Italy from the Inside

Enjoy 300+ photos of Trieste (copyright free)


Several years ago, my wife and I decided to produce a photo CD of our home town Trieste, a beautiful city and port in northeastern Italy near the Slovenian border. We collected numerous pictures and selected the best 300 for the CD, including landscapes, food and panoramas.

With mixed feelings, we decided it was time to discontinue the CD (old digital world), but we are happy to share these images with all of you under the copyright free license called Creative Commons (a small contribution to the social media travel community).

Next time you’re visiting Venice, if you want a nice day trip off-the-beaten path, jump on a train for a couple of hours and visit Trieste. We hope these pictures will entice you to do so.

– View Trieste CD photos as a slideshow
– Download Trieste CD photos from Flickr.com

Share your Italian photos with Photosynth


Here is an exciting technology that will help you bring to life hundreds of photos of Italy and convert them into an immersive interactive online experience.

Microsoft has finally publicly released Photosynth, an online application that has the ability to reconstruct scenes or objects from a bunch of flat photographs.

Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point the photos were taken from. With this information, Photosynth recreates the space and uses it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.

As a Microsoft employee I had a chance to play with Photosynth long time ago. But other than generically blogging about it, I couldn’t really share any specific details.
Now that Photosynth is public domain, I encourage you to take a closer look at it and try to “synth” some of your own photos. The first time you visit the site, you’ll need to download and install a special plugin for your browser (Windows PC only).

– Microsoft Photosynth web site
– How to introductory video
– Various user generated synths of Italy

The Sassi of Matera

Last summer, my wife and I visited Matera in the region of Basilicata in southern Italy. We were curious to learn why UNESCO inscribed Matera into its Heritage list. And it didn’t take long for us to find an answer. The old part of the city, called Sassi di Matera, originate from a prehistoric settlement, and are suspected to be some of the first human settlements in Italy. The Sassi are houses dug into the rock, often with no windows.

Because of the resemblance of ancient sites in and around Jerusalem, director Mel Gibson chose Matera as the setting for his famous movie The Passion of the Christ.

We shot several panoramic photos of the Sassi and surroundings so you can enjoy this very particular city that is finally starting to get the attention from tourist searching for the unbeaten path.

Click on the images below to view the high resolution version of the pictures. Each high-res image is about ~500K.