Holiday Scenes

In the course of our Mediterranean cruise last June, I took over 3000 photographs. I continue to go through them and occasionally find ones that I overlooked initially. Today I’m going to share a few that I have resurrected and chosen to post because I quite like them.

I begin with a picture of another cruise ship, the Aegean Odyssey. It was taken in the early morning as our ship was anchoring in Sorrento Bay, Italy. The sunlight was exceptional, seemingly focused on the ship. Its brightness enabled me to get the picture from our balcony with good shutter speed, 1/200 second. (Settings ISO 100, f5.6, 110 mm focal length).

The next picture was taken on the nearby Amalfi Coast, south of Naples. This picture shows the town of Amalfi, taken from a ship’s tender as we traveled ashore for our excursion. A beautiful place in a gorgeous setting.

Earlier in our cruise we visited Barcelona, Spain including an area called the Spanish Village. The sight of an orange tree framing a doorway caught my attention and I was able to get this picture of a very interesting arch over the door. Colour is added courtesy of the orange tree.

While in Rome we visited the Coliseum, a tourist “must do”. I got many pictures but I like this one the best. It’s a simple picture, taken in the peripheral passage around the Coliseum at ground level. It’s very much like the entries to sports arenas today. What appealed to me in this scene is the glow of the sunlight on the arched doorways into the passage.

The final picture for today was taken in Marsascala Harbour in Malta. It’s a fishing boat and it shares two features common to most of the boats we saw there: its brilliant colours and the eyes on the bow. The evil eye is a look that is believed by many cultures to be able to cause injury or bad luck for the person at whom it is directed for reasons of envy or dislike. Belief in the evil eye is especially strong in the Mediterranean Region. We saw references to it in Turkey as well as Malta. Attempts to ward off the curse of the evil eye has resulted in a number of talismans in many cultures. Disks or balls, consisting of concentric blue and white circles representing an evil eye are common talismans, found on the prows of Mediterranean boats and elsewhere. The staring eyes are supposed to bend the malicious gaze back to the sorceror.

Travel has taught me many things. I’ve often heard references to the “evil eye” but never realized its significance in many cultures. On that note, I’ll conclude for today.