Campo de' Fiori - II

Roma, Piazza Campo de' Fiori

Campo de' Fiori - I

Roma, Piazza Campo de' Fiori

I'm back

And I'm ready to delight you with plenty of stunning samples for "The Town".

No pictures this week

"Hi,

I'm far from my photo-lab for Christmas break. No posting for a while, though shooting all the time. Just refilling batteries and memory cards.
I'll be back home next Sunday with plenty of pictures to show.

Enjoy your holidays."

Xmas Telegram

Just received:
"On the tracks of the italian foreign office of the Institute. stop
Made a long walk this morning through the narrow streets of my old town citadel. stop
Got plenty of clues. stop
Not far from the final solution. stop
Will keep you updated. stop
Merry Christmas to every one. stop"

Cup Cakes

Hands up!

Is this it?

Could these be the Institute premises?

A sample

A cloud over the Big Blue

A heavy blanket of permanent fog has just fallen upon the flat lands of northern Italy. These are the farthest days from past and next summer vacations. Memories of the gone "season" are shaded, as if a cloud stopped over to impede our sight on the open sea.

Where the Glory days ended up

It all began with a very small group of antique and curiosities sellers. People coming by were few, without money and mostly skeptical. Then the current crisis came and people started looking at these markets with a different eyes. There came more and more sellers, with their loads of undefined items and the market grew one Sunday after the other. But people still kept to be without money. Moving through the stands became a sport, a way to spend some time, looking at the remains of a glorious past time.

The winter garden

A line of persimmon trees wearing their winter frock.

My best samples

Now that my balcony pottery collection is completely burn out by the early morning frost of these days or resting safely under a small glasshouse of fortune, it's time to dig around the archive and take out some good samples of the beauties that brought some spots of color to the reddish monotony of the floor, the nearby roof tiles and walls. This makes me feel just like a genuine wine maker, who, after some months of ageing in the cellar, proudly invites you to taste his best juice.

Homeworks

Suggestions on how to spend a sunny Saturday afternoon ...

Pop Cakes

This is some kind of tribute I owe to my wife, Antonella. She says she's a practitioner of cooking and pastry, whereas the results shows she's much more than a Sunday experimenter. The "pop cakes" she made this year for our kids birthday party are a simple example. Others will come. Colors are not shown but, trust me, they make a good deal of difference.

Bandidos! - III

This is the candidate back cover of an album to be. We cheerfully thank the owners of the ugly building for hosting our photo stage. It wouldn't be the same without. 

Bandidos! - II

Sometimes at lunch the Bandidos, in the endless minutes of wait before pizzas are served, are used to talk about the coming dates of their long lasting tour, the next "delivery" committed to the production team, the many arrangements (AKA customizations) of their latest studio recording, sessions plans, deadlines, the crew and the band perspective, issues still open and any other reported trouble. The most debated topics are always around things to be fixed before going to stage, fine tunings, new tools and instruments to adopt, rehearsal sessions and demos: sound perfection is in their mission. The customers (their fans) don't tolerate bad quality!

Later on, once the beers have gone down and the pizzas are still far to come, someone raises the bar of the discussion and talks about the "way out", his personal long term projects. Bands, with some exceptions, are doomes to eventually split up: they always dis-aggregate to set up new and better ones.

Sunday Ride

Bandidos!

I'm living (and working) in a Babel of digital and analogue hardware designers, verification and test engineers, system and para-systems guys, Galois Space travellers, Karnaugh mappers, Shannon cryptographers and boolean ambulant terrorists, Nyquist and Bode plot practitioners, gurus of the electropolitan bitscape, in other words bad & ugly people who claim to master the art and craft of electronics and forge the worlds that fit into your electronic furniture.
Some of them join together in bands: these are the Bandidos. Stay away from the worst kind of bandits on this World's surface!

Winter announced

Winter is definitely here. I woke up this morning and, opening the blinds of my bedroom, I saw the first snow flocks of the year coming down. A real joy for kids. Not much for me. 

In this time of the year I wake up when it's still night, enter my office at dawn, I spend most of my days closed into a lab or into a meeting room, without noticing any difference in light as time passes and then I get out of there when it's night again and the fog has fallen upon almost everything. Milan, London or Stockholm, it doesn't make any difference. Let's get ready for this month of consumism.

Autumn explorations

After several B&W images it's time to put some colors on this blog again. Don't expect an extraordinarily colorful palette: hunting and proposing aggressive color combinations are not in my top priority list since long. There must be always some kind of balance in each proposal and long term coherence, from day to day, one post after the other, as if I was weaving a long tale on my loom.

Last time I put some samples from a french marketplace, now I'm showing the colors of the Autumn. Looks like incidental, riding bikes with my son we came out of a wood and crossed a small village where magically all building appeared as if they had just wore an autumnal frock, in tune with the foliage of the nearby grove.

In this small series everything, even my son's jersey, looks so much monochromatic, in some extent so much ... B&W. That's why, just like the french onions and powders, I opted to put it on display.

The front yard

I've spotted this building not far from where I'm living during one of my last Sunday's rides on my bike. It looks like being abandoned since eons but it's actually populated by someone. The small, ancient, garden on the front is clearly maintained, even if has already put on its winter frock. The door light is on night and day but the blinds are always shut. I've heard someone in the nearby village calling it the "institute". I'll investigate a little more in the coming days. 

The toy is broken

591 has definitely quit (fermeé). The fire's off but the embers are still burning below. The phoenix has come back to life again from her ashes. I'll come back on this topic in the following days.

The underlying form

"We are at the classic-romantic barrier now, where on one side we see a cycle as it appears immediately - and this is an important way of seeing it - and where on the other side we can begin to see it as a mechanic does in terms of underlying form - and this is an important way of seeing things too. These tools for example - this wrench - has a certain romantic beauty to it, but its purpose is always purely classical. It's designed to change the underlying form of the machine."

Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

On top of the World

I must confess I'm one of those who doesn't necessarily feel disturbed while spotting one of these cabinets on top of a mountain. It's my job. I'm among those people who spend ten hours a day - most of which sitting and talking in endless meetings - trying to make these telecom equipment work as the "customer wants".

One could argue what a smart-phone is necessary for on top of a hill. He's got a point. But there are many others who are in the need of a permanent connection, where ever they are, 7x24. For them (and few others public interest services) these boxes and antennas are for and, yes, there are times I feel proud to spot them and tell my kids what they're for and that I'm one of those guys who made what's inside.

We go alone

I was talking with some colleagues of mine, today, during a coffee break at our premises, when one of them started complaining that he hadn't slept much the night before. One of his sons had been out with his friends for a cinema & pizza or something else he didn't want (or couldn't) know. He stood up, watching TV on the sofa in his living room, until his son was back home.

Some of us laughed at him; others sympathized, having had more or less the same experience; I tried instead to suggest him to be less catastrophic and more fatalist. At my words he turned to me and ironically smiling said: "Your kids are still young. Wait and see ... There will be a time when you'll drive them to party. There will be another when they'll take the car to drive you around ...".

Oh my!

Flora Alpina - VI

Flora Alpina - V

Pastorale

Echoes

We're having the most typical rainy November, this year, despite the news and predictions of an imminent, looming, dooming, disastrous climate change. Additionally, for some reasons, my workoad has just grown, along with responsibilities (noblesse oblige). For such, I  can't find anymore the time enough to walk around and "observe" the world. I have to go back looking into my hard disk and work out some samples of the recent past. But this is not a real problem: Summer holidays are our think tank, the time budget we have at our disposal to keep ourselves trained.

The pictures coming in the next days, once again, are echoes of my last Summer on the Alps.