Choosing a Format

I've been mulling it over, and to be sure of having adequate material to write about as well as enough free time not-blogging to get out and experience things I think I have decided that what I will do is rotate photographic posts with written posts. Without intending to promise too much I will be trying to do so more or less daily, probably with weekends off since there will be a lot of out of town excursions. With that in mind and because I am a day behind I will do one quick set of pictures.

Before I get into heavy architecture and landscapes and all the other stuff that has made up boring travel slides for time immemorial, I thought I would do something fun. What struck me most walking around the city was how compact the streets are, and more importantly the vehicles. There is an entire universe of super-tiny cars here that doesn't exist in the US. This will probably be a regularly occurring segment of the photo posts, without further ado:

The Miniaturized Highway

I'll start off with something normal and quintessentially Italian: scooters.

What may not be immediately evident in the photo is that the grayish area above the last clearly visible scooter is not the road, it's the overlap of dozens of windscreens. There are probably 50 or more scooters here, in a space that you could fit maybe 5 or 6 cars in.

They have miniature woody-wagons:

Miniature delivery trucks:

A svelter model:

As well as, astonishingly, a 3-wheel model that I believe are actually retrofitted scooters themselves:

The miniaturized city buses make me smile every time:

Next to a bike for some perspective:

Personal transport vehicles can get even smaller. There is of course the ubiquitous Smart, which are literally everywhere as well as a similarly sized Mercedes, both tiny by American standards. But then there are vehicles small even compared to the Smart, and the behemoth-like Ford Focus and Fiat 500. This thing is much smaller than a golf cart:

This little guy takes the cake for size so far:

It's also electric which means they are even harder to hear behind you than the rickety bikes, I really want to hear one beep its horn.

Finally, my favourite mini so far are the tiny dump/garbage trucks:

That's an average sized guy standing next to it.

I realize these are probably less amazing to most people than to me, but I had to share. It was also quicker and easier than trying to name monuments. Ciao!