Cape Town Lens: Lion and lattice

A Cape Town Lion’s Head tagged image from photographer – Darkroom Daze as published on Flickr.

Lion and lattice

Image by Darkroom Daze

Detail of terracotta brickwork, frieze, inscription, carved lion’s head and rose lattice motif on one of the main corner columns of the portico of the church of San Giorgio in Velabro, Rome (Italy)

‘In Velabro‘ refers to the swampy ground where this church was first constructed in the 7th Century, when it was dedicated to St. Sebastian. It was re-dedicated in the 8th Century to the Greek saint, St.George, now also patron saint of England. This part of Rome was a Greek quarter at the time. The church has been reconstructed and added to many times, including extensive repairs following a street bomb in 1993. But I assume that at least some of the brickwork here is the same age as is quoted for the portico – 12th Century.

—– en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Giorgio_in_Velabro
—– www.revealedrome.com/2010/11/st-george-in-velabro-medieva…

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LONDON – PARIS – CATANIA – ROME – LONDON —– DAY 8

Photo from the eighth day of our crazy long distance rail trip from home (London) to Sicily. We had had an unscheduled but happy first night stopover in Paris because our Eurostar train out of London was badly delayed due to ‘a fatality [unexplained – perhaps fortunately] on the train’. We therefore missed our onward sleeper train connection to Rome, so spent our second day in Paris. We left Paris that evening, on the equivalent sleeper train service a day later. We reached Rome during the third day, where we changed to a daytime train for Catania, Sicily, arriving there the same evening. Our fourth day was our first full day in Sicily, and we spent this in the centre of Catania itself. We spent our fifth day on an excursion to Mount Etna run by GeoEtnaExplorer. We chose this tour company because the guides are geologists. Our particular tour went high up on the flanks on the summit, but not to the summit proper. For this sixth day, our final full day in Sicily, we took the bus from Catania (our base) to Siracusa, in search of Ancient Greek remains, while also getting distracted by other interesting sights, and some excellent ice cream, at various points in the day. But perhaps the most spectacular thing was the huge thunderstorm which hit us in the early part of the afternoon. The seventh day was the start of our homeward journey, for which we took our sixth train of the trip, from Catania and ending with an overnight stop in Rome. We spent the eighth day on a long walk through the heart of Rome, where we hadn’t been back since I worked there briefly many years ago, before continuing our way home to London by catching a sleeper train that evening to Paris.

By the end of the whole holiday trip we had seen things and sites from ancient Greek time to modern, so the trip felt like a mini Grand Tour. Or given the rich mythology of Sicily, Etna and the Straits of Messina (Odysseus, the Cyclops, Scylla & Charybdis, etc.) perhaps our trip was like a modern mini Odyssey of our times. Odysseus took ten years to get home. It took us ten trains – but no monsters.

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Photo
Darkroom Daze
© Creative Commons.
If you would like to use or refer to this image, please attribute.
ID: DSC_6834