Annalia S.'s photos with the keyword: park

Rollerskating rink at Villa Vogel Park in the last light. Wishing everyone also a nice time together with your loved ones for the holidays!

The last stragglers head home from Villa Vogel Park after the last sunlight abandons a recently vacated bench. Have a good week ahead everyone! Or at least as good as can be had, with Covid surges and violent protests ... P.S.Posting a bit early as I will not be able to tomorrow until quite late.

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

Happy Bench Monday, everyone!

By the fence of the Isolotto children's playground. No children around at this hour (too frigging hot!), but someone found a pole to secure their brightly coloured bike. Happy Colorful Fence Friday, everyone and an equally bright coloured weekend!

I was about 5 years old when my art teacher father got me my first serious painting kit. He wanted to get me oil based paints, but my mother put her foot down, so we went for more washable tempera paints. The art supply store, with its profusion of colors, its smells and mind boggling variety of brushes, spatulas, easels and palettes, was like a rutilant wonderland to me, better than any stores, even better than the toy store! What part of this phantasmagoria would be mine to take home, I wondered, excitedly. My dad took a long time selecting brushes, checking what hairs they were made of and picking different shapes and sizes. He explained his choices to me, but all I remember now is the wonder of the different textures: boar hairs were coarse and rigid, others as smooth as silk, and others even more incredibly light and almost feathery and would tickle the palm of your hand if you ran them across it. The paint tubes themselves, however, did not take long: a large tube of white, an equally large tube of black and four smaller tubes: yellow, blue and two kinds of red. Considering the endless variety of colors offered by the store, some of them - flowery pinks, aqua greens, light and dark turquoises - just irresistible to a young girl, this was a bit disappointing. “What about the other colors, Dad?” I asked. He smiled and said “You’ll see”. As we headed home he elaborated a bit on that rather unsatisfying answer: “You can make any color you saw in the store from the ones we got”. That sounded more hopeful, but I still couldn’t see how red, blue or yellow could be turned to aqua green or turquoise, or shocking pink. It sounded like some magic trick would be required. At 5 years of age, kids tend to believe their parents are all powerful. But still, magic tricks didn’t seem like his cup of tea. And yet, magic it was, of course. A wonderful magic that makes yellow and blue turn into a whole palette of greens depending on how much of each gets mixed in. And red and yellow into orange, blue and red into purple, but … wait! Red was a bit different; to get the right results, red had to come in two different versions: scarlet and vermillion. You needed scarlet red to make purple and vermillion red to make a proper orange. Switch them around and the magic would not work right. Vermillion red and blue made brown, not purple. And scarlet and yellow made a sort of salmon pink instead of orange. I understood the principle and could see some difference in those two colors, but still, red is red, isn’t it? Vermillion just seemed a little lighter and perhaps more brilliant than scarlet, but still it was just red to me. I did not really “get” vermillion, not until - that is - I saw my first pomegranate tree, or rather, the absolutely flamboyant flowers of the pomegranate tree. If you have ever seen them in real life, I think you’ll agree that “red” just does not do justice to them, doesn’t even begin to describe their happy, sunny, light-filled color that stands out so strikingly against the brilliant green of the leaves. The main photo and PIPs are all from two beautiful pomegranate trees in Piazza Savonarola's little city park which, this time of year, are in full bloom. I swear I must have spent nearly an hour there, shooting this way and that, into the trees and under the trees, sticking my camera through the branches to get close to the busy bees that were visiting their beautiful vermillion flowers. I hope you enjoy … well, I can’t say the fruit of my labour. It’s not really labour when you are having that much fun, is it? :) This is especially dedicated to Andy and Maurice (HappySnapper) who are going through tough times. Errata corrige: Upon rereading I realize I used the wrong red for the one that gives purple if mixed with blue: it's carmine, not scarlet! Sorry. Should re-read my stuff before I publish! :))

Evening light lights up the fence surrounding the restoration work in progress at the site in the Cascine Park where decades ago I used to go dancing at the Meccanò discotheque (now long abandoned and finally demolished in 2016). A small colony of stray cats that had lived for many years in the abandoned lot seems to have been provided with shelters just outside the grounds under restoration. A couple of the "tenants" showed up while I was taking photos (see PIP) and a young boy attempted to approach one of them, while his mother advised "Move slowly, darling, so you don't frighten it". When a second cat showed up coming in from the side, however, it was the boy that took fright and decided the best part of valor was ... retreat! :) HFF everyone and may you have a colorful, light-filled weekend!

Have a lovely week, everyone!

A gentleman at the park takes advantage of a bench carved out of the stump of one of many trees felled by a freak weather phenomenon a few yers ago. In the pip front view of the bench. Have a great week, everybody!

Piazza Indipendenza, around noon. Some seek the shade for their lunch break, some nap in the sun, And some others share the bread crumbs from some half eaten panino ... :) Have a nice week ahead, everyone!

View of the Arno River from Anconella Park Happy Bench Monday, everyone! May your week have plenty of moments when you can take a rest in peaceful settings and enjoy the view before having to plunge back into whatever it is that keeps you busy or puts food on the table!

With the limitations to traveling, people seem to have rediscovered the charm of city parks, like the Albereta Park on the left bank of the Arno River, just upstream from the city. While I headed for home as the the sun was preparing to set and most park goers seemed to be following the same plan, a couple lingered on a bench by the river to enjoy the last of a day among the new green of spring. I will be busy all day tomorrow, so HBM a bit ahead of time to everybody!

No spectators seemed to be enjoying the theatrics of the shadows at the park. Well, unless you have an overactive imagination like I do and somehow "see" ghosts enjoying the shadow theater ... :D In the PIP: the curvy fence and, in the background, the wall of the old convent (this small public park used to be a patch of land belonging to the adjacent convent - part of it no doubt was a vegetable garden; part, perhaps, a graveyard) HBM and a good week ahead to everyone!

a glimpse of the sunlit buildings across the Arno river, taken from the pleasant shade under the trees of the riverside garden in Piazza Poggi (where I also enjoyed a tasty panino from the Easy Living Kiosk). The tower of the Palazzo della Signoria looks closer than it is in reality from this perspective. On the right hand side, part of the brownstone building of the Biblioteca Nazionale.

By an area of the Cascine park that is under renovation, the various layers of an old fence caught the morning light in a way that attracted my attention. In the PIP: a close up that shows off the variously bent fence posts. Happy Fence Friday to all! P.S. The IMA team is asking for comments on a counterproposal regarding the Esperanto language interface. In my opinion the discussion is taking on a more general nature that even those not interested in the specific topic might want to comment on. Anyone interested in expressing their opinion can find the thread by clicking on the blue bar above the banner.

Arm in arm, an elderly couple crosses the Arno River on the tram bridge to reach the Cascine Park, while the evening sun casts shadows on the pedestrian walkway.

At the Cascine Park on an overcast morning.

Left in peace for two months during the lockdown, the wild grasses took over and park lawns now look just like Nature intended! It won't last long, city gardeners will soon be showing up with their lawnmowers, so I made sure to have a picture of "the time Nature took back over" :)