Spanish indeed is becoming one of the most spread language of the planet, and when my son asked me “Why is it important to learn Spanish?” I did a quick research on the web and discovered that Spanish is spoken by almost 400 million people worldwide, which is reason enough to learn the language. But it’s even more compelling when you realize that about half of the population in the Western Hemisphere speaks Spanish, making it the primary language for as many people as English in this region of the world.

You never know what will be your future, but surely knowing an extra language is a great bonus, both for your curriculum and for pleasure: because of this, I want to do with my son what my parents didn’t do with me, teach him a new language while he’s still young, since recent studies shown that this is the best moment to learn a foreign language.

nowadays people doesn’t seem to be interested anymore in looking at the natureworks, at our world. I find this still a very important and also very relaxing activity to do while walking outside.

All around, nature and a weird silence. You can only hear the sound of a nearby water fountain. Some birds, the wind that moves leaves. Apart for that nothing but silence.

The life goes on, and the bells of the small church located in village’s entrance are ready to sing again.

the small chapel nearby village entrance

closeup of an ivy climbing on the old walls

a group of wrecks

Pontremoli is a nice old town in the “Lunigiana”, a zone of Tuscany. It is not far from the famous “Cinque Terre” national park, and also near many other interesting places like Lucca, Viareggio, and so on.

It is also close to where we live now, so a sunday of december we decided to take a short trip there. We arrived and the feeble winter sun was lighting the town in a wonderful way. We walked up to a hill where you can see the whole town, and someone had hang up some clothes to dry them. I decided to take a picture of it, the one you can see above.

I like the result very much. It has a sort of “old feeling” on it, typical of the 1960-70 years. Old houses, the climate of desperation and poverty after the world war, where everyone had to restart their lives from zero.

The pictures in this post comes from a well-furnished Christmas shop, as you can see, that is located in the middle of the small town of Oberammergau, about which I already talked in the past. It’s funny because those pictures are dating back to August 2004!

Indeed, that shop sells Christmas stuff and wooden statues, etc during all the year !

The north-european cities, in particular the ones of Austria, with Salisburg, Innsbruck and Vienna, have a long tradition about Christmas street markets and in general of Christmas-related objects. Recently we visited Velden, on the coast of the big lake Wörthersee, and even if it is a medium-sized town, there was a nice street market along the main road that were selling this kind of stuff.