The Then and Now Series Comes to a Close

I saved the best for last. After three shows featuring 19th century photos of Italy, I saved perhaps the most interesting for this last broadcast featuring material from Rome, Milan, Venice, Pompeii, Mt Vesuvius, Bologna, Bergamo, and Verona. This pretty much consumes my supply of photos from the several books I bought while in Florence at the bookstore which used to be the Alinari Brother's workshop and studio. When I return to Florence in a few weeks, I will once again visit this amazing store, but right now, I would like to discover other interesting off-beat locations for further shows. For that I would need Luca, a native Florentine, to assist me.

Meanwhile, I felt that I needed to begin tonight's broadcast by explaining to my audience why we are only producing a show a month instead of my promised twice a month or my four times a month that we did for the first two years. I indicated that my material has gone down in size and needs to be replenished by what I anticipate to be as many as 20 new show from our next trip to Italy in May and June. These new shows will focus on small towns in Cinque Terre, Western Tuscany, and larger cities such as Florence. We will also feature our favorite restaurant in the Lake Como village of Varenna.

Tonight Ellen struggled with several problems related to the live broadcast causing dark frames, sometimes poor quality images, sound issues, and who knows what else. As more and more people use the public access studio, there materialize more and more problems. Amateurs are switching things around for seemingly no reason causing Ellen, a pro, to experience all kinds of issues. Some of these problems are manifest on the Youtube video, but the lion's share, a 70 second strange screen has been edited out by me after the upload to my channel. I hope there are are not too many distractions because the actual 56 minutes broadcast was fascinating. I was quite relaxed and meandered through 19th century Italy making my usual comparisons to the 20th and 21st century versions. The photos of scenes with a mother and her children were to me the most beautiful.

I told Ellen that I would attempt to get back on a semi-monthly format of shows if I could get into the process of creation of shows during the next two weeks. I have pretty much finished my book, and my college teaching is in a two week lull right for spring recess. I do have some ideas, but need to take the time to develop shows around them. That will occupy my time for the next few weeks, but when I return from Italy, that is when I should have a large number of photos which will form the basis for a year's worth of new shows.