From Wikipedia:
The Alhambra (Red Castle) (in Arabic الحمراء = Al Ħamrā’)) is an ancient mosque, palace and fortress complex of the Moorish monarchs of Granada, in southern Spain (known as Al-Andalus when the fortress was constructed), occupying a hilly terrace on the south-eastern border of the city of Granada. It was the residence of the Muslim kings of Granada and their court, but is currently a museum exhibiting exquisite Islamic architecture [...] The palace was built chiefly between 1248 and 1354, in the reigns of Al Ahmar and his successors;
In this place, seven centuries ago Jews used to live in peace with Muslims. There was tolerance and mutual acceptance. But in 1492, Granada was taken over by Catholic monarchs Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, and they immediatly issued a decree ordering the expulsion of all Jews from Spain and its territories and possessions by July 31. At that time Torquemada was leading the Inquisition, burning Jewish and Arabic books.
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Four thousands kilometers in thirteen days, across Switzerland, France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and The Netherlands. It’s been a long and amazing trip, visiting wonderful cities, looking at breathtaking landscapes, having great meals and unfortunately a lot of rain showers. We mostly followed the path of two major central European rivers: Rhine and Meuse. Rhine (Rijn in NL) springs up in Switzerland and flows in the North Sea, traversing Germany and forming a large delta in The Netherlands after a long path of 1320 kilometers. Meuse (Maas in NL) springs up in France and runs 925 kilometers across Luxembourg and Belgium before finally draining in the same delta.
A great deal of history happened along these two rivers and in particular they have big symbolic value for Europe: they delimit the field where France and Germany fought for centuries (including two world wars) but they also merge in The Netherlands thus keeping Europe together. No wonder most of the European and international institutions are in this valley: Strasbourg, Brussels, The Hague. This is also the place where bishops used to be rulers and the Protestant Reformation developed, and the place where many renowned beers are produced.
To complete our tour we visited Geneva (again on a river, this time the Rhone) and the United Nations palace!
I’m posting more pictures and details, stay tuned!
UPDATE: here is the photoalbum
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A quick stat among guys that were in my classroom before university shows 2 married (one with kids), 3 living with their partner (one with kids), 2 with a stable relationship, 2 singles. Maybe it looks not so bad, but actually it is very very different than what you could see for same age and social level among people that were born ten years earlier. The same statistic among people working in my staff shows 2 married (one with kids), one living with his partner, one with a stable relationship and 8 singles. Oh my…
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Today has been my last day at work before vacation. The last day I always feel strange, completely exausted and worried to forget something that I had to tell my coworkers. The office was almost desert, with approx 75% absent employees, but still it’s been a productive day, with a new feature brought live and some bug fixed. At 6pm I activated my email auto-responder, greeted everybody and left. At this point I usually need 48 hours to enter the right mindset and fully enjoy the spare time. I look forward to leave for our trip.
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Last night I’ve been to Roberto Benigni’s show in Piazza Santa Croce. In the last few days Benigni has been reading Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, one different chant every night. Foreign people maybe don’t know, but this collection of three books (Hell, Purgatory and Heaven) and one hundred Cantos written in the 14th century is the foundation of italian language as well as a mandatory reading in our secondary school. More or less similar to Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Well, maybe more 
Since they were forced to read it in their young age, many italians have nightmares when you talk about Dante, but actually everybody agrees is a great masterpiece.
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Today Steve Jobs announced the new amazing features of OSX 10.5 aka Leopard.
- they can run natively on Intel hardware (wow, I stopped using Intel in favor of AMD at least 5 years ago)
- they have the Time Machine, or they can apply versioning to files and directories (wow, I’ve been using Subversion for so long…)
- they have multiple virtual desktops (wow, we have had this feature since KDE 1.0)
- they can index files according to metadata
OK, maybe Spotlight is cool, but why so much fuss for such a simple new feature? When you talk with Mac enthusiasts they seem to imply 10.5 is a revolution and nothing will be ever the same under the sun. I don’t think so.
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I love traveling. I love traveling without a detailed plan, without booking rooms, just wandering around and following the flow of my mind. The perfect travel is driving with a Lonely Planet guide in your pocket, a friend to chat with and just a vague idea of where you’re heading to. When you see something interesting you stop. There’s no hurry, no pressure to reach the next target, you can just sleep anywhere there is a room to rent, including places in the middle of nowhere that you didn’t even knew they existed.
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After a good kickstart, lately our government has been busy at creating laws that make me uneasy. First they cut three years jailtime to almost everybody who committed crime before May 6th, including killers. They made instantly free about 13k people, one third of the jailed population. This is supposed to make us save a lot of money (they say billions, but there’s no account for the added expenses on social security) but frankly speaking I saw no urgency for this act, I felt like we’re already tolerant enough, expecially after the last government ruled by Berlusconi almost legalized financial crimes.
Now, they want legal immigrants to be allowed to bring their relatives in Italy and to apply for citizenship after just five years they lived here. Apparently this is strongly pushed by the catholic movement. Now I’m OK with this, I love melting pots, I think italian culture is more in danger because of mcdonalds and american movies than because of immigration, but I don’t see what the hell they’re trying to achive. Don’t they have anything more urgent and useful to work on? Can they please explain what’s the deal? And what impresses me the most is that people most upset by immigration are also the most integralist catholics. Totally schizophrenic.
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On top of the Empire State Building, looking at New Jersey.
