Postcard from Monterosso al Mare

Monterosso al Mare, Italy, 2012

Hello from the Italian Riviera and the lovely seaside town of Monterosso al Mare. This town is special to me; I fell in love here last year, not with the town so much as a beautiful woman. We’ve spent the last year traveling much of the world together, sharing some beautiful adventures, but we started our story here. I guess it’s why I like this town so much more than Pisa. If you’re going to fall, it may as well be in love. So it’s a romantic place, but it’s also really beautiful, especially when the light gets interesting. We’ve had a couple days of really amazing skies on these first days of the Liguria Within The Frame Adventure, though yesterday we paid for it in spades after getting stuck in the pouring rain for 40 minutes waiting for a delayed train.

I’m posting this just after sending our students off to make photographs, fresh out of a 90-minute image discussion. I don’t think I will ever tire of seeing students get ignited by photographs, and hearing them talk more excitedly about the thing which we create than about the tools we use to create them. Thrills me every time. And to see their work and the places we’re exploring, through eyes other than my own is a gift. Even if those eyes are a little blurrier this morning. I think we started dinner around 9pm, and got back to the hotel just after midnight, full of wine, seafood risotto, grilled calamari, and other wonders.

Tonight we go back to Manarollo, one of the 5 cinque terre, and tomorrow we take a train north for three days in Camogli, one of my favourite little places in the world.