Tag Archives: Sculpture

Day 8 Part 1 – Leaving Vila Nova da Barquinha

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Friday 4 September 2026 – Another day, another Uber. The forecast was unchanged – a very warm (30°C, cloudy and humid) day was in prospect. With a 23km walk, meaning at least 6 hours and probably seven on the road, and an elevation profile like this

helped us decide on taking a ride to our next destination, Tomar. Not therefore having to get out at sparrowfart allowed us to take time to look round Vila Nova da Barquinha in more detail, seeking out the bits of street art which were within walking distance and revisiting the sculpture trail in the park that we’d pottered around yesterday evening, to see things in decent light.

Barquinha (for such I’ll call it in the interests of brevity) is typical of our experience of Portugal so far – touches of great elegance against a backdrop of neglect. So, for example, some wonderful azulejos

but a badly-maintained backdrop.

One thing that looked in good nick was the bullring.

We saw from a poster by the railway station that a corrida was happening in a week’s time; whether this clean and tidy appearance was due to the imminent event or whether civic pride generally kept it looking nice we will never know. However, I happened to notice that one of the doors, the second one, labelled “Camarotes”

was open. So we looked in. It would appear that “Camarotes” means “Boxes” in the sense of privileged viewing places.

and we got a good view of the arena, which was being worked on, presumably, again, for the forthcoming festivities.

I had formed the impression (see the featured image for why) that the “Vila Nova” (“new town”) part of Barquinha’s name meant that it was only about a century old. Wrongly, as it turns out. It has a significant history stretching back centuries. Actually, the development of the region is strongly related to the Reconquista period, when the nearby river Tagus was the border between the dominions of Christians and Moors. In the 12th century, the defence of this border was in charge of the Knights Templar, who built several castles along the river. One of these is the Castle of Almourol, (which we didn’t get round to visiting for various reasons). At the end of the 13th century, when the Reconquista was finished, the importance of the castles of the region declined and the villages along the Tagus then became important riverside ports for the transport of agricultural goods of the region to Lisbon. There’s an azulejo in the riverside park about this.

Vila Nova da Barquinha was created in the 17th century around a fluvial port. In the 18th and 19th centuries the village became the most important in the region, and it was turned into the seat of the municipality in 1836. The history of the place explains the touches of elegance we saw as we walked around.

And it was quite a walk to the first street art installation,

tiling placed round what we think is (or was once) an electricity substation. The tiling was done by Manel Vieira in 2018, and it doesn’t look as if the building has had much TLC ever since, which is a shame. We pressed on, going back past the bullring and a tiled installation

which is apparently about 500 years of the Reformation in Europe. A tiling panel next to it dated it as 2017, but I couldn’t decipher the artist’s name.

We walked some way out of the centre of Barquinha and passed a mural that I’d actually noted on our ride into the town;

another piece that would have been impressive at the time but which looks very sad now. The same was true of the next instance we came to;

a further example of an attempt to prettify infrastructure which has been allowed to decay. The final piece on this part of the walkabout was an impressive work, once again using infrastructure as the canvas.

In it, the artist (whose name was not specified in the accompanying panel) expresses his concern about pollution in the Tagus River. (There was one more example of prettified infrastructure, which I’ll come to later.)

As we walked about, we noted that the mosaic pavements were decorated in a very specific pattern,

which Jane correctly identified as a small boat, which is, of course, how “Barquinha” translates into English. This was confirmed at the municipality offices.

The mosaic pavements stretched across much of our walk. We came across a couple of guys working on the maintenance of a section,

which makes one realise what a huge scope of work all of these pavements are.

Not everywhere is tatty. The sports pavilion is tidy and announces itself with great panache.

and many of the houses and apartments are in good shape.

We were struck by all the white space around

that was completely devoid of graffiti. Until we got to the station, that is.

I wonder whether there’s a specific anti-graffiti task force which keeps (almost) everything clean; it certainly makes a change from everywhere else we’ve been, where graffiti is depressingly ubiquitous.

On returning from the above peregrination, we walked around the park, where there is that other example I mentioned earlier, of an electricity substation that has been gussied up.

and we walked past the various sculptures beside the paths in the park.

“Rotter” – a representation of a wicker basket used in fishing in the Algarve
“House in the Sky” – industrial storage boxes used to build a prefab
“Line of Earth and River” – in polished and brushed stainless steel
Untitled – actually four tall steel mirrors, turning the garden into a stage
“Contramundo” – artistic tosh in the description of this trilobite
“Square house with tree inside”. Nuff said
“Castle” was once in yellow granite
“Concrete Poem”
“Irrigation”
“Over the forest” inspired by a mandala

As well as all the above slightly pretentious stuff, there were a couple of rotating disks, one of which gave a very compelling illusion.

 

The park was opened in 2005 and the sculpture trail inaugurated in 2012. The building decorations seem to date from around 2017 or 2018, so it’s clear that sporadic efforts have been made to bring art into the public spaces. It’s just a shame that, having done this good work, so much of it has been left to decay.

The café in the park got some more of our business after all that walking, and then we whistled up an Uber to take us on to Tomar, where we have a rest day. (Well, I suppose you could call today and the preceding couple of days “rest days” since we didn’t actually walk any of the Caminho. But we have walked a bit – today’s wandering round Barquinha was a 7km path, so we haven’t been entirely idle.) Tomar has significant historical and cultural significance and so I’ll deal with it in subsequent entries.

 

Staving off boredom

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Tuesday 26 August 2025 – The only scheduled activity for the day was to meet a Swedish friend, Peter, for lunch. Well, dinner. Depends on your viewpoint. We’d chatted to the hotel concierge and settled on a rather interesting, eccentric-looking restaurant; but it didn’t open until 3pm. So we booked a table promptly for then, and I don’t care what you call it, really.

So, after a lavish breakfast in the hotel’s very handsome dining room,

we pottered off in the direction of the cathedral. It’s such an un-cathedral-like building that I had no expectations about what we’d find inside. Walking in, two things hit one: it’s very airy, light and largely unadorned; and the main exception to that is the ceiling, which really does make an impact.

It really is a lovely piece of work.

There’s some quietly impressive stained glass

and what looks very much like a Royal Box!

On the wall outside, inserted into the brickwork, is the “Devil of Oslo” – a man being attacked by both a dragon and a lion. The stone relief, once part of the ruined St Hallvard’s cathedral, is around 900 years old.

A few steps away is the view along Karl Johan’s gate to the Royal Palace.

We weren’t going to visit the palace, but headed off in that direction to get a ticket for the train to the airport tomorrow. Since this is going to be at 0630, and we can’t rely on the grey matter firing on all neurons at that hour, we wanted if possible to get tickets. We walked to the National Theatre station, and it was clear that Something Was Going On with kids and political parties. There were booths set up by the green, and hordes of kids were congregating at each one and whizzing between them clutching bits of paper.

We understand there might be local elections in the offing; presumably they had to prove to someone that they had engaged with all the parties, or something like that; anyway they appeared to be quite engaged in the process.

We found the station, found the ticketing machines and bought tickets – only to discover that the tickets we’d bought were only valid for a couple of hours. Ah, well…chalk it up to experience; it was only about a tenner down the drain. Had we not been Old People, it would have been twice as much.

I reckon that you can’t really say you know a place until you’ve engaged with the public transport, and our next objective was most easily reachable by bus. We knew it was the no. 30 and had read that you could pay on board the bus. We located the right bus stop and the no. 30 came by bang on time – but the only payment accepted was via an App, called Ruter, or – horror of horrors! – cash! We actually had cash with us so proffered a 100 crown note. The nice lady bus driver looked at it and said, with a hint of a Nordic sigh and possibly some well-disguised rolling of the eyes, that we should just sit down and not bother with the payment nonsense. We sat down, but weren’t comfortable with this arrangement, so I used the journey to download the app and buy the ticket anyway. Nice technology, but not quite 100% joined up, which is a surprise, given how tech-savvy the Norwegian systems are.

Anyhoo…

Our destination was a peninsula called Bygdøy, which houses several museums, including the one we wanted to visit, which was the Norsk Folkmuseum. Granted, we have a general interest in the history of the places we visit, but there was a specific reason for the visit which will become apparent if you keep reading. Sorry for the viewer bribery bit there, but I have to try to give you an incentive to stay awake, here.

The museum is similar in principle to the Weald and Downland Living Museum in the UK or Skansen in Sweden – the chance to see traditional buildings of historical interest relocated to or recreated at a single site. The no. 30 bus stops outside the doors, so we bought our tickets and, after a restorative coffee, went in, immediately heading for the specific thing we really wanted to see. Teasingly, it became visible through the trees,

until we turned the corner and

saw our second stave church! Originally built at Gol in the 13th century, it’s a lovely thing on the outside,

I had to wait ages for people to sod off out of my picture!

and the inside is just as enchanting.

There’s any amount of intricate carving, much of it with Viking influences – dragons an’that –

and a wonderful cloistery bit round the back.

It really was a delight – and it was our second stave church in three days. We’ve now seen two of the 28 extant stave churches in Norway and I’m rather worried to report that Jane has decided that she we now Have A Project which involves visiting all of the remaining ones. In a camper van.

The site of the Folkmuseum is really quite large, with lots of buildings from various periods, split into various areas, such as farm buildings, some with rooms that one can go into and talk to an interpreter.

Some are in small avenues, like this arrangement of alternating stores and farm cottages from the 1600s.

They even had saunas in those days! This one is from 1600.

Don’t believe me?

(It was also a drying room, of course.)

Some of the storage barns have very fine carving.

and the carving extends to runes and other ways of identifying the builder or owner of an establishment.

The runes are over the doorway of the world’s oldest preserved wooden dwelling, from the first half of the 13th century…

Another attractive area is called the Old Town – not really old like the farm area, but old enough, and very photogenic.

There’s a huge amount to see (and photograph). We barely skimmed the surface and there are many, many pictures I haven’t included; but I hope this gives a flavour of what the place is like. We had a very enjoyable couple of hours there, but had to leave in order to catch the ferry back to Oslo downtown for our lunch appointment. So we hastened there, past some really lovely houses which I would have liked to photograph if we hadn’t been hurrying for the ferry. But I couldn’t pass the Kon-Tiki museum without taking a picture, since we’d visited Easter Island, famous for its Moai.

At the quay

I used my nice new Ruter app to buy a ticket back to the Town Hall quay. Sadly, when the ferry turned up

and we boarded, it became clear that what I’d bought was a bus ticket, not valid for the boat. Another one chalked up to experience….

Once back at the town hall quay

we got a decent view across the water to the fortress and palace where we’d wandered yesterday

and we pottered along to Rorbua for our lunchtime appointment with Peter.

It’s a place which specialises in dishes from the north of Norway, hence some of the more unusual decor items

and, indeed, items on the menu. Yes, reindeer, yes, moose, of course, but also – whale! Peter had whale steak, and pronounced it to be very tasty – more meaty than fishy, which makes sense, given that a whale is not a fish. Jane had a taste and said that the texture was somewhat fibrous, the taste was fine, but she probably wouldn’t order it given the chance. Whale meat again, don’t know where, don’t know when.

The restaurant is in the popular Akersbrygge area, where there are loads of eateries and drinkeries, and also, incidentally, the Nobel Peace Hall.

After our Nice Lunch, we wandered back past Peter’s hotel and round the corner to Oslo’s oldest pub,

which opened in 1969 (same year as the Tudor Arms in Stockholm, for any of my Swedish readers). There, we took our leave of Peter and headed back to our hotel, since we have a sparrowfart departure tomorrow. En route, we passed something we should have seen as we arrived, but somehow missed – the parliament building

which, as is not unusual in Scandinavia, was the site of a rally, or demonstration; this one was in support of Ukraine.

So, that’s about it for our Phase II. But before I close the file on Oslo, I feel I should include some of the other odds and bits we saw today.

We’ve been really lucky with the weather, and Oslo has presented its best face. It hasn’t really resonated with us when compared with Stockholm, which is similar in many respects but has something that calls out to us more. But it’s been enjoyable wandering round, delightful to score our second stave church and great to meet Peter again. So we leave with pleasant memories.

Tomorrow is the start of Phase III, so please stay tuned to see what we got up to next.

Florence in more depth

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Wednesday 7 May 2025 – Long Post Alert!

In what I suspect will be a relatively rare occurrence during this junket, we were allowed a lie-in to 7am before having to get under way for the day. The hotel offers a decent breakfast (meaning mainly that they have Earl Grey available) but in somewhat cramped conditions. No matter; at 0900 we were ready to meet our guide for the morning, Bianca.

She is clearly very knowledegable about Florence, its history and culture, and Jane very much enjoyed learning about Florence in more depth. Me, not so much; I had enormous difficulty penetrating Bianca’s very Italian delivery and accent, particularly as it was often set against the backdrop of traffic, roadworks and many, many large tour groups.

The city was crowded today – there were plenty of tourists and schoolkids in large groups, making me suspect that at least one large cruise liner had berthed at Livorno, and that this was the time of year that schools favoured for an attempt to inject kulcher into the little ones. The practical upshot was that I didn’t get a great deal of extra information from our tour. However, Jane did, so collectively we learned a lot and got some photos of wonderful places that we might not have otherwise found.

I’m not a habitual, practised or skillful street photographer, but Florence offers some nice vignettes, if you’re not careful. I managed to get told off several times during the day: taking photos of art sellers, who clearly didn’t appreciate  being photographed;

and photos from some angles which caused people in uniform in key locations to tell me to move away from where I was.

Standing on the wrong side of a piece of rope to avoid too many TV aerials interfering with a nice view of the cathedral cupola

Standing on a bench to capture a better angle of the Pieta in the Cathedral museum

I also captured a couple of vignettes of interesting people who may or may not have been couples;

OK, back to the mainstream of the day. We visited lots of very attractive and photogenic places:

The Academy of Fine Arts (this is the exit – we didn’t go in)

The local equivalent of the UK’s Ordnance Survey…

…with its fetching observatory on the roof

The Piazza della Santissima Annunziata – the Annunziata Church is on the left; on the right a hospital for foundlings

Annunziata Square (2)

The Annunziata Square was recommended by the driver who picked us up at the airport yesterday; he described it as “cute”, which is not, I think, the right word.  It’s a handsome square all right, featuring a particular Florentine architectural characteristic – the pillars and arches. The pillars form a cube which is of a consistent dimension wherever it’s used; and the arches form a hemisphere above the cube. The cube’s exact dimensions are based on an exact number of standard “forearm” measurements, documented elsewhere in the city;

 

each “forearm” is 56.83cm in length. This, by the way, is longer than my forearm by quite some margin, so I have no idea how they arrived at 56.83cm as “normal”.

One can see from the square to the Duomo, which makes the scene a favourite for wedding photographs.

A less appealing feature of the Annunziata Square is this:

The cloths hanging there are are a reminder of the prevalence of domestic violence in Italy. Each cloth represents the death, through domestic violence, of one woman – this year!

Inside the entrance of the Annunziata Church is a splendid cloister.

around the walls of which are some lovely artworks.

Outside the church is an arch

which contains a corridor, built for a lady of the Medici family who was severely disabled so that she could get to services in the church without having to negotiate stairs or other difficulties.

The buildings in the environs of the cathedral featured wine cellars, which were somewhat below street level. It was A Thing to greet cellar workers and ask for a glass of wine, which could be delivered once money had changed hands. This practice gave rise to “wine windows”

whereby one knocked on the door to gain attention, and a glass of wine could be served directly. A little further along was a similar-looking niche

but one too small to accommodate a wine bottle. This one originally had a wire and a pulley to allow the lowering of a lamp so it could be lit before being hauled back into place.

We were by this time adjacent to the cathedral, and Bianca took us round the building, telling us about some of the background to the details. One of the world’s largest churches, with the dome still the largest masonry dome ever constructed, all but the dome was complete by 1380, with the dome itself completed in 1436.

The extraordinary external decoration, in polychrome marble, was begun in the 14th century but not completed until 1887!

In the triangle, the Virgin Mary is depicted in an almond shape called a “mandorla” which is a symbol of the intersection between the divine and the human

 

Shields in the facade representing the families who gave funds towards its creation

Panels on the campanile (bell tower) tell the story of the creation: God creating Adam and Eve, here

More campanile panels showing the development of civilisation – science, construction, medicine and so forth

The amount of symbolism among the detail of the decor of the cathedral and campanile is utterly extraordinary. It’s clear that it takes a lot of work to maintain it; a gang was at work with a specially-developed cherry-picker

examining every single piece of marble by tapping it to make sure it is secure.

Our next major stop was the Palazzo Vecchio – the old palace – but en route we passed a vendor of street food

Tripe sandwiches a speciality!

and a modern Florentine craftsman – not a worker in wood of stone, but in metal.

Penko is one of the world’s most skillful goldsmiths – his work in gold and silver is exquisite.

Jane and I had passed the Palazzo Vecchio yesterday, noting it as an impressive slab of masonry; but Bianca took us inside, to an astonishing interior:

The coat of arms you can see in the above is the Medici coat of arms, demonstrating the power and influence they had in the development of the city.

Near the Palazzo Vecchio is the Accademia Gallery, which famously houses Michaelangelo’s statue of David. We weren’t about to join the long queue to see the real thing, but luckily there’s a copy outside the Palazzo Vechio. Jane took a photo of his bum, but I preferred a less prurient view

The David was originally intended to be mounted high on the cathedral for people to gaze up at

yes, on the stone just peeking above the screening; getting the perspective right for this location is said to be why the proportions of David are not quite “right” (although his bum appears to be perfectly well-formed, I’m told). Nearby is the Loggia dei Lanzi, a sort of open air sculpture gallery;  the Perseus with the Medusa head by Benvenuto Cellini is a notable example.

Bianca then led us down towards the Ponte Vecchio, via another “Tree of Life” sculpture by Roggi

which was commissioned to commemorate those killed in a Mafia car-bombing outrage on this spot in 1993. Nearby, on the outside of a neighbouring building, is another sculpture in tribute to heroism as a reaction to the bombing.

You’ll have seen yesterday’s photos of Ponte Vecchio, of course you have, but Bianca pointed out something that actually in theory I knew about but which I hadn’t noticed: the Medici Corridor. This is an extraordinary construction which allowed Grand Duke Cosimo I de Medici  to make his way from Palazzo Vecchio to Pitti Palace (south of the river, remember) – without touching the ground or, perish the thought, being seen in public. It runs right through the upper floor of the Uffizi Gallery, crosses over the road via the arch you see here,

goes along the upper storey of the Ponte Vecchio

and round corners as necessary

to get to its destination – a distance of just under a kilometre. Interestingly, the construction of this corridor led to a major change in the usage of Ponte Vecchio, which was originally the site for butchers and tanners shops (using the river as a handy waste disposal) but this was too smelly for the Grand Duke, and so a law was passed – in force still today – to ensure that only jewellers may trade on Ponte Vecchio.

The Ponte Vecchio was the only bridge over the Arno to be spared by the wartime German bombing campaign. No-one knows exactly why; although they didn’t destroy the bridge itself they blocked access to it by bombing at each end, which explains the modern and ugly buildings to be seen close to either end of the bridge.

Bianca’s final offering was to take us to another church, still south of the river – Santa Felicita

which features in it an artwork depicting Christ being taken down from the cross.

It’s by Jacopo Pontormo, entitled The Deposition, an example of 16th century “Mannerist” style, which I invite you to look up for yourselves, By this stage, whilst being grateful for all the great things we’d seen and photographed, I found that my brain was full and my stomach was empty. So I for one was grateful when she left us at a recommended pizzeria, Casella 18, where we had a Nice Lunch. I recommend the Pizza Diavola (note the correct gendering here – British Diavolo pizzas have been misgendered for years).

Refreshed, we decided that we should attempt to get inside various parts of the cathedral complex, as we are gluttons for punishment as well as pizza. Amazingly, we managed to get tickets to go into the cathedral, the baptistry and the museum. We got them in a rather random fashion; looking for the ticket office, we stumbled across a helpful young lady who said that things were mainly sold out but the her colleague over there could sort us out a ticket for only 20 Euros each. Her colleague could indeed, but only for cash (which, remarkably, I had to hand). I thought at first that we were being conned, but no, it appeared to be legit.

Several astonishing moments then transpired: the enormous queues we had seen earlier evaporated; the fact that we were dressed in sandals was not, after all, a Dress Code Problem, and they didn’t mind me toting my penknife around with me inside any of these things. So we had a full house of cathedralness. First the main cathedral building, which is not, frankly, as awe-inspiring as one might have thought, given the outside, but it has some photogenic corners,

some nice marble flooring

with overtones of the almond shape,

some decent stained glass

and a wonderfully painted ceiling, a depiction of the Last Judgement, commissioned by Grand Duke Cosimo, on the inside of the cupola.

Actually, there was far more of a “wow” factor in the next-door Baptistry of Saint John. The origins of this building lie in the 11th or 12th centuries, although the remains of a large structure dating from Roman times lie beneath it.

The outside, principally white marble and green-black serpentinite, is not as exciting as the cathedral; but the inside is very eye-catching. Regrettably, the mosaic ceiling was under maintentance, so one couldn’t see the whole thing, which apparently looks like this;

Completed between towards the end of the 12th century, the ten million tesserae form Byzantine-style depictions of the lives of Joseph, Mary, Christ and John the Baptist, and the Last Judgement. We could see portions of it

outside the scaffolding

and other details of the building were simply wonderful,

and the marble floor tiling was lovely.

Our final stop was in the museum, which Jane particularly wanted to visit in order to see the “Florentine Pieta”, the scupture of Christ being taken down from the cross originally made by Michelangelo to decorate his own tomb. But first we had to find it, which involved bumbling around all three floors of a very museum-like building,

a

occasionally taking note of details such as replicas of the Adam and Eve panels from the campanile

and various important doors,

and, in my case, being shouted at for crossing a rope to take a photo. In the end, all that climbing stairs was wasted, as the sculpture of Christ being taken from the cross by Nicodemus (whose face is considered to be a self-portrait), Mary and Mary Magdalene, was in a separate room on the ground floor, where I was admonished for standing on a bench to get a better angle. But here it is again

to round off a longish, satisfying and content-rich day. I apologise for the profusion of photos, but hope that, even if you got bored and skipped a few, you got an impression of the richness of art and architecture throughout the city. Since the plan is to visit the Uffizi Gallery tomorrow, there wil be even more, so brace yourselves!