This week Cee has asked us to share our photos of bikes and motorcycles. Here we go…

Ghost biker. Naples, Italy.
This week Cee has asked us to share our photos of bikes and motorcycles. Here we go…
Ghost biker. Naples, Italy.
I love to read novels that take me to interesting places, especially to those I have visited. Last month I read Dan Brown’s Inferno, which takes place in Florence, Venice and Istanbul. Having just visited Florence and Venice in April, I felt like I was there, following Professor Langdon in wild adventures in those magical cities.
Dante’s Inferno is central to the plot and Brown takes us through many passages of the poem as Langdon struggles to decipher the coded messages left by the story’s villain. The story begins in Florence, where the villain jumps to his death from the “spire of the Badia,” formally known as Badia Fiorentina. From that point on, the story takes us to major landmarks in Florence, including the Palazzo Vecchio, the Boboli Garden, the Ponte Vecchio, the Baptistry, the Duomo, and the Vasari Corridor. The latter was built to enable members of the Medici family to go from the Palazzo Pitti to the Palazzo Vecchio without being seen. With Inferno’s success, the Vasari Corridor became a tourist attraction, although access is still limited, through scheduled tours.
While in Florence I visited and photographed these landmarks.
From Florence our hero travels to Venice, arriving, as everybody else, by boat on the Grand Canal. From there he and his adventure companions meander through city landmarks such as the Palazzo Ducale, Saint Mark’s Basilica, the Piazza San Marco, and Brown mentions many other attractions, such as the Rialto Bridge, the Bridge of the Sighs, the Riva Degli Schiavoni, and the San Giorgio Maggiori Island, among others.
Venice is the most beautiful and enjoyable city I have ever visited. I can’t possibly do justice to its magnificence, but here are some shots of the places mentioned in the book.
From Venice, the plot takes us to Istanbul, Turkey. There, Professor Langdon’s adventure ends at the Hagia Sophia, a former Greek Orthodox patriarchal basilica, that later became an imperial mosque, and is now a museum. I haven’t yet visited Istanbul so that part of the novel didn’t have the same special meaning, but the city is on my list of must-see cities and I certainly will relive the thrilling end of Inferno when I visit it.
Perhaps this post has raised your interest in Inferno. It isn’t a literary masterpiece but it’s an exciting read and I recommend it. Most importantly, I hope it has raised your interest in visiting these magnificent cities.
Ailsa’s Travel Theme this week is Cities. Here are some of my favorites.
Visit Ailsa’s Travel Theme to see other Rivers entries.
Jane's Lens
Less is not enough.
photography, poetry, paintings
And then I stop and sit and eat.
Jy is wat jy dink - nie wat jy dink jy is nie. Dit help soms om hardop te lag vir wat jy dink of dink jy is.
To See a World in a Grain of Sand...
Creative Exploration in Words and Pictures
One Photo, One Story at a Time
Street | Urban | Travel | Photography by Marcus Puschmann
Focus Hocus Pocus
Fun, Fitness & Photography
capturing memories one moment at a time
Sharing a world of joy with photos and words
Gardens Plants Travel
Photography at its most candid
by Neil Williamson
A photographer's view of the world - words and images to inspire your travels and your dreams
Fotografía y algo más...
Wildlife photography along the urban edge
Colouring by touch : altering by thought : fed by feeding.
A daily selection of the best content published on WordPress, collected for you by humans who love to read.
sharing photographs, poetry, and random thoughts
Travel website featuring adventurous train journeys & travels in over 70 fantastic countries
My experiences in Italy and the world
Somewhere to play with image styles
An exploration in human being after decades of human doing.
Notes on Seeing, Reading & Writing, Living & Loving in The North
life, the universe and everything - in pictures
photographs on the street
Chris is an amateur photographer and blogger who just wanders around with a smartphone taking photos
The secret to having it all is believing that you do!
Documentary Photography, Street Photography, Photo Reportage, Black and White, film,
Words and Pictures from the Middle East
Adventures in Photography
If you aren't living on the edge, you're taking up too much space