Category: Europe
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The time path
At the beginning of this millennium the Swiss city of Neuchâtel laid out a path through time in the nearby woods – Le Sentier du Temps. Its starting point was meant to mark the origin of our planet Earth and the end point our present time. Each step of one meter was equal to one…
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Equestrian statues
Statues of national heroes on horseback, I don’t think much of them. Not of the statues, nor of the heroes. They generally make me yawn with boredom, or at best incite me to ridicule. So when I saw this equestrian statue in Vienna, I felt an urge to search for the right angle to make…
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Kind-hearted nationalism
Swiss alpenhorns are relics of the past. Just like the smoke signals of Red Indians, they once were used to communicate swiftly with inhabitants of nearby valleys and mountain slopes, long before the invention of the telephone. But their main purpose seems to have been for herdsmen to call their free-grazing cattle back to the…
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Ah … Holidays!
Sometimes you receive a picture postcard – although less and less in this digital age – that arouses deep inside you an instant longing to be there; to see the scenery with your own eyes; to take it in with all your senses. That is of course the whole purpose of a postcard, to pull…
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Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari
Popular belief or the folklore of faith is, in general, what religion means to the common man. It is its most widespread manifestation, not only in Catholicism, but in other religions as well. There’s a lot of suffering in the world and people are often subjected to great stress, either self imposed, or by their…
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Treasure-house Venice
One of the nice things of the Italian pavilion at the 2011 Biennale in Venice was the continuity one experienced when stepping out of the exhibition venue into the different nooks and corners of this always enchanting city. Both inside and outside one felt surrounded by the same mixture of folkloric frivolity and renaissance seriousness.…
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The art is not our thing
Art critic and politician Vittorio Sgarbi was chosen as curator of the Italian pavilion at the 54th Biennale in Venice (2011). Since he is known not to like modern art and even less its organizational “mafia”, his nomination was rather controversial. He decided not to select the works for the exhibition himself but to ask…
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Art is my thing
The experience of art in all its manifestations (literature, music, visual arts) is occupying a privileged place in my mental and intellectual life. I could say: in my spiritual life, but I always hesitate using that word since it has these strong religious connotations I’d like to avoid. With acknowledgement and approval I quote what…
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Taking a break
We are here in the Swiss Alps at an altitude of 2000 meters on a trek around the Muverans and I am standing at the exact spot from where I took last week’s picture of landscape with horseman. While that photo clearly was a landscape, I wouldn’t call this one a landscape with goats, the…
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Landscape with horseman
As we noted in last week’s post, a picture of a beautiful landscape normally doesn’t create the emotion that the viewer experienced when he looked at it in reality and which caused him decide to take the picture. What is it then that makes a photo of a landscape potentially interesting? I don’t know if…
καιρός remembered 