After two weeks in Jordan, I’ve arrived in Italy! In particular, I’ve spent the last several days exploring the world heritage sites in the Emilia-Romagna region. I’ve been in the region before but I’ve never spent any significant time here.
In a few days my G Adventures Photography tour begins in Venice and I had a week to kill before it started. The Emilia-Romagna tourism board is running an innovative program called Blogville where they invite bloggers to come and live in an apartment in Bologna. I applied, figuring that the dates and located worked well between my Jordan trip and my photography tour, but they had already filled their slots. However, they did manage to help me get a hotel room and I’ve used the time to go exploring the UNESCO World Heritage Sites of the region.
Emilia-Romagna has 3 world heritage sites, not including the country of San Marino which is surrounded on three sides by the province. They are:
- Cathedral, Torre Civica and Piazza Grande, Modena
- Ferrara, City of the Renaissance, and its Po Delta
- Early Christian Monuments of Ravenna
I am writing this in Ravenna, which in my opinion is the far and away the best of the three. The early christian churches here are fantastic. Not many people realized the during the last 70 years of the western Roman Empire, the capital was not in fact in Rome but was in Ravenna. It was also the Byzantine capital of the region after the collapse in 476.
Tomorrow I head back to Bologna for a few days before making my way to Venice to begin the photography tour. I’m really excited about where we’ll be going. Over the two-week course of the tour we will be visiting and photographing some of the best locations in all of Italy.
Oh yes, I won a Northern Lights Award this year for my photo essay on Haida Gwaii. The awards are given out by the Canadian Tourism Commission for excellence in travel journalism covering Canada. I took second place in the photography category behind National Geographic…
Tuesday Travel Update – Emilia-Romagna Edition
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