While Scicli is fairly off the beaten path, Ragusa is a common popular feature on Sicilian itineraries. How can it not be?! Just look at this perspective of a quintessential Sicilian hilltop village. What we see here is Ragusa Ibla – the historic and medieval in topography part of Ragusa.…
Scicli is enough off the beaten track so a fair portion of the WH-focused community considers it a favorite among the towns comprising Val di Noto serial site. It is bright and clean, its compact central area is easy on the eye, and the ratio of locals-to-visitors is higher than…
In the south-eastern part of Sicily, eight towns comprise the World Heritage serial site of Val di Noto, recognized as a great rebuilding achievement in the decades following the devastating earthquake of 1693, which resulted in surpassing examples of Baroque town planning and architecture. It is a varied collection, ranging…
On a business trip – what a concept, no!? – a couple of weeks ago I landed in a part of these United States that I had never been to before. In the Texan capital for less than 2 days, I could carve out an hour and a half in…
Villa Romana del Casale is among the most unique and impressive monuments of antiquity. The very short WH inscription mentions the richness of the mosaics found in practically every room of the villa, and indeed those are altogether remarkable and likely unparalleled among the surviving such artifacts in both quantity…
The archaeological area of Agrigento (also known as “Valley of the Temples”) is inscribed on the World Heritage list in large part for its Doric temples dominating the erstwhile Greek settlement dating from the 6th century BCE. Temple of Concordia is the undeniable primary highlight of the site, and clearly…
The most impressive sight in Palermo is that of its Cathedral. It can be said, with practically no hyperbole, that Cathedral by itself is worth visiting Palermo for. It is an amazingly architecturally diverse structure, with many additions and alterations in a mix of styles having taken place through the…
Quick show of hands – who has Palermo on their must-see-in-your-lifetime list? The capital and largest city of Sicily does not enjoy a highly-recommended status among the travelers (and, like any other place in the South of Italy, is nowhere near the list of most-visited destinations in the country). It…
Having descended from the Edge, I took a stroll along the length of New York’s High Line. The elevated park has been around for nearly a dozen years now, but I had very limited familiarity with it to-date. The walk thus progressed very neatly the theme of my second day…
On another day of my January staycation (first mentioned in the previous post), my targets in Manhattan included sights in Hudson Yards and Chelsea that I never explored before. Starting with one of the newest attractions in the City – the highest outdoor observation deck in the Western Hemisphere called…
At the end of last month, I took a week off work, for reasons none other than I would lose a perfectly useable vacation week if I haven’t done so. It was my first staycation in recorded memory, a type of holiday that has never held a lot of appeal…
Restaurant reservations aside, a sunset cruise on a tall boat was the only pre-arranged bit of entertainment on our road trip along the Maine Coast. Late September evenings are already quite cold at those latitudes when you are on open water, but bundling up and taking ample advantage of the…
Continuing from the prior entry, here is another limited selection of pictures from various Maine locales taken during the September trip. Main Street in Camden. View to the Camden Public Library from the green of Harbor Park. The opposite views over Camden Harbor. The tall ships seen in the above…
Our itinerary along the Maine coast was structured as a road trip with a lot of comparatively small stops. There is no particular narrative that lends itself to such an approach. This tranche of visuals represents brief impressions of a quartet of such stops in different parts of the state…
The biggest town on our recent itinerary along the Maine coast hosted us the longest. Not long enough for a proper exploration, but long enough to form a good impression. Old Port and downtown area are full of architectural features of the kind that we always find delightful. Every block…
“Acadia National Park” is probably the more common way to identify the location of Mount Desert Island. It is not without reason, as the national park is a non-contiguous entity with several areas covering large portions of the island (and a couple of other islands as well). Not all of…
Lighthouses are among Maine’s best-known points of interest, and on our recent trip we specifically marked out a few for a visit. With just a couple of exceptions, they all turned out to be true highlights of the trip. Our first stop was the Portland Head Lighthouse. One of the…
Earlier this week we did what we usually only do only on vacation: made time to watch the sunset. We went to a place on the central Jersey coast called the Fisherman’s Cove, found a likely spot at the edge of the marina, and lingered enough to see the sun…
This favorite photograph is actually a shot that went rather wrong when it was taken. It is a picture of the lake adjoining the Dubai Mall, with Souk Al Bahar prominently shown on the left. The lower levels of Burj Khalifa skyscraper occupy part of the background on the right.…
After the somber mood of the previous installment in this series, my randomized selection popped up a picture highlighted by the azure celestial hues. A bit ironic, since this photo was taken on the British Isles, which, you know, are not habitually associated with such brilliance in the skies. This…