Beautiful bright colors and beauty in a historic cemetery on a sunny day on Capri
Capri is a world famous resort, the playground for jet setters. It’s an ancient Roman island in Southern Italy still peppered with the villas of Emperors. I’ve heard it called the Beverly Hills of Italy because of its luxury boutiques and grand dame hotels. To me, Capri is about the quiet moments, the local back streets, the flora and fauna and places like the beautiful, very off the beaten path 19th century non-catholic cemetery.
The cemetery is in a residential, slightly run down section between Capri town and the Marina Grande but it overlooks the sea and is incredibly charming. Artists, writers, Anglo Saxons, Nordics and French in love with Capri are all buried here. There are Jewish graves and non-religious tombs and plenty of Madonna statues. And in modern Capri, plenty of Catholic Italians choose this idyllic spot with a sweeping view of the Tyrrhenian Sea for their final resting places.
I walked to the cemetery on the rather harrowing, not very pedestrian “old road down to Marina Grande” and found the graveyard after a ten minute “stroll” sidestepping uncomfortably close vespas, cars and buses like a veteran Italian. When in Rome, eh?
You may want to take a taxi from the bus station in Capri Town. Ask for the Cimitero acattolico di Capri. On Capri – not the pretty, much smaller catholic cemetery on Ana Capri – though that is also lovely. This is the spot with character and history and angels.
I wandered around this lovely melancholy place on such a beautiful sunny day I couldn’t help but be moved by all the beauty, by the sea views, by the wild blue flowers, the statues, and the declarations of love for Italy, and the names, and sometimes images of the lost beloved.
I shot these lush unedited analog photographs on Portra 400 and Portra 800 fine art 35 mm films in 2013.
The Splendor of Napoli and the Isles of the Emperors
the splendor of napoli and the isles of the emperors
The bright and brash colors of the Spacconapoli neighborhood in Napoli, Italia (Naples, Italy) captured on velvia film slides, shot on one of my canon analog cameras.
The sharp contrast of the elegance of Bourbon architecture and Neapolitan artistry against the slow modern decay of the last 80 years in grafitti and weathered edges of life highlights a city steeped in dichotomies.
The Neapolitan soul remains seemingly intact however, divided between the threads of passionate art, beauty, the wild nature of the sea and Baroque gardens, and the soaring rocks and islands so utterly exquisite they are paradisos on earth… and in the looming apartments and close quarters of alleys making the piazzas the true heart of the local’s living room.
Travel on sea and breathe deeply in the clean bracing air as you wander miles of meadows and picaresque villages along the hiking trails of the Amalfi Coast, and the bejeweled isles of Capri, Ischia, and Procida. They are nature and ruin found in perfect harmony, timeless slices of heaven to be experienced best when in love with life.
And back in Naples, even among the crush of pollution and population, with the stain of the Camorra, even in the heart of this ancient superstitious city with countless rulers over countless centuries one simply cannot ignore the fascinating elements of history and beauty bound eternally in the treasures of Roman Naples, of Pompeii and Herculaneum, of the ancient Emperor isles, of the Renaissance and Baroque art everywhere, still lingering, surviving, — conserved in the museums and palazzos of the Campania that will forever be worth exploring and studying.
