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Where Am I ? Does anyone recognize this place?

Tim Rucci

Member
Where am I? Please be specific



ific...
186_IMG_39800.jpg
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
I recognize Italian architecture, but I have never seen this before! Reminds me of thr Dromo in Florence!
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
It’s San Marino, an isolated state surrounded by Italy. I have heard the name but didn’t even have it on my itinerary.

Seems much like small towns in Tuscany.

Asher
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
I have done some studying to my ignorance.

Italy is a challenge as one wants to stop and spend sufficient time getting into a location and absorbing the atmosphere so some less famous places easily get passed over. But I know the name very well! Why didn’t it ever get in my list of must see places?

I guess because one never sees enough of Rome or Florence and other famous sites with the richest European history.

I imagine that what hasn’t been excavated just in Tuscany would amaze us, if we only knew.But I am mostly ignorant of the deep history.

I do now suspect that the connection between Tuscany and San Marino likely comes from the commonality of Etruscan village-dominated governance and Etruscan culture.

The famous Romulus and Remus sculpture is actually Etruscan.

Thanks, Tim, for this beautiful view of San Marino.It prompted me to read up on Etruscan history that goes back to the Neolithic revolution in culture and migration of Turkish peoples to the Italian Penninsula.

Although there is that genetic, the population of the Etruscan remnants are considered to be largely native to the land and distinct from the Celts the North, the Greeks to the West and the further distant Turks.

Because San Marino is rather isolated, it likely serves as a purer example of where Etruscan heritage might have survived even after the language became extinct.

Tim,

by chance there are more pictures from this trip?

Asher
 

Tim Rucci

Member
I appreciate your efforts to identify the location, Asher. I definitely see same resemblance that you see to San Marino, but that's not where it is.

I need to do a little bit of explaing here. I actually am not sure exactly where I shot this photo, and I had hoped that folks here might recognize it and help me identify it. What I do know is that I shot the photo from a moving
vehicle and we were traveling on a major highway. It's somewhere near Livorno or Pisa. The confusing thing is that we visited this particular area 2 separate times in a 3-week period, first as a stop on a 14-day Mediterranean
cruise, and second as part of a 7 day land tour that we did afterward. The ironic thing is I have photographs of this same place from both times we passed it on the highway, yet as much as I'd love to know, I'm not sure exactly
where it is. I do see a resemblance to San Marino, but that's not where it was because I have never been there. If you look at the San Marino photos that resemble it, you'll notice a single arch in the bell tower, while my photo
shows a double arch in the bell tower. The buildings surrounding it also look different, although it's difficult to tell without additional photos from multiple angles.

If anyone wants to help try to pinpoint the location, here are some clues:

The image I posted above was taken at 8:48am on a day when the cruise ship docked at Livorno and we traveled by motorcoach first to Florence, and then back to Pisa, which was a lot closer to Liorno. The reason we did it backwards
is that the cruise ship ran two separate tours, with one group going to Pisa first and then Florence, while the other did the opposite to minimize the croud. So we started at the cruise port in Livorno, I shot the photo at 8:48am, and my
first image in Florence was shot at 10:47, almost exactly 2 hours later.

The following week, we were on a land tour starting in Rome and we spent 2 days there before heading to Pisa and then to Florence the same afternoon. My last photo at Pisa was shot at 3:21pm, and the other images of the site in
question were shot 39 minutes later at 4:00pm. By 5:42pm, we were already checked into our hotel in Florence. So we can roughly estimate that the site in question is approximately 1 1/2 hours drive from Florence and about
40 minutes drive from Pisa.

I would welcome any effort to identify the place as it has puzzled me for many years. I've actually gone to Google maps and dropped the little yellow man icon on the map at Livorno and tried vitrually driving the road between Pisa and
Florence to see if I would come upon the place. Perhaps it's on the other side of Pisa, in the short distance between Livorno and Pisa. I have not checked there. And of course, it's impossible to know what roads we actually traveled.


186_IMG_40704.jpg


Here is an image from the second viewing of the place....
 

Jerome Marot

Well-known member
I don't think it is fair that you let us seek a place which you cannot find yourself. But it can be found on google street view:

google-street-view.jpg

Now, what do I get if I tell you where the place is?
 
Last edited:

Tim Rucci

Member
Now, what do I get if I tell you where the place is?



If you reveal the location, you get a gratefully expressed "thank you".

Identifying this gives you three straight scores. In hockey, 3 goals in the same game is referred to as a 'hat trick'.
Three consectutive scores by the same
player is referred to as a "natural hat trick". If this were a hockey game, I'd be removing my cap and tossing it to the ice along with thousands of other folks.
The game would be stopped for a couple minutes to allow the hats to be cleaned up off the ice.

Realizing that I so far had not been able to stump anybody on locations of my photos, the thought occurred to me to post this one and see if I might get lucky.

So if you reveal the location that would be great, but if you don't, it's no big deal. I'm no worse off than before, and I'm sure you probably enjoyed the exercise
as well as bragging rights for scoring three photos in a row. I wonder if my clues helped you at all in your search?

Have a great enening and thanks for playing. (or I guess it's probably late night in your neck of the woods)

:) Tim
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
I found the others immediately but didn’t want to stop the fun. Here I was mistaken.

I would like to know the technique of using street view. It’s very easy to spend a long time on the wrong highway. Perhaps there are route markers I am missing!
 

Jerome Marot

Well-known member
I see things differently, Tim. The information is valuable to you or you would not have “tried vitrually driving the road between Pisa and Florence” to find the place and you would have forgotten that picture taken 15 years ago. Yet it has puzzled you for 15 years.

The 3 other pictures were a game, as the place was reasonably easy to find (tourist places) and you new the info and could have given clues or the solution should nobody would have found. This is different and I feel it was disingenuous on your part to present it as a game. Moreover, the initial presentation as a game made the search unnecessarily more complex.

This is you who wants some piece of information and hopes we would do the work of finding it for free. At least this is how I see it.

Now, this discussion could have taken a different turn. You could have acknowledged the facts, maybe apologise and I would have asked for something small, maybe a print for our host Asher. I know he collects pictures and Christmas is in 3 weeks. We would all have had a good laugh and stayed good friends.

Things turned out differently and there is a parable here for us photographers. It so happens that, from time to time, there are people who expect that I work for them for free. Fix their computer, repair stuff or, of course, take some pictures for them. I am sure you know the drill: “can you take a portrait, do my wedding, some pictures of that house I sell”. I usually point out that a professional photographer would require a fee for that job.

Some people immediately understand. Some don’t and start shouting, write in bold red letters, come with the most bizarre stories about a different subject and insist that what they asked for was of no value to them and that they can do without if I am so mean. Basically, they make it my fault. As a general rule, I advise against doing business with the second sort of people.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Jérôme,

It has never occured to me that Tim has been disingenuous. At face-value It could be true.

The all-red Surprised me!

So yes there is weirdness to boot!

Still however, it doesn’t add up to definite motivated deception. It can just as easily be explained as declared: a more challenging photograph.

A friend of mine made a chilling pose with a tongue twisted and a demonic face and so totally ruined the single group shot of a meeting of photographers assembled from a huge region in Southern California. His action was just disappointingly childish. It wasn’t evil! He thought there would be so many pictures that it wouldn’t matter. But the folk has already dispersed. I was and still am annoyed to the nth!

So, yes, you are absolutely justified in your feelings as the component steps here can, indeed, be added up the way you have assembled them.. I grant that.

However, yours is not necessarily a certain and only likely read of Tim’s intention and original motivation. I didn’t take your path.

I still find the challenge intriguing in itself and as a puzzle, worthwhile.

I can’t read Tim’s mind. Unlike my friend’s grimacing face ruining a perfect group picture, Tim way of doing things is not inherently either naive not intentionally deceptive. The latter is neither excluded nor proven.

So while your reaction is understandable and the consequential feelings both true and supportable, that wasn’t my own experience and journey. Although I can myself be naive and far too trusting, I am still open to a happenstance awkward evolution of events and explanation, with no mal-intent.

I still want to identify the place, LOL!

Asher
 

Tim Rucci

Member
I see things differently, Tim. The information is valuable to you or you would not have “tried vitrually driving the road between Pisa and Florence” to find the place and you would have forgotten that picture taken 15 years ago. Yet it has puzzled you for 15 years.

The 3 other pictures were a game, as the place was reasonably easy to find (tourist places) and you new the info and could have given clues or the solution should nobody would have found. This is different and I feel it was disingenuous on your part to present it as a game. Moreover, the initial presentation as a game made the search unnecessarily more complex.

This is you who wants some piece of information and hopes we would do the work of finding it for free. At least this is how I see it.

Now, this discussion could have taken a different turn. You could have acknowledged the facts, maybe apologise and I would have asked for something small, maybe a print for our host Asher. I know he collects pictures and Christmas is in 3 weeks. We would all have had a good laugh and stayed good friends.

Things turned out differently and there is a parable here for us photographers. It so happens that, from time to time, there are people who expect that I work for them for free. Fix their computer, repair stuff or, of course, take some pictures for them. I am sure you know the drill: “can you take a portrait, do my wedding, some pictures of that house I sell”. I usually point out that a professional photographer would require a fee for that job.

Some people immediately understand. Some don’t and start shouting, write in bold red letters, come with the most bizarre stories about a different subject and insist that what they asked for was of no value to them and that they can do without if I am so mean. Basically, they make it my fault. As a general rule, I advise against doing business with the second sort of people.


I was taken completely by surprise by your response, Jerome, and by your comments quoted above. When you asked earlier "what do I get if I tell you where it is?", I honestly thought you were kidding me. That is the reason I replied in the light-hearted way that I did. My analogy to a hockey game was just my clowning around method of replying in-kind and complementing you for identifying 3 photos in a row. In otherwords, I took your "what do I get?" question in a light-hearted way, as I honestly thought you intended it. It was not as you suggest, a deflection in the form of a bizarre story about a different topic. So I'm sorry I misunderstood your now-apparent intention. I didn't realize that it was more of an extortion attempt than a bit of kidding around. I have to also say that I don't understand Asher's comment about "all red" and I can only suppose it might be a suggestion that perhaps the color of the text in my post had some hidden meaning. I can assure both of you that nothing could be further from the truth. I have chosen a different text size in some of my posts because it makes them easier to read for m 64 year old eyes, and I was just experimenting with different colors, hoping it would also make for easier reading. This is likely because I have my monitor resolution set to a very high level for photography and it consequently makes text look smaller. I didn't realize that doing so might lead to consipracy theories about "what my intentions might be". I find it difficult to believe that we are actually having this discussion in that context.

I never intended to ever take time to visit this forum again, and I only came here again on November 10, after a Google notification that my sign-in password had been compromised. I had basically forgotten this forum existed until then. So I came here only with the intention of changing my password and nothing more. But out of curiousity, I looked around a little before leaving and I came across the original post I had made when I joined this forum in 2006. So I decided to post again in that welcome forum before leaving. I also remembered the enlightening posts I used to read from Doug Kerr, and I wondered if he was still around. So I included a photo of Santorini thinking it might make my post get noticed, and perhaps someone might respond. I had noticed surprisingly little activity in the way of any recent posts in the forums here. I was relieved and delighted a day or two later to see that Doug Kerr himself replied in that thread. That, in part, was the reason I continued to post.

So the responses to my November 10th post are largely what caused me to take interest and I post a few more images, thinking I might create some activity in the forum. After posting some of my favorite images of the Chicago Skyline from the 103rd floor of the Sears Tower, and some tennis shots of Maria Sharapova, I got the idea of posting images and challening people to indentify the locations. This was all done in the interest sharing. I provided an image for everyone's viewing pleasure and I was not asking anything in return. Out of a love of photography I was sharing some of the looks I had captured of some interesting places I had visited. Asher appropriately moved one of the posts to a forum where such posts belong, and that is where I continued to post images. This was something I typically did a couple times late at night before hitting the sack, when I was winding down from my day.

When I read your latest post, Jerome, it would be easy to let myself become angry at the tone and at your suggestion that I owe you something. But I won't allow myself to do that because it would be a useless waste of time and emotion. A more appropriate resonse is to laugh it off. But let me be clear that in light of your reply, I do NOT want you to reveal the location shown in my photo. Your condescending and insulting comments leave me unwilling to accept anything that you might have to offer.

What I don't need is preaching from you asserting that people always want something for nothing from photographers. I know all too well that sometimes it is true, having dealt with it myself. What bugs me is you apparently count me among those who you suggest want something for nothing, completely discounting the fact that if you are a photographer yourself, we are both on the same side of that issue. The fact is you know very little about me. I have probably donated to worthy causes nearly as much photography services as I have sold. When I do that, I do it because I want to help a good cause. I don't hold out my hand expecting anything more than a 'thank you' in return. My photography business developed as a sideline after retirement from my main line of work, after being repeatedly asked by many to take on photography jobs. When I took jobs I did it because I enjoyed doing it; not because I needed the money. I have been retired nearly 17 years and now and have not take any jobs in over a year, because my time is more valuable the more I age. I might never do a paid job again. And especially now with covid, I do not desire to put myself in circulation.

As I read Asher's comments on your reply, I understand that he was trying to see your point of view and also trying not to unfairly judge my intentions. I am still puzzled by the "all red" comment, but I tend to give him the benefit of any doubt, because he revealed some of his thought process in his response to your post.

Had I realized ahead of time that anyone might be offended by my not disclosing up front that I was not exactly sure myself where the photo was taken, I certainly would have included that information. But how was I to know that? Honestly, the possibility of that happening never even crossed my mind. And how was I know that you would choose to participate and take it upon yourself to try and identify the location? I did not ask you to do that, you decided to do it yourself. It was a public post. Anyone and everyone who read it made a decision whether or not to participate. You apparently took the challenge willingly. Now I see that the reason you are offended is you probalby conclude that had I disclosed that I did not know the exact location, you would have had an opportunity to offer to identifiy if for a fee (which I would have certainly declined). If you want to get technical, there was no contract. I did not ask you to identify the location; you made that decision yourself. Consequently, I owe you nothing for any effort you made.

Let me clarify one last thing. The location has not puzzled me for 15 years. More accurately it has puzzled me a few times over the last 15 years when I came upon that photo again in my archives. I only tried the virturally driving the road for the first time yesterday, because that's the first time I thought of doing it.

Full disclosure: there is no hidden meaning to the blue text. It makes the text easier to read.
 

Jerome Marot

Well-known member
This is just fine, Tim. You owe me nothing and I owe you nothing. You could not know that I would choose to participate, whatever. I may be wrong, it happened to me before. Please note that I did not ask for money and that I am making this text a bit larger for it to be easier to read.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Tim,

I am grateful for your detailed post and that you don’t react in temper.

I also appreciate to the nth Jérôme’s succinct reply.

Your sharing of photographs is a very valuable stimulus for this forum. I am trying my hardest to have OPF not only survive this pandemic, (and the constant allure of Facebook and Tweets), but also to thrive.

Keep up on the challenges as each time I get to revisit far off places I have photographed or to see places beyond my current reach.

In this Italian caper, I was overwhelmed by the number of villages with dual towers in quaint hilltop villages and sprawling Tuscany towns!

I guess the each need to pray and imprison to keep “pacem in terres”.

Asher
 

Tim Rucci

Member
This is just fine, Tim. You owe me nothing and I owe you nothing. You could not know that I would choose to participate, whatever. I may be wrong, it happened to me before. Please note that I did not ask for money and that I am making this text a bit larger for it to be easier to read.


No worries, Jerome. Disagreements happen. Let's not let this create a wedge between us. Life is too short...
 
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