So, a few years back I managed to scrape a little money together and went backpacking across Europe for about a month. I stayed in hostels, lived as cheaply as possible, and toured the cities either by myself or with people I’d met from the rooms I was staying in.
Needless to say, I’d give anything to go back.
This photo is one of my favorites from that time. This overgrown staircase is found in Venice, Italy.
Just barely in my peripheral vision, I nearly missed catching sight of them altogether. Nestled in between two small alleyways, this stark stone structure felt anachronistic even for a city as old as Venice.
For those of you who haven’t had the luck to have visited, Venice’s streets have an almost haphazard feel to them, winding and meandering about, with little rhyme or reason save the whims of the architects. Here we have a building that might have been the very forefront of a thoroughfare, only to be obscured by the burgeoning populace’s newer housing.
If I were more pretentious, I might say something like “The sprawling greenery sprouts from the cold stone, almost yearning for something new.” But then, I feel that analysis would only detract from this.
The plain fact is that this photo makes me happy.
In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection.
