Annalia S.'s photos with the keyword: yellow

Most of my life I have been a night owl. If I got to work at 9:00 a.m., it would be 11:00, if not noon, by the time my brain actually started moving at anything like the required speed and my most productive time was always in the late afternoon and into the evening. Not anymore. Old turkey that I am getting to be, by 4:00, 4:30 p.m., with at least another hour left in my work day, I start losing concentration and making mistakes. So I step outside for a 10 minute break, to clear my head, think of something else. This time of year, with the autumn colors in the nearby park and the resident birds cleaning up the berries on the courtyard bushes, I find plenty of sights to divert my attention from work matters. On this particular day, however, I had no sooner stepped outside that my photographer’s eye caught something that sent me scampering back upstairs. “That was a mighty short break ….” commented my colleague. I grabbed my camera out of my purse and promised to explain later. Light, you see, doesn’t leave you time for chit chat if you want to catch it at the right time. What you see here is the deeply ridged driveway ramp that leads down to the underground garage at my work place. Just before setting below the nearby land features, the light from the sun was coming in at a low angle and illuminating only the very top of the ridges. A lone fallen leaf from a nearby tree, still in its pretty autumn livery, seemed to have chosen this particular spot as a final resting place, going out in style with a little help from the westering sun. I am always thrilled by this kind of images, where mundane, everyday things turn out to have a claim to beauty. They remind me of the advice my art teacher father would obsessively give his students: “The subject matter of your best work will always be what you see around you everyday, the stuff you can picture in detail even with your eyes closed, that you know as intimately as the inside of your pockets.” As his students were rural kids, what they knew best were cows, chickens, barns, the woods, the mountains. They usually balked, at least at first, at this advice. “That’s boring stuff! “ they complained, “we want to draw interesting things, you know, stuff like spaceships, castles and unicorns, airplanes and race cars …” But, of course, he was right: their pictures of far away places and things they knew little about lacked detail, were naive and even a bit ridiculous or at best commonplace. By contrast, an oil painting by one of his students, featuring a maze of ink-black, intricate tree boles in the woods, with leaves in lurid colors that seemed to be flying in your face, was for years the centre piece on our living room wall. It had a dark, ominous quality that told the story of an adventure turned dangerous, of having wandered too deep into the woods and lost your way, of a familiar place turned scary when a storm hid the sun and plunged it in darkness. To this day, I still see that painting clearly in my mind’s eye.

The magic of the early Autumn in some small details. In the main: a clump of grass on a tiny river islet gets highlighted by the last light of evening. In the pips: - a newly fallen horse chestnut on a park lawn (my grandma had a folk belief that if you kept one of these in your pocket/purse through the winter it would keep you from catching colds and to this day I still look for one at the beginning of the season - not to prevent colds, of course, but in memory of my grandma); - a tiny yellow flower emerging from fallen leaves and trying to take advantage of the last warm days; - bright red berries on a bush.

Looking across the River Arno at the Anconella Park as Autumn begins to deploy its warm palette.

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.

Falling angels in primary colors at the underpass.

An intimate look inside a backlit iris in my garden, the way a pollinator would see it as it comes in for the landing. A small miracle of natural "architecture", the iris flower starts out as a compact lance and slowly unfurls into a complex three-pronged pavilion, with entrance ways lined with a strip of pollen-bearing stamens and equipped with an upper lip that ensures the pollinating insects must rub on the stamen to gain entry to the nectar chamber. This delicate inner structure is protected by outer petals that curl upwards and towards each other to form a sort of graceful "roof". No architect could wish for a more elegant yet effective design! P.S. I added a PIP to show the complete structure of the flower. To the right of the full blown flower, a second one was still tightly furled into a lance-like shape (it is already half unfurled today, less than two days later).

On a spring walk, I enjoyed seeing how spring exuberance managed to colonise even the walls. First pip: a caper plant (these live exclusively on walls) sprouts colorful new leaves; Second pip: a wild flower manages to make a home even on a concrete wall; Third pip: a climbing vine comes alive after the winter rest.

Stairs leading to the entrance to the Buonamici Garden in Prato. In the PIPs: 1. the lady in red - Prato's Palazzo Pretorio square; 2. the blue umbrella - Prato's Emperor's Castle; 3. shoe-decorated wheelchair ramp at Prato's university campus. HAPPY FENCE FRIDAY, everyone!

On the platform at Prato Porta al Serraglio station, waiting for my (delayed) train back to Florence. I had to pass the time somehow ... :) I liked the colors and textures. Added a PIP of a jay-walker :D

A feast of golden fall colors reflecting in the Arno River upstream from the city.

I was a bit late catching the bright yellow fall livery of the fig tree, but it still made a nice splash in the slanting light. In the pip: the fallen fig leaves

One of the public housing buildings (now probably owned by the former renters) in my part of town recently got a new coat of bright yellow paint that made for interesting contrasts. I was told these public housing buildings were originally build to house Italian refugees from Istria and Dalmatia who were escaping the purges in Yugoslavia after the end of WWII. They brought their cultural habits with them and to this day every summer they get together at the nearby park for traditional dancing. This summer, couple dancing had to be eschewed of course and the program was substituted with open air folk theatre. HFF everyone!

One of the first autumn leaves I noticed , sitting next to what remains of the yellow painting marking a parking spot reserved for people with disabilities, each showing, in its own way and time frame, the wear and tear of passing time. I didn't have my camera with me, so this is from my smartphone.

Riding through the Isolotto open air market in the morning, I noticed an elderly vendor downloading her produce crates from her car and stopped to ask to take a picture of her beautiful fresh zucchini flowers. She seemed very pleased that her freshly picked production had caught someone's eye. In the pip: the stacked crates creating a colorful geometric pattern. A little extra for those of you who like to cook just below: my Grandma's Margherita's recipe for fried stuffed zucchini flowers. Ingredients: fresh zucchini flowers, anchovies preserved in oil, cheese (any non-seasoned cow milk cheese, like fontina, that will melt when heated), flour, water, beer (optional), frying oil. Clean the flowers well with a damp cloth (no washing), leaving a bit of the stalk. Inside each flower place a little cube of cheese and a third or half of an anchovy (depending how salty you like your food). Fold or twist the flowers closed and dip them in a lightly salted batter of flour and water (if you want the fried zucchini to come out fluffier, prepare the batter a couple of hours ahead of time and mix in some beer, leaving it outside the fridge. If you need to make them gluten free, use rice flower for the batter, adding an egg and skipping the beer). Deep fry the flowers in oil until golden and serve hot. Enjoy!!!

Way too hot to go fence hunting this week, so these are from last summer. In the main image: Cucumber flowers in the vegetable garden with fence repurposed as a trellis. In the pip: Japanese lanterns, cultivated as ornamentals for their bright red fruit HFF to those sweltering in the heat and those who are in the midst of winter on the other side of the world!

A wild flower grows gracefully next to a step in the building where I work, taking advantage of what little nourishment can be gleaned from windblown dirt collecting in the corners.

The plant, leaves and fruit look very much like wild strawberry. Only the bright yellow flower gives it away (as would, of course, your disappointed taste buds if you put the fruit in your mouth expecting a strawberry experience ...) as a different plant, a "mock strawberry". They are just starting to flower now and part of my half-wild garden is beginning to light up with these tiny yellow suns nestled in their artsy green crown.

This is our third weekend in the StayHome era and I think I need to count my blessings: 1. I have a garden, not a big one and rather unkempt, but a place to get some fresh air, exercise (and photo ops!); 2. I have always enjoyed cooking and these days the simple pleasures of home cooking are an important source of comfort. It takes my husband up to 50 minutes in line to go grocery shopping, so this colorful bunch of produce struck me as being not only beautiful but downright "precious". I look at them and think back to my mom's wartime stories, where she would ride her bike for 30 + kilometres to get a single egg. We are definitely not to that point, but still, all of a sudden, I find this wealth of fruit and veggies movingly beautiful.