Belluno

This is Belluno, the town where I was born and raised. It lies at the foot of the Dolomites and on the confluence of the Piave River with one of its affluents, the Ardo. I took this after dining out with my family and I had left my purse with my sister in law to take a short walk with my youngest nephew to the town's oldest bridge spanning the Piave. When I told him I would have liked to photograph the scene but that the light would not last long enough for me to go get my purse and come back, he offered to run to his Mom and get me what I needed. Being a teenager, of course he came back with my phone instead of my camera :D In the PIPs: houses in one of the oldest sections of town and a glimpse of the bell tower designed by architect Filippo Juvara.

Happy Wall Wednesday! Wild flowers against the wall of the former church of Santa Maria dei Battuti (see PIP), now part of the municipal historical archive structure. Built between 1300 and 1400, it's one of the oldest buildings of the town of Belluno.

Happy Bench Monday, everyone! Have a great week!

Seen from a small village above Ponte nelle Alpi, the Piave River valley snakes its way upstream towards the distant Cadore Dolomites. The first time I left my native mountain valley for an extended period of time I was 17 years old, embarking on a 1 year stay as an exchange student in the US. The organization tried to match the students with host families residing in an area that would be somewhat similar, in terms of natural landscape, to their home environment. So I was sent to Colorado. But someone didn't take the time to check the actual location on a map and I found myself nowhere near the Rocky Mountains, but rather in the flat, endless plains of the prairie. Beautiful in its own right as the prairie is, it was dramatically different from where I came from. In whichever direction you looked, there were few or no landmarks and even trees grew only along the banks of the river courses. The rest was an immense expanse of sandy-bluish coloured grasses, rippled here and there by the wind that swept unhindered through the plains. I was (sort of) prepared for the language and cultural disconnect, but not for the utter sense of dislocation caused by the simple fact that, all of a sudden, I could no longer orient myself, pinpoint my location in the world so to speak, in reference to the mountains. I felt ungrounded and lost and realised, for the first time, how much the Dolomites, with their familiar peaks, meant to my sense of where, and perhaps also who, I was in the world. I remember this as perhaps the first of many "certainties" that one must learn to put in perspective while growing up and coming to terms with the fact that much of what we regard as "fixed" is actually relative to culture, language, place and time. Nevertheless, to this day, returning home, opening my window in the morning on a landscape of familiar childhood land marks, gives me a sense of peace and security I experience nowhere else.