I am in Tropea and it has been a fabulous week so far.

The old town of Tropea is a great little town to walk through and gaze at the architecture from the 18th century and take pictures off. Add on that from our apartment at Salato the view is stupendous and it just doesn’t tire looking at, if ever. This area is an amazing place to have a holiday at.

I’d like to pre -warn everyone that these pictures are copyrighted, and that anyone re-using them without my permission will be contacted by my solicitor! 

In Nicotera we climbed 200 meters uphill on a path that had not been used much, by the time we arrived up there we were drenched in sweat, after another half an hour browsing we decided to sit down in the shade and we got to talk to Giuseppe, a 78 year old retired teacher, who gave us boiled sweets and we did our best to converse with him in our broken Italian, I HAD to take his picture. The old town of Nicotera is strange to pass through, you end up going up and down stairs and slopes and go from a beautiful restored apartment to a complete wreck, back to beautiful house and then another wreck and so forth. Some parts of this town date back to the 1200’s. Great place to visit.

Capo Vaticano was next, nice place to lie on the beach, the fact that we are at the beginning of the season means not many people around all over, I bet that is different in July/August!

To Stromboli: the journey  was the least of anything we have done so far: imagine the worst Ryan Air flight, treble that, and you will have a rough idea of what it was like to take the boat out there, ok so loads of kids roaming, screaming and whatnot which comes with the package, fair enough but the constant tannoy activity in Russian, French, German and Italian, each taking ten mins and talking so much drivel, the people doing this are surely in love with themselves as the English translation lasted just about 20 seconds. I kid you not. I feel not very well due to the rocking sea but a  friendly Italian family hand me a motion sickness pill and it sorts me out about 20 minutes later.

The island itself is on the brink of becoming too commercial with too much stuff for sale no one actually needs. The viewing of the ‘wall of fire’  was nice, it happened 3x in about 40 minutes, the last one being a great one to take some shots of as the lava rolled down all the way into the water. Being quite close you realise how powerful nature can be.

We also went land inwards and this was a great idea, since there are some beautiful stretches around and derelict buildings as well. The Italians drive like mad on the motorways, we have witnessed it a few times up close, real up close!

The evening before we leave and I pick the missus up in town, after a short ride I turn around the corner with our moped and I have to hit the brakes so hard, so we don’t slam into the car who suddenly halted in front of us  that we slide over the asphalt for a few feet, enough to break two toes, various scratches and bruises on my ribs and right leg and arm, bot nothing too bad. The missus is ok too.

On the last day we miss our connecting train to get to the airport so we splash out 120 euros for a cab ride that you could only imagine in a film, ‘rode like the devil’ indeedy 😀 We end up making it to the flight in time.

I grabbed a couple of great pix for The Kiss book, which will be shown in due course.

I have to end this post on a sad note that Johno Driscoll has passed away, a b&w printer I met first back in 1994 (when he had his darkrooms in the basement a stone throw away from the White Cube Gallery on Hoxton Square and later based in Clerkenwell Close, sharing the corridor with LTI (the color lab that did my prints back then). A fitting tribute has been posted HERE