ISCHIA – A lily pond at La Mortella, the garden that William Walton and his wife Susana built into the volcanic rock above Forio. Walton composed here for forty years. The garden has been growing for eighty.
Day 6,017 of one photograph every day for the rest of my life.
LILY PADS
Looking back exactly 4 years to Joshua Tree National Park. Today in Ischia a garden coaxed from volcanic rock on a Mediterranean island. Four years ago, ancient monzogranite rising from the Mojave desert floor. Different rocks, different millennia. Day 4,556 of one photograph every day for the rest of my life.
NAPLES ITALY – The Certosa di San Martino, the Carthusian monastery on the Vomero hill above Naples. This model is the Temple of Neptune at Paestum — the best-preserved Greek temple in the world. It sits in a baroque monastery built by monks who had taken a vow of silence. A sensationally Neapolitan mash up.
Day 6,016 of one photograph every day for the rest of my life.
Temple
One more for today – leaving Naples. Vesuvius from the stern of the aliscafo to Ischia. The volcano killed the man in the glass case at Pompeii nearly two thousand years ago.
Vesuvio
Looking back exactly 4 years to Joshua Tree National Park. Two kinds of ancient violence: yesterday, a volcano that buried a city. Four years ago: quartz monzonite forced up through the desert floor and left to weather for a hundred million years. Day 4,555 of one photograph every day for the rest of my life.
CASERTA ITALY – Caserta, April 2, 2026. The grand staircase of the Palazzo Reale di Caserta, commissioned by Charles III of Bourbon in 1752 and designed by Luigi Vanvitelli. By floor area it is among the largest royal palaces in the world. Charles was the grandson of Philip V of Spain, himself the grandson of Louis XIV — which explains why Caserta, Versailles, and Schönbrunn feel like variations on the same dynastic dream.
A comparison to Piranesi is not a stretch. Vanvitelli and Piranesi were near-exact contemporaries — both born in the first decade of the eighteenth century, both steeped in Roman antiquity, both drawn to architectural space as a subject in itself. Piranesi’s Vedute di Roma and his studies of ancient monuments share with Vanvitelli’s interiors the same appetite for axial recession, compressed verticals, and arches framing arches into apparent infinity. The Carceri d’Invenzione push that grammar toward the irrational, but the underlying spatial language is the same one Vanvitelli deployed in earnest. Standing at the base of this staircase, you feel the kinship without needing to argue for direct influence.
Day 6,015 of one photograph every day for the rest of my life.
Caserta
Looking back exactly 8 years to New York. A spring snowstorm out my window. The water towers hold their ground while the city dissolves behind them. Day 3099 of one photograph every day for the rest of my life.
NAPLES ITALY – The Chiaia–Monte di Dio station on Naples Line 6, with a ceiling installation by Robert Wilson. Dozens of eyes look down at the platform.
Day 6014 of one photograph every day for the rest of my life.
STATION
Looking back 12 years to Leiden. Someone put a Chesterfield love seat on the sidewalk at number 56. Someone else decided that was perfectly reasonable place to spend the afternoon. The Dutch have a gift for making the ordinary strange and the strange ordinary. Twelve years on, she is still reading.
Day 1631 of one photograph every day for the rest of my life.
NAPLES ITALY – The Basilica di Santa Maria della Sanità, Rione Sanità. Under the altar, visible through a glass floor, a saint lies in permanent repose in the crypt below. Yesterday at Pompeii, a man frozen by volcanic ash reached outward into empty air. Today, this.
Day 6,013 of one photograph every day for the rest of my life.
Saint
Looking back 14 years to Diana in Nashville. Day 900 of one photograph every day for the rest of my life.
POMPEII ITALY – We spent the better part of the day in this remarkable Roman village. We haven’t been here for fifteen years or so – the site is dramatically improved. We learned a lot. There was an earthquake in AD 64 that badly damaged the town – much of the damage was unrepared and much of the population left. in the two years (or so) before the eruption in AD 79 the water had turned sulfurous – so a lot of people left. As a result the actual death toll from the eruption was only 1500 or so. The scope of the tragedy is best seen in the plaster casts of victims. The volcano stopped this man mid-breath nearly two thousand years ago. The glass case that encloses the cast throws its own grid of shadows across his body.
Day 6,012 of one photograph every day for the rest of my life.
Plaster cast
Looking back exactly six years to an image shot with my Hasselblad XPan film camera. Day 3,821 of one photograph every day for the rest of my life.
