Around Barzio

Italiano

Going around Barzio photographing with my cheap pocket machine or with my first smartphone to get to know the country started as an extension to mountain hiking which I practiced for several years. There paths, nature, mountain pastures, cows and horses, shelters, hikers, panoramic views from above, rocks and peaks, runs and sweat, here, as in any inhabited center, sidewalks, asphalt, squares, cars and motorcycles, shops, people, views, parking lots and road signs, walks. Walking relieves my chronic back pain due to a fall on the butt that prevented me from working and fills the day. From the exploration of the streets of the town in the province of Lecco, a well-known summer and winter tourist resort of Valsassina, with about 1300 inhabitants at 769 meters high (Palazzo Manzoni, town hall), I brought home a dozen photographs, which quickly became a substantial number. Most of them were taken starting in 2011, during the three summer months spent in the company of my parents in the second floor apartment in Via Milano 30, which has a nice balcony overlooking the Grigne. The three-room belongs to my brother, who bought it in August 2010. With the same purpose I walked through the streets of Milan where I live, in the north-west outskirts of the city. I stopped to photograph only when I realized that a description was needed for the albums that grouped them, one for each street, square or place, and one with the most beautiful or significant of the country, it was 2015. I wrote some entries, in Italian and English, only text, no photographs, cited as sources at the bottom of the page in the notes. I started in alphabetical order, and so parking comes before square, and square before street, the main ones have a specific page. This is how this Blogger blog was born; Barzio's main square is not missing, Piazza Garibaldi, and its lion, that is the War Memorial of Barzio.

Since then, returning every summer to Barzio with my mother, away from the heat of Milan, in the living room a little dark of Riccardo I concentrate on my work on Barzio (and on Grignone), assigning a better place to my photos in the drive, deleting the ugly and useless ones, and renaming the file names, reading, correcting and rewriting comments to photos and album captions. In the most recent version, the comment on the photo describes the image, which sometimes triggers an autobiographical tale, also useful for clarifying the meaning and circumstances of the shot, in Italian and English. My discussion stops at the few entries already written because it is a demanding didactic work, without economic compensation, which forces me to spend many hours sitting in front of the computer.