Infiorata di Genzano

I interrupt our road trip chronicle to report on yesterday's Infiorata di Genzano. It's a festival that involves the creation of elaborate designs made of flower petals laid on the main cobblestone street of Genzano, a town south of Rome.

The townspeople create tappeti (carpets) with gazillions of different colored flower petals, sand, dirt, leaves and other plant matter.

Each year there is a theme. This year's theme is Caravaggio, 2010 being the 400th anniversary of the artist's death. This tappeto reproduces part of a Caravaggio painting.

Many, many of these boxes full of flower petals were put to use.

Here's a reproduction of Caravaggio's "Head of Medusa," which we saw last year in a museum in Florence. Gory!

The Caravaggios were interspersed with other designs such as this one:

The blue and bright green parts of the eye design below are made from colored rice.

The street is on a hill. Here's a view looking part way up.

The view from the top was so colorful. So many flowers!

This banner spells out the event: Infiorata 2010.

Here's a closeup. Does it remind anyone else of a Mark Rothko painting?

A few South African flowers

We visited South Africa in October, which is springtime there. As it turns out, that's a great time to see wildflowers in bloom. We missed by a week or so the major blooming season, but managed to see some beautiful flora. Here are some examples.



The yellow blooms above are proteas. The protea is the national flower of South Africa. We saw these at the Cape of Good Hope.



These pinkish-purple flowers fill whole fields in western S. Africa.



The texture of the petals on these daisy-like flowers is papery.



Even the cacti were blooming.