Piazza del Popolo, Rome

In my 156 days of blogging so far I’ve learnt a few things about my photography.  Discoveries include realising that I like my fisheye lens, that I find bicycles photogenic and that I like photographing landscape scenes in portrait format.  As I post today’s photograph I’m struck by the possibility that I may just have a thing for cobbles too.

If you remember my early morning shot of the Sean O’Casey bridge in Dublin a couple of months ago you might recall that the cobble-stone path was one of my favourite elements in that picture, and going back further to my photograph of a VW Beetle outside Charlesfort in Kinsale I worked hard to exclude any other signs of road other than the cobbles from that photograph.

So perhaps I should not have been surprised by my urge to take a photograph of the Piazza del Popolo when I first walked into it on my wedding-anniversary weekend in Rome last October, as it has one of the most vast expanses of cobble stones you will find.

At the centre of the piazza is an Egyptian obelisk, but what caught my eye for a photograph was the symmetry of the two churches at the southern boundary of the piazza.  I’ve since learned that these are the twin churches of Santa Maria in Montesanto (on the left) and Santa Maria dei Miracoli (on the right).  Interestingly the construction of the churches was staggered with one starting only after the other was finished.  In fact they are not identical twins, but were always intended to be a pair all the same.

It was late afternoon when I took this photograph, and hence the shadows of lamp posts outside the frame and the people in it are elongated.  The fronts of the churches face north, putting them in the shade, while their western-facing sides are nicely lit by the low sun.  This side light gives a nice depth to the buildings, and creates a nice highlight on the side of the lamp post at the right hand side of the frame.

I considered moving beyond this lamp post when composing the shot, but to do so would have not allowed me to keep as much of the cobbles in the frame, and would have required me to turn the camera back to landscape format, making this a photograph just of the churches, rather than of their surroundings.  Also it would have meant excluding much of the sky, which was particularly photogenic this day (as it had been when I had earlier photographed the Forum).

While the sky was photogenic, when viewing this shot in colour I found it detracted a little from the foreground, with the blue at odds with the general lack of colour in the rest of the scene, and so I opted to present this image in monochrome instead, adding a hint of a sepia tone to warm up the overall feel of the shot.