Lake Nemi was sacred to the virgin goddess Diana, huntress and protector of childbirth the remains of her shrine have only been partially excavated.  The moon is associated with her and the lake is called Speculum Dianae (Diana’s Mirror) – it particularly captivated the poets and composers who made their homes here.

The Roman emperors recreated naval battles known as  Naumachie on nearby Lake Albano, a form of gladiatorial spectacle involving killing and actual sinkings. When they found submerged boats on Lake Nemi in the 1930s they were presumed to be pleasure boats rather than warships as Lake Nemi was a sacred lake. They were raised and a museum built, but sadly they were destroyed by accident during WW2.

Section of ancient Roman wall in Diana’s shrine, showing ‘opus reticulatum’ and brickwork

Diana’s altar, still in use by modern adherents to her cult, offerings of fruit, prayers and candles.

Nemi is also associated with the myth of Rex Nemorensis, the story of which begins and ends James Frazer’s famous work of anthropology, The Golden Bough (1890). The story goes that the high priest of the shrine at Nemi to Diana, achieved the role through mortal combat with his predecessor; he in turn would be slain by his successor, and so on through the ages. As Macaulay put it:

Those trees in whose dim shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain.

The contender had first to prove his metal by plucking a golden bough (most likely mistletoe growing on the sacred oak) from Diana’s Grove, thus the origin of the legend. Recently, archeologists discovered the fossilised remains of an oak within the sanctuary. Cannabis was cultivated on the shores in ancient times and may have been involved in sacred rituals.

statue of Diana in Nemi village

Nemi, the main street

Strawberries both wild and cultivated

Patrick holds up the famous bread, baked in wood-fired ovens, in nearby Genzano (with a wild boar sausage necklace).

Nemi on the distant hill and Lake Nemi in 1831

A fanciful view of Lake Nemi in The Golden Bough by JMW Turner (1834)

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The most notable building is the edifice commonly known as The Colosseo Quadrato (Square Colosseum) designed as part of the EUR project in 1938. It is officially called The Palace of Italian Civilisation and was designed for the 1942 World’s Fair that was cancelled in 1941 following Mussolini’s declaration of war on Britain and France in 1940. It was not completed till 1953. The frame is reinforced concrete clad with Travertine limestone. Atop the building incised in giant letters are the words from a speech Mussolini made in 1935, ” A people of poets, artists, heroes, saints, thinkers, scientists, navigators, migrants.” No one could take issue with this list.

One of the Dioscuri statues, either Castor or Pollux

The statuary, in Carrara marble, was added from 1942 on. The statues in the arches on the ground floor, represent trades, arts and sciences, while the four equines represent the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux. Although the building has featured in numerous films to illustrate solid Italian clerical-conservatism, I find it an extraordinary radical style of architecture rooted in the classical past. It is also most photogenic in any season or light.

The Flaminia Bridge,  Ponte Flaminio

The Flaminia Bridge was started in 1938, damaged in WW II and not completed till 1951. It features in the 1993 film Dear Diary, and the left-wing director Nanni Moretti is vociferous in his love for the architecture – despite its Fascist origins. The architect, Armando Brasini was popular with the fascist regime and would have demolished large swathes of central Rome as part of a Le Corbusier-style planning revolution in the late 1920s if he had had his way. He was responsible for the architecture and urban planning in various parts of Mussolini’s empire such as Tripoli and Tirana, Albania. He designed many remarkable buildings, but worked little after the war. His grandson lives in Orvieto.

The Fascist Eagle on the Flaminia Bridge

I will publish more posts shortly about Rome’s architecture.

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The red granite Spartali tomb stands behind an armless statue in Norwood Cemetery. The entrance has been bricked up. The Orthodox chapel behind, under scaffolding, is undergoing restoration.

Cristina Cahen died, from an overdose of chloral, possibly accidentally, aged 37, in 1884. It was a fashionable drug in artistic circles, both her sister’s husband Stillman and the painter Rossetti, were habitual users. It calmed the nerves, it was also known as a hynotic drug.

Christina Spartali Cahen

Thankfully, however, after her separation from Eduard, she had had a rapprochement with her father Constantine Ionides. He had her remains brought back home to London from Meran in South Tyrol, Austria (now in Italy), for burial in the Spartali family vault in Norwood cemetery, London. Cahen was despised by Christina’s father, on account of his being short and Jewish, the Spartali family was Greek Orthodox, but also possibly, for his poor taste; evident in the manner in which Count Cahen refurbished his castle near Orvieto. The faux Renaissance mythological and rustic frescoes may have had something to do with Christina’s reluctance to follow her husband there.

Happy, half-naked peasants harvest on the Cahen estate. The mediaeval style Cahen castle tops the hill behind. Extreme right, on the crest of the hill, stands Orvieto.

A scene from the Arabian Nights? Or King David spying on Bathsheba?

A jolly Bacchanalian scene in the grounds of the Count’s castle.

A balloon’s eye view of Orvieto. Viewed from a hang-glider today the city would appear almost identical.

A reminder of the fate awaiting a wayward wife perhaps?

The count’s Landau carriage. Christina would never have ridden in it: when she visited the castle there was not even a paved road leading there from Orvieto.

It would be too pathetic if the Count sought to impress his worldly and cultured wife with these provincial offerings. Whatever, he refused to concede her a divorce. But Cahen could be generous: at his death in 1894, he left a worthy sum in his will to Marie Spartali Stillman, to atone perhaps.

Norwood Cemetery

Spartali over door

The cemetery was consecrated in 1837, the year Queen Victoria ascended to the throne, and immediately attracted high class burials such as Sir Henry Doulton (founder of Royal Doulton china), Sir Hiram Maxim (inventor of the machine gun), Mrs Isabella Beeton (cookery and home management writer), Sir Henry Tate (sugar magnate and founder of the eponymous gallery), Baron Israel Paul von Reuter (founder of the news agency).

The cemetery had state-of-the-art funerary machinery in the mid-1850s. This hoist lowered coffins into the Gothic-style catacombs.

The Greek ‘Stunners’

The central section of the cemetery was bought by the Greek community in 1842 for burials in the classical style, contrasting with the predominantly Gothic architecture of the rest of the cemetery. Many of the women who frequented the demi-monde of the Pre-Raphaelite artistic brotherhood and oftentimes modelled for artists such as Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Ford Madox Brown are interred here. These beautiful, exotic, women were known in artistic circles as ‘stunners’. The brilliant circle of the patriarch Alexander Constantine Ionides also included William Morris, Watts, Whistler, Walter Crane, du Maurier and others.

Maria Zambaco and Ned Burne-Jones (in sepia) with fellow Pre-Raphaelite William Morris (black beard). Mrs Georgie Burne-Jones is seated left. Most of the company looks very glum.

Cristina Spartali, the future Marchioness Cahen of Torre Alfina, was the model for one of Whistler’s most famous paintings, ‘La Princesse du Pays de la Porcellaine’. Her cousin Maria Cassavetti Zambaco was not only Burne-Jones’ model, but his mistress, he painted her obsessively, even as an androgynous-looking man, in several pictures. She posed for all three of his Three Graces. The three ‘stunner ’cousins Marie Spartali, Aglaia Ionides Coronio and Maria Cassavetti Zambaco were known collectively in their circle as “The Three Graces”.

Aglaia Coronio. Portrait by Rossetti 1870

Cristina’s sister Marie not only modelled, but was an accomplished artist in her own right. She enraptured the poet Algernon Swinburne who said of her, “She is so beautiful that I want to sit down and cry”. She died in 1927, was cremated, and unlike the others, was not buried in Norwood, but cremated and interred in Surrey with her husband, the American painter William Stillman. The third beauty of the trio, Aglaia Coronio, is buried alongside the Spartali tomb. A woman of considerable talent, she took her own life after the death of her daughter, stabbing herself with scissors. Theodore Coronio buried his wife and daughter on the same day.

Aglaia’s gravestone

Christina’s sister Marie Spartali Stillman 1868

The large Cassavetti tomb to the left wherein lies Maria Zambaco.  Aglaia Ionides Coronio’s white gravestone lies in the foreground. The large white Ionides family vault stands to the left.

Cupid Delivering Psyche (1867)  by Burne-Jones who portrayed his mistress, the voluptuous Maria Cassavetti Zambaco as Psyche, while Marie Spartali took the part of the somewhat androgynous Cupid. He was as obsessed with the subject as he was with Maria, painting several versions.

The Cassavetti tomb. Maria Cassavetti Zambaco died in Paris, 1914

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Belvedere Temple, showing outer sanctum, with bases of columns, and the inner sanctum beyond. St Patrick’s well lies behind the trees.

Numerous artefacts were found including the miniature bronze statue of Minerva, now in the Civic/Faina Museum. Freud’s favourite statue, bought some time after 1914, is almost identical, in fact Athena is the Greek Minerva. Freud described her as ‘perfect, only she has lost her spear.’ Freud’s Athena is a Roman copy of a Greek original. She holds a patera, a dish for pouring libations, whereas the Orvieto version carries the aegis cloak over her shoulder. Both have the Medusa breastplate.

Right hand ‘ cella ‘ of Inner Sanctum of Minerva

Minerva, the Greek Athena, in the Faina Museum which Freud visited.

The temple was dedicated to the three Capitoline gods: Tinia (Jupiter /Zeus), Uni (Juno/Hera) and Minerva (Athena), most probably on the right side of the sanctum where the tiny statue was found. The temple was constructed almost entirely of wood above the stone podium so little remains, but there would have been a large collonaded portico, the outer sanctum, and then three cellae dedicated to the three gods, the inner sanctum.

We know that Freud started collecting genuine antiquities, as opposed to replicas, the summer of his first Orvieto visit in 1897, and began to arrange them in his consulting rooms on the ground floor of Berggasse 19. Later he transferred to the floor above, the site of the present museum). As his collection grew he arranged his collection in the manner of the Belvedere Temple, the bulk of his antiquities jostled for space in his outer sanctum, the consulting room, in which he had his famous couch, many concealed in drawers; whereas, the Inner Sanctum, his study held his prize pieces, arranged in cabinets, vitrines, and arrayed across his desk, a small army, mainly of statuettes, all directed towards him, the commander in chief. His temple is estimated to have held around three thousand artefacts although many were donated to friends and colleagues over the years. He had a drawer entirely full of Etruscan bronze mirrors and would ask favoured guests to ‘help themselves.’

Engelman’s view of Freud’s study from his consulting room towards the study, Freud’s ‘inner sanctum’, which gave onto a central courtyard.

Edelman’s famous photographs taken just before the Freuds’ departure for London, clearly show the arrangement in his consulting rooms, by now upstairs, on the mezzanine floor, the entrance across the way from his family’s flat. He complained about the darkness of both flats. As a mezzanine, it was below the massive balconies of the piano nobile, the first-floor flat, which left it gloomy.

The heavy balustrade blocked the light

Perhaps this dimness, which he oft complained of while doing nothing to lighten it, is why he had need of his nearly three-month-long summer holidays, excursions always accompanied by his terracotta army, painstakingly packed and transported to the shores of Lake Aussee, Bad Gastein, to the Alpine heights at the Riemerlehen in Berchtesgaden, and his summer house in Grinzing in the Wienerwald, the Vienna Woods. He wrote on holiday and was unable to do so without his ‘grubby old gods’.

When Freud visited Orvieto for three nights in 1897 he met Riccardo Mancini, who owned an antiquities emporium on Corso Cavour, a five-minute walk from his hotel, from which Freud began to acquire his own collection.

Entrance door of Mancini’s Emporium where he exhibited his archaeological finds.

ceiling of Mancini’s showroom with ‘cippi’.

‘Cippi’ from Etruscan tombs excavated at the Necropolis, high in oval niches.

Mancini called himself an archeologist and had the good fortune to own some rich sites around Orvieto including the famed Etruscan Necropolis of the Crocefisso del Tufo below the cliffs on which the town is built. Mancini’s enormous enthusiasm for archeology, which was not only commercial, no doubt infected Freud, to the point where he collected more books on the subject than he did on psychology. There are obvious parallels between excavating into the ancient past and delving into the unconscious.

Freud returned to Orvieto twice, most likely to further his collaboration with ‘my friend’ Engineer Mancini, who even offered him a plot of land to buy so that he could not only get his hands dirty digging for his own antiquities but export them more easily from Italy.

Freud’s Inner Sanctum, his study in May 1938. His favourite statuette of Athena/Minerva is no longer in the middle of his desk. It had been sent ahead to London in the care of his friend and benefactor Princess Marie Bonaparte, afraid that the Nazis might not allow him to export his collection in its entirety. On the side desk right is an open copy of his favourite magazine, Die Antike. Ph. Edmund Engelman, May 1938.

The same view today, his reading chair in the corner is a replica. The mirror is original. The study was darkly painted in Pompeian style red in 2016; it is now white, not a bit like the sombre tones of Freud’s day. The room beyond is his consulting room in which he had his famous couch. The waiting room is beyond that through the white doors.

Waiting room looking out onto the inner courtyard

Both flats in Berggasse 19 now belong to the Viennese Freud Museum. All the rooms have recently been redecorated in white, quite unlike the sombre coloured apartments of Freud’s day. Most of the furniture is in the London home and museum, though some of the waiting room furniture was donated by the youngest daughter Anna Freud to the Vienna Museum.

Freud’s Waiting Room in which he held the Wednesday Analytical Meetings

In this smoke-filled room he held the weekly meetings of  The Wednesday Psychological Society. My photographs were taken before the refurbishment, and I believe, render the atmosphere of Freud’s day rather better than the present-day photos with the trendy white patterned wallpaper which can be seen on the Freud Museum’s website.

Athena comes home to London

London, Freud’s study cum consulting room. The famous couch has temporarily lost its Persian drapes – dry-cleaning. His desk with its statues is on the left.

Engelman’s photo of Freud’s desk, sans Athena

Freud’s desk in London with Athena-Minerva in pride of place (highlighted). Thoth, the white baboon on the right, another favourite, had his top knot rubbed every morning by Freud.

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On his three visits to Orvieto, Freud always stayed in the comfortable Hotel delle Belle Arti on Corso Cavour in the town center, midway between Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele (now Piazza Repubblica) and the central clock tower, La Torre del Moro. There is a plaque. There were then 7,300 inhabitants, about three thousand more than now inhabit the old town.

Doorway of Freud’s Hotel delle Belle Arti in Corso Cavour. The plaque is on the right of the door.

In September 1897 Freud stayed in the Hotel Belle Arti with his younger brother Alexander and patient and pupil Dr Gertl, a rather mysterious figure who disappears without trace a few years later. One wing of the former hotel is now a lawyers’ office, the other,  the salon ( in Freud’s day, it was the dining room) has remained largely unchanged.

Hotel Belle Arti, Orvieto 1897

Ballroom, former Dining Room, Palazzo Bisenzi 2020

Here follows an excerpt from The Idler magazine in which W.L.Alden sets the scene in Orvieto a few years before Freud’s visit in 1893, “At the Hotel of the Fine Arts (Belle Arti) where you will inevitably go, you will find three other tourists, probably German, sitting silently in a vast room, waiting for dinner, which is the only thing the tourist does after he has seen the cathedral.” Orvieto offered little to the tourist after dinner, Freud probably wrote letters while his brother Alexander, somewhat of a ladies’ man, could not wait to move on to Rome. However, Freud would refuse to go on this occasion, something akin to a phobia was blocking him. He finally overcome his resistance in 1901, calling his first Roman visit, ‘the high point in my life’.

Freud embarked on his life’s journey into archeology while on his first visit to Orvieto through his friendship with Riccardo Mancini, proprietor of the Etruscan Necropolis below the walls and a showroom of artifacts found in a long career as an archeologist. It is probable that antique hunting provided the excuse to return to Orvieto on two further occasions, in 1902 and 1907. He may however have revisited old haunts such as the cathedral and Signorelli’s fresco cycle of the end of the world.

Entrance doorway (left) to Riccardo Mancini's Antiquities Emporium on Corso Cavour. Mancinelli Theatre in the distance. Listed in Baedeker's Guide at N°85, it is now 130.

Entrance hall to Mancini's Emporium showing Etruscan funerary 'cippi' in oval niches unearthed by Mancini in the Etruscan Necropolis.

Ceiling of corridor leading to Mancini's Emporium

 A 15-minute Video on Freud’s visit to Orvieto

More blog posts on this subject of Freud and Orvieto:

Tale of Three Cities Part I

Tale of Three Cities Part II

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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

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I started my photography career in the early 1970s so I have thousands of slides and large and medium format transparencies in my archive. Every now and again I need to pull one out and scan one for some reason. Here are a few that I have pulled out from the box.

A year in Egypt

I spent a year in Egypt from 1978-1979. I went there as a tourist and stayed (much as I did five years later in Italy except I’m still here). I found a job as an art director and illustrator in Egypt’s first advertising agency to open after the Soviet period, Radar Advertising later taken over by Mccann-Erickson. I was paid the princely sum of 60 Egyptian pounds (about £50 sterling) a month. Given that a Stella beer cost one pound and my rent in Heliopolis was 15 pounds a month that did not leave much beer money.

Brightly dressed Bedou women in the Fayoum Oasis 1979

A Trip to an Oasis

I shot these brightly dressed Bedou women in the Fayoum oasis in 1979. My friend was driving me in her Renault 5 which luckily had a sun-roof. I popped my head through and got just one shot before they turned, covered their faces and hurried shyly away. The film was Agfa slide which had a very warm hue compared with the coldish saturation of Ektachrome or the slight green in some circumstances of Kodachrome – not that any of this matters in the digital age.

View of Chefren from summit of Cheops

Climbing the Pyramids

In the late 1970s you could still climb the Great Pyramid of Cheops for a small ‘fee’, or baksheesh, to the dragoman in his galabeya who stood guard at the base. I was informed by a resident that you should give a just a few piasters, no more than 25 – if you gave too much he would feel honour bound to guide you up to the top.

My grandad Major ‘Pat’Somerville in 1941

The flat summit has a heavy iron pyramid shaped mast placed there, quite why I have no idea, perhaps to give an idea of its original height. The stones had all been incised on every available surface with names. I have read that even in the 19th century the guides filled the graffiti with gesso so that the pyramid presumably did not get chiselled down to its foundations. I managed to get a blurry self timer pic by resting the camera on a stone.

Patrick Nicholas stands atop the Great Pyramid 1978

I do not have a very good scanner for 35mm, the Epson 4990 is really designed for medium and large transparencies. That said, the dust on this slide was exceptionally sharp! I still use film occasionally with my old medium format cameras which still work as well as ever and give a fine high quality transparency or negative.

Dahshur bent pyramid of Sneferu.

Running for our Lives

Cairo was an easy place to hate: huge, dirty, dusty, noisy, chaos incarnate – and that was in 1979 I imagine it is even worse now. At least it was very safe then, and full of hope. It was the time of Sadat. I left Cairo on Christmas day for lunch in Helwaan with a friend after which we set off for the Bent pyramid of Sneferu at Dahshur. I had read that inside were perfectly preserved beams left over from its construction.

But there was a problem – in those days it was in a military area. The only guard on the dirt road leading to the site was an old fellow wearing a scruffy galabeya – but he did carry a rifle. I said to my mate David, “If we amble along to that big sand dune we could probably cross behind it unseen, let’s try.” We did, and a shot rang out. We came back very humbled to be greeted by a torrent of Arabic. We thought, given his un-agressive demeanour, that he was essentially apologising, “I had no choice you understand?” We warmly shook hands, no hard feelings.
Next post: medium and large format transparencies or trannies as we called them.

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In this video shot in my gallery I show how to fix a maddening problem common to most point and shoot cameras: the sticking zoom. When the zoom either refuses to protrude at all or does so only to retract immediately with ‘lens error’ showing on the display, you feel that the camera has reached the end of its natural life as sending it away for repair will cost more than the value of the camera. The answer is the common or garden vacuum cleaner. Using this method will also help clean the sensor of most or all the dust that has been sucked in through the telescopic zoom lens as for some reason even expensive compact cameras have no sensor cleaner. All you need is a vacuum cleaner with a flexible tube, a plastic bottle, sticky tape and five minutes of your time. I have demonstrated this method scores of times without damaging the camera (a Lumix LX100) in any way. That said, you shouldn’t do this if your camera isn’t already manifesting these problems.

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Camera Etrusca is starting a new programme of photo workshops in Lisbon and the Coast in spring and autumn – the best times of the year for photographers to tour Portugal and enjoy the Atlantic coast’s dazzling light and warm climate, the buzzing atmosphere in Lisbon, and the unrivalled air of mystery and decadence among the eccentric palaces and the gardens of Sintra.

Spring and autumn workshops in Portugal: Lisbon

Modern engineering and architecture in Lisbon: MAAT modern art gallery and Almada Bridge

Lisbon is one of the truly buzzing places in Europe. Camera Etrusca will run workshops in Portugal in May, and November 2018 with 3 nights in Lisbon and 3 in the Algarve.

Discoveries Monument, Lisbon

Lisbon is best known for its delicately melancholic Fado music, its old fashioned trams running up and down its seven hills and its brilliant predominantly blue azulejo tiles which cover its buildings inside and out.

Azulejo ceramic facade in Alfama, Lisbon

It is a city of superlatives: it has the most stunning light for a good part of the year, in fact it is the sunniest capital in Europe with 2,799 hours of sunshine a year (Rome has 2,516, London half of Lisbon’s at 1,460); it is the most Western city of Europe as well as being the oldest, predating even Rome.

Tram in Bica street, the sea in the distance.

The city is a street photographer’s delight with scores of old fashioned cafés to drop in on and spend hours with just a coffee or a glass of port with no stroppy waiters to hustle you from your table.

The charming, and sexy, Pensao Amor Cafè, Lisbon

The doyen of the strolling flâneur, writer and poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) practically lived in cafés using them as office, writer’s den and meeting place; there are cafés to suit every taste in Lisbon: the Turkish bordello style of Pensao Amor in downtown Chiado popular with young foreigners; the famous Brasileira, Pessoa’s favourite; the Versailles frequented by locals and many more.

Street cafe at Miradouro S.Catarina overlooking the Tagus

Patrick and Pessoa

Of late Lisbon has drawn to its urban heart creative young people from all over Europe and North America, hence the arts scene is flourishing especially in the Alcantara district around the LX Factory.

Sintra

Sintra with its own micro-climate was favoured by the Lisbon aristocracy as a summer residence. The palaces they built in a bizarre variety of styles are truly fantastic.

15th century Sintra Royal Palace with curious twin chimneys

The delights of Sintra are a mere 40 minutes by suburban train from central Lisbon.

Foggy Sintra

The micro climate of Sintra makes it an especially interesting place from the photographer’s point of view. Its vicinity to the sea and the fact that the gardens and eccentric palaces are nestled into clefts in the valley leads to foggy mornings and evenings lending an unrivalled air of mystery.

Entrance to the alchemical well in the Regaleira Palace garden.

There are no end of architectural oddities in Sintra from the arabesque

Arabesque pavilion in Sintra

to gothic

above: The Neo-gothic Quinta da Regaleira palace

The coast near Sintra north of  Lisbon. The Atlantic coast of Portugal is dramatic especially at night.

The Algarve  (November only)

Algarve: above the Benagil caves

The Algarve has a dazzling light and a divine, almost African climate. The sea is warm and swimmable until December. Benagil is known for its limestone cliffs, caves and blue grottoes, many of which may only be reached by boat.

Sea cave in Benagil. The figure, left, gives an idea of the size.

Camera Etrusca runs Lisbon and the Coast workshops in May and November.

Camera Etrusca Photo Workshops  in Lisbon and the Coast start Friday May 25 and Friday November 2

The May 25th workshop is in the Lisbon and Sintra  area only. (We go to the Algarve as well only in November.)

You can choose:

• 3 night workshop finishes Monday at noon,
• 6 night workshop finishes back in Lisbon Thursday at noon.

We recommend you arrive in Lisbon Thursday evening so we can start Friday morning. You should arrange your own accommodation in Lisbon.

The November 2nd workshop is in Lisbon, Sintra and the Algarve. We leave for the Algarve Sunday evening.

You can choose:

• 3 night workshop finishes Sunday evening in Lisbon,
• 6 night workshop finishes back in Lisbon on Thursday at noon.

Fill the form below for more info and booking.

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