SavocaWeb

03-21-05 Savoca (June 3)

Seeing my name on every street sign and manhole cover perhaps gave me a false sense of celebrity – I owned this town.

Granted, there wasn’t much to own. Most of the buildings were empty, boarded up, rotting, inhabited only by pidgeons and dust. Dad and I mused briefly over the real estate possibilities of a place like this, but having to farm for my own food is not on my list of specialties or desires.

The one establishment that brought any life at all to the town was the Bar Vitelli, famous for its role in The Godfather as the place where Michael meets Apollonia’s father. After we mentioned our last name to Maria D’Arrigo, the bar’s proprietor since before Pacino sat on her porch, she handed us a postcard and offered to sell us paper-thin t-shirts proclaiming her as Mama del Mundo (mother of the world). Of course, as they listed the name of the village, we couldn’t resist. Ahh, the only thing worse than a tourist is a tourist who’s a sucker for gimmicks.

03-21-05 Taormina (June 2-3)

Mountainous. Sicily thrusts up out of the Med magestically, rising hundreds of feet right at the shoreline. The taxi drivers love this, as the hotels, views, and sightseeing are all perched on the cliffs, while the beaches and sunbathing require descending on the roads that double back on each other over and over down to the sea.

As Sicily rises from the sea, so does Etna from its surrounding land. The volcano, steaming and smoldering, can be seen from almost everywhere in Sicily, as it is at least twice as high as anything else on the island.

Liberty Gull

Udvar Hazy Museum, DC

John Walker

While I was working at a lighting design firm in Manhattan, one of our clients had a gallery on the Upper East Side, and every time he had a new show, we would go to light the exhibit.

Once we were called in to light the work of an English abstractionist John Walker. He came in to see how his paintings looked, and stayed to chat a bit.

A few weeks later, I took a bus to DC to visit my Cincinnati roommate, who was co-oping there. We headed over to the Philips Collection to see the Modigliani exhibit there, and John Walker had a number of pieces in the permanent collection. Here’s an example of one

Washington Mall

Man on Fire

A malfunctioning signal in Washington, DC. I like to call it “Man on Fire Tries to Cross Street” or “The Perils of Jaywalking.”