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On Tuesday at 7 p.m., Nasra Adan will present her amazing travel photographs again this year for her fourth summer slide show at Kump Education Center.
Nasra and her husband teach overseas and return to Elkins with their two sons each summer to visit his parents, John and Ginny Zuboy.
Adan's photos have taken us to Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Pakistan. This year she will share her photographs of Italy. We will see images of ancient Rome where Caesar Augustus was Emperor when Jesus was born. Also, we may see Vatican City where the popes have led the Catholic Church for centuries. Even today the current Pope is fearlessly challenging modern autocratic leaders.
The art and architecture of Rome draw thousands of visitors each year. Tourists climb up the remaining levels of the Colosseum where Roman crowds hailed gladiators before they died. Many of the rocks from the Colosseum were removed by Popes during intervening years to build great Roman cathedrals.
The Vatican and Roman cathedrals hold hundreds of beautiful works of religious art. Nowhere else in the world has a better collection of Western religious and classical sculptures and paintings. The tradition of carving a "bust" [head-shoulder-chest] image of each middle-class person who had died makes the oldest cemetery scenes a bit spooky.
Adan's photography will take us beyond Rome to Tuscany where we can expect to see the Duomo in Florence and Michaelangelo's great marble sculptures. Florence was the central city of the early Renaissance in the period between 1300-1500 when Dante wrote the Divine Comedy and Machiavelli wrote The Prince under the orange, terra cotta roofs of Tuscany. Machiavellian quotations like, "It is better to be hated than loved," still serve well for modern autocratic leaders.
Adan's images of southern Italy will tell why Pompeii can be described as the tomb of a civilization. It
was covered with lava when Mount Vesuvius erupted on August 24, AD 79. Visitors can still see how
the volcano trapped people that morning and many never got out of bed. The city of Pompei was not far
from Naples where the few survivors fled the molten lava and told their stories.
There is so much to learn about that Italian boot on the map of the Mediterranean Sea. Pizza and spaghetti are our best-known foods from there, but ancient and renaissance Italian philosophy have given European history a great deal more to think about.
Nasra Adan's presentation will get that process started.