Photos and the City

Tag: sunday

  • Sunday at Steinhof Gründe

    portrait, destination shoot, vienna, lisa kellermann, matt philiips, photography, vienna

    Lisa & Matt

  • Sunday at Casa Grotta di Vico Solitario

    Strolling through the Sassi today one almost can´t imagine how living in the caves had been until the 1950ies. Whole families and their live stock lived cheeck by jowl, without running water and other modern facilities.

    It’s difficult to imagine that Matera’s ancient warren was known not too long ago as “the shame of Italy” for its dismal poverty. In the 1950s, the entire population of roughly 16,000 people, mostly peasants and farmers, were relocated from the Sassi to new housing projects in an ill-conceived government program, leaving it an empty shell. (Smithsonian Magazine)

    Today some of these former homes have been restored as little museums – like the Casa Grotto di Vico Solitario – for one or two Euros you´ll get a little glimpse of what life may have looked liked. Inhabited until 1957 by Vico Solitario, his family and his animals.

    The Casa Grotta tells the story of the people that lived in the Sassi. In the large one room area, partly dug out of the rock and partly constructed, the furniture is positioned so as to create smaller areas: the hearth with the stove, a small table in the centre of the room, a bed with two iron trestles on which wooden planks were placed, supporting a mattress made out of corn leaves.
    In front of the bed, in between the cave walls, there was a trough where the mule was tied. A round hole was used as a cesspit, or as a place to keep straw. (Case Museuo Italia)

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  • Sunday with the Old Romans

    Sunday is the day for little Landpartien (trips out of the city) and so I spend some hours at Herculaneum – one of five cities which were buried by Vesuvius big eruption in 79AD.

    Unlike Pompeii, the deep pyroclastic material which covered it preserved wooden and other organic-based objects such as roofs, beds, doors, food and even some 300 skeletons which were surprisingly discovered in recent years along the sea shore as it was thought until then that the town had been evacuated by the inhabitants. (Wikipedia)

    Pompeii was a port – Heculaneum was a wealthier city with lots of fine houses and baths and I especially felt in love with all those beautiful mosaic floors!

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    Herculaneum is easy to reach with the Circumvesuviana line (train between Naples and Sorrento, there is even an express train in the summer month. I took the normal one, it´s an about 20min ride.) and only a short walk from the trainstation.

    I chose this site because it is smaller and one doesn´t neet that much time as in Pompeii and I wanted to do a trek on Vesuvius later on, but as the weather wasn´t good enough, I went back to Naples, ate some “Caffé dell nonno” granite (so good!) and did a tour underground.