This is the last post in a series on last month’s trip to Italy.
I hope to finish on a high note, with some of what I think were my best photographs from the churches we visited, and likely the trip overall.
The first shot is a one off. This church overlooked a steep hillside cemetery that we drove through to get here, and hiked up the last bit. Like a church in my previous post, it too had a mostly missing roof, but here the light of the setting sun was able to come into the altar area and give it a warm glow. Where the pews once were, a small copse of trees now stood. I came away with a few interesting photos, but only this one really made the cut.
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This next church was probably the largest one we saw, and much of the nave immediately inside the front door was covered in scaffolding towering up to the ceiling. It was unclear if it was for support or if it was simply to provide workers with access for yet-unstarted renovations. The rest of the church was largely intact and had some interesting finds. We’ll start in the vestry, which seemed untouched except by dust, and where I found this tableau laid out.
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Next: the main altar with a shaft of light coming through.
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A set of doors off the left aisle led a separate room with its own altar and pews.
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Through the scaffolding on the right aisle I thought I saw a dim glitter. When I got closer and lit it with my flashlight, I saw that it was a diorama showing Our Lady of Lourdes appearing to the little girl in the grotto. The scene was simply crafted out of many rags, stiffened with sparkling paint of many colors, and hung in layers to look like the jagged walls of a cave.
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Finally, several statues around the altar had been defaced, this one quite literally, making for this haunting apparition.
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The next church was a pain to get to. It sat atop a hill overlooking a picturesque small town. It took very winding roads just to get to town, then a single narrow alley to drive up to its highest area accessible by car. Imagine our surprise, when more than halfway up this road we came face to face with a car coming back downhill. The little alley was meant to be a two way street! Being easier to reverse downhill, and us being outsiders who didn’t want to stir up trouble and unwanted attention, we backed up, ever so slowly, down to where there was a bit of extra room to pull off. Reversing those 400 or so feet took several minutes of painstaking inching. We were then greeted by three carloads of nuns, who smiled and waved in thanks to us as they passed.
Once we finally resumed moving forward, we got to a small parking lot and realized we would need to further hike through the last part of town, and ultimately up a steep and narrow footpath to the very peak where this edifice stood. As mentioned in the last post, some churches seemed to have purposes other than your typical houses of worship, and this place is a good example of that. Its very location seemed out of reach for many worshippers, and the layout was strange, with the main altar facing sideways while a set of steps led up to a small chapel at the far end. There were no pews, and there was scarcely room where they would have fit, anyway. I don’t have an answer but its something to ponder as you look over these photos.
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A closeup of the stairs:
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Finally, a couple shots from this church outside of Sorento. It was a relatively quick shoot, as the outside wasn’t much to look at and the adjacent buildings were so ruined and overgrown that they left little to photograph. The decay in the church itself was pretty extensive, as this shot of the altar shows.
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But it was the simplest and most direct zero-point perspective shot that proved to be my favorite, possibly of the entire trip. Just a nice balance of light and dark, and just enough foliage creeping in along the ground and up the walls and columns.
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And that will wrap up Italy. Thank you for stopping by and checking me out! I’d love it if you left a comment telling me what you thought.
T A B U L A R A S A photography 