Tivoli and the Villa d'Este

My first visit to Tivoli Gardens was when I was 14 or so. I enjoyed the rides and developed the tiniest quantum of a crush on the 30-something woman who was the only person in the tour group willing to go on the roller coaster with me. It is one of my fondest memories of Copenhagen, and there it stood for decades as far as I was concerned.

It is only in preparing for this trip that I learned that that Tivoli Gardens isn't the Tivoli Gardens, in much the way I suppose that the Kew Gardens I first visited isn't necessarily the Kew Gardens people first think of.

Yesterday the VOSS gang visited the original Tivoli, a bit outside of Rome. There are two things to see in Tivoli--the Villa Adriana, which was something of an original version of Versailles built by the Roman Emperor Hadrian. The second is what we went to--the Villa d'Este, built by a cardinal in the 16th century and borrowing inspiration (and borrowing ransacking material) from the Villa Adriana.

The Villa itself is, of course, spectacular. Even if it's basically "another palace". The art inside is very impressive, with frescoes giving praise and adoration to the cardinal, who was a grandson of a Pope*.  They were made to look like tapestries (like the one here), or with painted columns or doorways and windows.

The real star of the show were the gardens.  These had a series of fantastic hydraulic features and fountains, taking advantage of a river that went nearby to divert plenty of water. Some of the fountains were restored in the 20th century with modern technology (like the ones in the Neptune fountain above), but most retained their period feel.

One axis of the gardens had a fountain representing the town of Tivoli on one end, and another representing Rome.  Here's the Rome side, with Athena and to her right (from our point of view) the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus.

After spending the morning on the lovely day walking around the gardens, Jen and I repaired to lunch followed by an extended stay at a cafe where we had a round or two while waiting for the bus. The students hung out across the piazza on the stairs. We probably would have bought them a round if they'd joined us. :)

The students seemed to have a good time.  Here's a subset gathered for a group selfie (groupie?) while others took pictures of them taking the selfie because 2016 I guess?


*One of the students came up to me afterward, confused.  "How could he be the grandson of the Pope? I thought that Popes..."  I am glad that she is not cynical by nature, and am a little sad that I had to break the bad news about some of the medieval popes to her.

The May-June 2016 Leg of the World Stupendathon Tour

The Vatican Observatory refractor, which is on the roof of the Papal Summer Palace in Castel Gandolfo.

OK, let's see if we can get this going.

I have a long trip coming up, albeit one that has us (mostly) staying in the same place. Jennifer and I have the pleasure of being guest lecturers at the Vatican Observatory Summer School in Albano, Italy, about a half hour south of Rome. The school runs the month of June, we're currently planning to spend some time prior to the school in Zürich and about a week after the school doing some additional touring (right now we're thinking of Vienna).

The students will have access to quite the library. This is something we pulled off the shelf on a previous visit to the Vatican Observatory HQ in Castel Gandolfo.

This will not be our first trip to Italy, nor the first time as the guests of the Vatican Observatory.  We visited in 1996 and stayed in Castel Gandolfo in-between conferences in Versailles and Berlin. I also had the pleasure of a visit to Rome in 2011 and a visit to Castel Gandolfo as part of that trip. Finally, I was in Rome last year, as well as the nearby town of Frascati.

I don't know what our schedules will be like there, but I at least hope to post on occasion.  I also do plan to talk about some past trips here once I get into the blogging routine!

So What's All This Then

I've been a lot of places.  The map up there represents most of the places I've been in my life, however briefly.  I enjoy travel, and have been fortunate enough to have been able to do a lot of it both for work (I'm an astronomer) and for pleasure. Faced with a massive amount of travel in 2015 I started referring to the various trips as the "World Stupendathon Tour" on Twitter.  2016 looks to have a similar amount of travel, and so I figured I'd start this blog to share some of the thoughts that are too long for Twitter. I'm not sure what I'll do with the blog, though I imagine it'll be a mix of what I'm up to and past trips. Maybe a post on my thoughts about Johannesburg followed by pictures from Singapore or something. I don't currently have a place to talk about science (I do have another blog, but it's for music/poetry), it's possible I'll have some science posts as well.

Anyhow, welcome to the blog.  Let's see what happens.