Showcasing the hidden treasures of the Villa Sant’Antonio.
Welcome to the latest post in my series about my Italian holiday (2-11 September inclusive). Today we look at the hidden treasures of the Villa Sant’Antonio, where we stayed for the second half of the holiday. We were shown these on the Thursday morning, the morning of our last full day in Italy.
THE CHAPEL
As I mentioned in an earlier post in this series the Villa Sant’Antonio is a former convent. One unchanged relic of the building’s history is the chapel…
PART 2: ROMAN REMAINS
The chapel was fairly impressive, but to me the second hidden treasure, the Roman remains that lend credence to the notion that the poet Horace had a villa here back in the day, is even more so.
An account of the time I spent in Penzance on the Saturday of my Cornish holiday.
INTRODUCTION
I have finally edited all the pictures from my recent Cornish holiday and have now at last got time to get back to blogging about it. My last post described my journey down to Penzance, and this post provides the story of the rest of the day.
GETTING MY BEARINGS
Having arrived in to Penzance pretty much bang on schedule I visited the local information office, purchased a detailed and very cheap souvenir map (I will conclude this series of Cornish posts with one featuring all the publicity materials that I collected while down there), and set out on the first part of my exploration of the town. An early necessity was finding somewhere to eat lunch (although I am not entirely inflexible on the matter I generally aim to eat lunch some time close to 1PM), and having walked past the Harbour and the Chapel I found an establishment suited to my needs. The Turk’s Head was not too extortionate (there are no cheap places in Penzance). I opted for a BBQ Chicken, Bacon and Davidstow Cheese melt, and enjoyed it, although I felt that it did not really live up to its name on two counts:
1. There was precious little evidence of bacon (though they had used good quality chicken)
2. Davidstow is supposed to be a strongly flavoured cheese and yet I barely noticed it over the other flavours – if I ask for something of which cheese is a featured ingredient I want to taste said cheese.
Here some photos taken between leaving Penzance station and having lunch:
The Egyptian House
The first of a number of shots of interesting items on display at The Turks Head
There were five sets of framed banknotes starting with this one.
Poor lighting prevented me from doing full justice to this map.
This, and the two set of framed cigarette cards the follow it were in a narrow passage that meant that I could not get them fully in shot from front on – had to photograph at an angle.
POST LUNCH EXPLORATIONS
Having consumed my lunch I headed for the Promenade, and walked along it. From the other end of the Promenade I walked back to the train station and then did some exploring on the other side of the train station, locating a path that ran between the tracks and the sea. Here are some photographs…
In November one would not expect an open-air pool in Engalnd to have much custom, and indeed the Jubilee Pool was empty.
A number of post boxes were painted gold to honour people who were successful at the London 2012 Olympics – this one Penzance is dedicated to rower Helen Glover.
I conclude this post with two special sections, firstly…
ST MICHAEL’S MOUNT
Being grey the whole time, and misty for most of it this was not a great a day for taking long-range photographs, but St Michael’s Mount was not a target I could resist, even under those circumstances, so here are the results:
You will notice gulls in a couple of these shots, which leads to the second special section, which concludes this post…
BIRDS
There are many seabirds to be observed in Penzance and I was able to capture some of them on camera…
The journey back was uneventful, and with the train departing Penzance at 16:41 on a November afternoon it was too dark for photographing through the windows of that train.
The walk down from Exochori follows one side of the Viros Gorge, the natural feature that dominates the landscape. Following the way markers took us too low at one point, so that we had to climb back up to get to our meeting point at Petrovouni. Also featuring on this part of the walk were various views across the gorge to Agia Sofia (Church of the Holy Wisdom in English).
Enjoy these photos…
Not quite cyclopean stones but impressively large.
A mason’s mark on the chapel.
This is an Autumn Narcissus.
One does not see much evidence of wildlife on Greek walks and this is a clue as to why.
Agia Sofia
The line of large stones marked the edge of the path until it was plundered for building materials – the extension beyond the line of stones being exactly as wide as a lorry wheel.
This is the church at Petrovouni.
The way markers for the route from Petrovouni to Kardamyli.
A first aerial view of Kardamyli. The tall tower is part of an old soap factory.
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