Friday, November 21, 2003

Comments is back!

Just added the excellent "Comment" function today, courtesy of the "Blog Back" site. which has been non operative for a while, but now back in action. Feel free to try it out and comment on our site!

Thanx a million, BB folks!

Sunday, May 04, 2003

Easter in Chamonix

This Easter we spent a few restful days in Chamonix where we did some skiing and walking in the mountains. Most of the pistes were closed since Easter was quite late this year, and we are nearing the end of the skiing season in the Alps. But we did manage a day at the Grandes Montets, where the excellent weather allowed us to finally do the superb black piste Point de Vue, which runs from the Aiguille des Grandes Montets (3233 m) and back down to Lognan, all the time with a continuing and changing panorama of the Glacier d'Argentiere on your right hand side. Fantastic!


Mont Blanc summit (4810,40 m) from Aiguille du Midi

Then a couple of days before we went back to Bologna we had the good fortune to have yet another perfect weather day, which allowed us to ski the Vallé Blanche (with a guide) for the second time.



A not uneventful trip, however, since one of our group had some rather serious technical problems right from the start, and after rather a lot of toing and froing, our guide decided to call a rescue helicopter and have him airlifted out. As it turned out this was exactly the right thing to do, since the piste over the glacier at this time of the year is very dangerous indeed, due to the generally low levels of surface snow and the concurrent risk of encountering small and large crevasses.

The photos are all grabbed from a digital video I made during the trip (with a Canon MV550i), so the image quality is only moderate, but they still give quite a good idea of what our trip was like. We were five in all who completed the trip, myself, Patrizia, Sam and Mark from London, and our guide, Nicole.


Click on the image of the Vallé Blanche above to begin the photo series.

Saturday, April 19, 2003

With this sign of life and hope we wish family and friends around the world a very pleasant and peaceful Easter weekend and holiday!



Auguriamo con questo segno di vita e speranza una buona e pacifica festa di pasqua a tutti nostri cari amici e parenti intorno in tutto il mondo!

Med dette tegnet av liv og håp vi ønsker våre kjære venner og slekt omkring i hele verden en riktig hyggelig og fredfult påske!

Saturday, March 22, 2003

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Some pictures from the peace demonstration in Piazza Maggiore, Bologna, Thursday, March 20th 2003









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Wednesday, February 19, 2003

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Iraq Peace Rally: Rome, Saturday February 15, 2003


Some contestation apparently about numbers: the civil authorities said 600.000, while the organizers said 3 million!!

That's quite a difference!!

Weird...

So who's right?

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Thursday, January 23, 2003

New Digital Media initiative in Bologna, a part of which is located in a chic new meeting and exhibition space called "Raum", just down the road from our house in Via Ca'Selvatica in the Saragozza area of Bologna:


NETMAGE


Tonight we went to Raum to see "Cane Capovolto" by Massimo Capovolto, from Catania, in Sicliy. An experimental digital video which was technically quite well made and interesting in parts, but not really too much more than that.

A couple of text citations off the screen:
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"Terrorist: A man with a bomb, without an airforce"

"If you believe something is "true", is it true?"
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Saturday, January 11, 2003

Wednesday, December 25, 2002

Happy Christmas, God Jul, Felice Natale to one and all!
If you want, you can visit our special Christmas page for 2002 and leave us a message!

Patrick & Patrizia

Monday, December 09, 2002

Got some rather sad news this morning from philosopher friend and ex-NTNU colleague Anita Leirfall, now in Oslo: a whole quarter with wooden buildings from the 1850-1900 period in Thomas Angell's gate, in the antique centre of my old home city of Trondheim burned down to the ground Saturday (7.12).



Source: Aftenposten



Source: Verdens Gang


Fortunately nobody was seriously hurt in the blaze, which started in the kitchen of a restaurant in the quarter that burned to the ground. Two firemen were however treated afterwards for smoke inhalation and one for back pains.

One light point in the general gloom is that the whole zone damaged by the fire has previously been extensively documented with both photography and video by city artist Henning Meyer, who has been drawing details of the city for years, so we can be reasonably sure that at least some form of faithful reconstruction of the quarter will be possible.

Apropos the fire: here in Italy (Bologna) I hadn't heard anything at all during the weekend about the event in local and national media. Well, my interest in this particular story is very personal, since I have come to know and love Trondheim after 26 years of highly formative and happy citizenship there. But I guess that I just have to accept that it is not really considered in mass media terms as one of the most important places in the world, especially when viewed from a still rather "provincial" Bologna in the "deep south" of Europe - even though Trondheim is the ex-capital of Norway, site of the highly innovative Norwegian University of Science and Technology, as well as the largest Gothic cathedral in Scandinavia (Nidarosdomen), and not to mention its tenacious Rosenborg Football Club, who surprised everyone in Europe in 1997 by beating AC Milan 2-1, eliminating them from the Champion's League Cup that year...

Anyway, here are a few links to websites with news stories about Saturday's Trondheim fire:

Norway Post (English)
Norway Post (English)
Verdens Gang (Norwegian)
Branmannen (Norwegian)
NRK Trøndelag
Archive of reports from NRK Trøndelag

Friday, September 20, 2002

Oh well, back to work again after the summer... sigh.


Well, I don't really mean that, but as you all know, it's always a bit of a mini-trauma to start back after a holiday, and this year's holiday was R-E-A-L-L-Y nice and relaxing, so that makes diving right back into the running of an admission test and before-term-start exams even harder!


The reason is that we have just spent a whole month, give or take a day or two, in Turkey. First a trip in a ciaico with Patrizia M., Chicco and a group of other friends along the coast from Gocek to Antalya, from which point the two of us left the group to drive our hired car all the way to the Armenia/ Iran/ Iraq border zone.


What a beautiful, majestic country Turkey is, full of constant surprises and lots of kindly people -- and it's VERY, VERY large indeed! One of the most enchanting parts we encountered on our journey was Eastern Anatolia. In all we drove over 4000 km this summer: Antalya - Konya - Cappadoccia - Mt. Nemrut - Lake Van - Kars - Ani - The Georgian Valleys - Mt. Ararat - Dogubeyazit - Lake Van again, then a internal flight to Istanbul, from where we flew back to Milano and Bologna


To be recommended!!


[Some of our own photos from the trip will hopefully follow soon...]

Saturday, April 13, 2002

The Semiotics of Writing is out!!

The proceedings of the 1999 University of San Marino International Conference: The Semiotics of Writing: Transdiciplinary Perspectives on the Technology of Writing, edited by Patrick is now available!!

Click on the image of the book cover below for more information

Thursday, March 28, 2002



Happy Easter to all our friends and their families!
God påske til alle våre venner og deres familier!
Buona pasqua a tutti nostri amici e loro famiglie!

Friday, December 21, 2001

Lots of Christmas cheer and all our very best wishes to one and all for the holiday, and for the New Year too!

Our Christmas greetings page is here - leave a comment/ message if you like!

Monday, December 17, 2001

Grrrrr, rats! At home with a miserable sniffy cold today. Obviously a result of the cold snap the last few days, coupled with a three hour!! (usually takes one) drive from Reggio Emilia to Bologna in the dark, snow, wind and sleet last Thursday evening, after it began to snow while I was in Reggio for a meeting. Total chaos on local roads in Reggio, and the autostrada only just barely driveable from Reggio to Modena South... Rather miserable journey, all in all, but at least I managed to get home again!!

Friday, December 14, 2001

Snow, snow and wind. Crunchy ice on the ground this morning here in Bologna... Italy is beginning to feel more and more like Norway every day! Have a great weekend everyone!

Patrick

Sunday, November 11, 2001

Just added the excellent "Comment" function today, courtesy of the "Blog Back" site.

Thanx a million, BB folks!

Friday, July 20, 2001

Our first "ferrata" (belied path in English) in the Dolomites: "Punta Anna". More details to come later...


The Punta Anna ascent

Friday, June 15, 2001

Our Castiglioncello pages are again under development

See here

Wednesday, June 13, 2001

NEWSFLASH!


Patrizia's book "Significato ed Esperienza" has now been released in English translation (by Jeremy Carden)

Title: "Meaning and Experience" More information here...

Friday, June 08, 2001

Here is a link to a few of the many pictures we took on our Easter 2001 trip to Nepal.
We flew from Bologna via Milan to Kathmandu, where we spent a few days looking around and also met our sherpa Shiva, who would lead our trekking team down the magnificent Kali Ghandaki valley running north-south along the west flank of the Annapurna massif. From Kathmandu we travelled by car to Pokhara, where we spent a brief night. Very early the next morning we left Pokhara in a tiny plane for the mountain town of Jomsun, which lies at the top of the Kali Ghandaki valley (at a height of about 3000 m).
From there we trekked over eight days back down to Nayapul (traversing the Ghorepani Pass, which involved a slow ascent from around 1000 m at Tatopani, up to ca. 3000 m at Ghorepani, and then back down to around 900 m at Nayapul, in the course of three days).
At Nayapul, a car was waiting to take us back to a quiet and pleasant resort bungalow at Begnas Lake, a few kilometers to the northeast of Pokhara. Here we spent a very relaxing night, before heading back by car again to Kathmandu for a few more days while awaiting our return flight to Italy.

A truly splendid trip, which we will hopefully get around to documenting in some more detail at this space a bit later on.


Some websites we visited for information and inspiration

Mappatour Travel, Rome
who helped us plan and organise our trip.
Hotel Tibet, where we stayed in Kathmandu.
Yeti Zone A useful site with a bulletin board with a lot of up to date information from other travellers.
Photoseek A photographic report of a trip round Annapurna.
Wired2the WorldA collection of personal diaries from more or less the same trek as ours.

Tuesday, May 29, 2001

Hi all..


OK, so this is our private page "on the air" at last. It's taken us some time to get started on it, but now we're really up and running.


We've chosen the weblog format (courtesy of Blogger), because we like the possibility this provides to develop a more fluid, interological* (rather than phenomenological) style of communication...


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* Thanks to Pat's Norwegian friend and colleague Lars Sigfred Evensen for this useful metaphor (if you want a more detailed explanation of the concept, feel free to contact Patrick at the e-mail address elsewhere on this page)