New place, new adventures! This is Diavolezza. Small ski resort with a glacier! Lucky with the weather!

When the weather was too much to deal with...we simply drove the car away and went...on top of the Bernina Pass!!! Awesome lunch, very cool environment and very genuine fun!!!

my car felt so tiny next to the huge amount of snow....

I liked this place so much we decided to spend our last night there...

I have to tell you that in fact the weather wasn't at all so nice as it appears on these images!!! We would wake up in the morning with the sun and run to the ski resorts, start skiing and then, suddently, the weather would change and become apocaliptic! Wind, clouds, snow. Aweful! My face at one point turned into the worst nightmare! With such a weather I wouldn't even think about taking out my little camera and shoot pictures! It is smarter to take them when the sun is out!!!

Beside the really bad weather of the first days (it was so cold it wasn't even funny) it was really nice conquering every single corner of these beautiful mountains! Crazy slopes for crazy people!

lunch at the Alpetta Restaurant...and when the food was on the table...it started snowing again!

calling

or simply doing stupid faces!

Some good dinners at Steffani, Cascade and of course...happy hour at the wonderful Posthaus. It is great when you don't have to cook...not always but sometimes it is really a good thing!

I am back! And I am not sure if that is a positive thing!!! I left the fabulous Engadin to come back to Ticino. I left one region with meters of snow to come back to my old town to discover spring had already showed up! It felt kind of weird all dressed up in cashmere/wool and other very heavy stuff and see people walking around in t-shirts! I kind of already miss looking outside the hotel window to see an enormous amount of snow...! I am sure that here no more snow will arrive. Winter is really in the past. Still, in St. Moritz the ski resorts will be open until may...I might decide to go back there for a weekend...or maybe not!
First post of my strange week vacation!

Does it ever happen to you to wake up in the morning and start your day drinking a coffee (and sometimes smoking a cigarette!) thinking about philosophical strange things? Well, to me it happens all the time! I was reading an article about those architectural works, made only for temporary things that ultimately for some reason or another just remain in our reality for good. Structures built for the Olympic games that, most of the time get destroyed after the games are over but sometimes authorities decide to keep them for social, cultural, or whatever other reasons. Sometimes these pieces become part of the urban realms they belong to perfectly fitting in, sometimes they just dont as they become what we say in italian a "hole in the water": too expensive, unfunctional and so on. Obviously the best example of all is the Eiffel Tower in Paris (not in Vegas!!!). Built for the International Exhibition of Paris of 1889 it was ultimately decided to keep it eventhough it was supposed to stand there for a maximum of 20 years and then be dismantled. Today it is one of the most well known landmark in the world. It stands there, in the Champs de Mars, as the most impressive Parisian icon. Its vertical presence becomes very strong not only visually but also in its meaning. It is a very powerful work of engineering, mediatic presence since it appeared in numerous movies, quoted in many songs, pictured in thousands of postcards, shot in million of pictures, and yes, it is today a money machine!
But then, when walking there, below it, around it simply adiring it from different angles it made me see the concept of temporality in a different way. You see this vertical imposing structure , maybe while sitting on a bench of the Camps, you shoot some pictures and you realize that at the end, immortal or not, it feel like a natural presence. Like a tree. What is at the end the difference between the tower and a tree? They're both directed towards the sky. Photosynthesis in one, throuhg which nature lives and survives through light, lights, flashes in the other process through which its symbolic nature survives. If in a tree the main vertical (liquid) movement is what brings life to its components, in the tower people are are vertically elevated to the top bringing life to the structure. They both live from bottom up. Are they both immortal. Some trees are supposed to be, for the tower...who knows...surely its iconographic image will be printed in our collective memory forever. But we are unfortunaly not yet immortal!

After suffering for more than 2 weeks I decided to finally go to the doctor. My arm and especially my elbow were killing me. Enough was enough! Diagnosis: humeral epicondylitis or vulgarly said "tennis elbow". Since it is almost 15 years I do not play tennis it felt like a joke! So, apparently it will take couple of weeks before it will totally go away...and it sucks since next sunday I'll go skiing for a week! Basically the cure is simple: try not to use my arm too much...it is my right arm...how can I not use it????? Rest and ...do not play tennis!!!!
So, last night I took a long bath reading Michael Connelly'y "The Narrows" and to tell you the truth it was kind of hard holding the book with my left arm trying not to let it fall in the water! Then I ate some ravioli and laid down in front of the tv hoping that something good would be playing: wrong!! There was absolutely nothing! Nada! Niente! On TMC they were playing an old movie and, eventhough it was already half way through, I started watching it and wondering how come that, in the year 2009 there is nothing better to show then a 1940's movie. Why? Honestly I love old movies, they are genuine. Very touching. Visually interesting. Sometimes watching the past in its simplicity gives you more than a movie filled with special effects. Not always. But last night it really made me relax. And fall asleep forgetting that my elbow was killing me. I even dreamt of beating Roger Federer at Wimbledon!!!

Strange day today. Or should I say strange week, strange month or strange life??? I was reading posts this morning around the blog's world and I've realized that many people are indeed wondering about the same things I find myself thinking about this morning: life! I was saving my pictures into Flickr when I came across some of those I shot in Paris last december. I was experimenting with my camera and see how the world came out if I shot it out of focus. Maybe that would be how I would see it without my glasses? That would be too much!!! But looking back at those pictures made me start daydreaming. I wish I wasn't in this town of mine right now. I wish I was somewhere else, anywhere, maybe alone, maybe with my closest friends maybe who knows. Looking at the world out of focus makes you see the unseen, allows you to complete parts of reality that usually impacts you in different ways. Out of focus makes you dream, makes you see different shapes or even wonder what if the world I see would sometimes be out of focus and I am the only one who can chose what to leave it that way or what detail should I see clearly? I wish my morning would be out of focus but...unfortunately it seems that life is one of those few things you can't photoshop!

REALITY

WHAT IF...WHAT DO YOU ACTUALLY SEE?