Orizzontintorno - di Carlo Paschetto & Emanuela Gris

NO BLOG

by Carlo, February 7th, 2004

Is this just a travel site? Or about photography? Or is it just our own travel site? Or, again, is this our ship's log? If I have to think about it, why did we create Orizzontintorno at all? In our home page we wrote that the ambition of this web site "is to become not only a hub, but also a landing harbour for sailors like us"...
Maybe I prefer it to see it as a meeting place: some sort of smoky tavern close to some harbour dock, with wooden furniture and lanterns hanging from the walls. Out of the door, night fog envelops everything, while the yellow light filters out of the windows and sounds come in, toned down.

In this meeting place you can find new people, chat, play card games, whisper about new routes. The bartender handles the game, decides the day's topic. The card players, if they wish, will make a comment. Or they'll just listen: our tavern isn't noisy, its customers like to look around themselves, and they're here because they share something.
We hang some pictures on the wooden walls, or we just tell once again the story of the 1999 gale, or about that marlin we fished some time ago and that, obviously grows bigger every time we tell the story.
How strange: I often write sailors' metaphors but I'm essentially a mountain man. My Genoa blood makes me speak…...

I've thought about it for a long time: I didn't like "Close Up" too much. What is it all about? When we first launched Orizzontintorno I thought about a page that could be updated every month, where we could write about anything, inspired by things we saw or heard or read, so that we could periodically meet our visitors again.
To be honest, we don't have something we want to talk about periodically. At least, not every month, as if we had bills to pay. And if we do have something to say, it doesn't necessarily have something to do with travels or travelling, however large the concept of travel is.
As for me, I like writing: that's it. I like to be free of being tedious and I consider even my own existence a kind of Travel. Above all now that Leonardo has arrived and that, together with Emanuela, we just left for the biggest adventure of our lives. Sure enough, this will bring us, also physically, in many distant places, but it will be mainly a travel made of images and daily events.

We also have a digital photo camera, now, and I hardly leave it home. I've always dreamt about being able to shoot random pictures of my own existence, without a clear necessity of doing it, just for the sake of freezing some instants with no other meaning other than having lived them. Taking pictures of things, moments, situations, faces. Just random shooting.

It's surely no new idea, I'm just the last of all latecomers. Photoblogs already fill the web: and there are some really interesting ones, like here, and here, and here. So, I don't want to have a photoblog. Even because I - also - like writing. And I don't even want to have a blog. I'm already a reader of some of them (especially this, and this, and this, and sometimes this). And I like the illusion of creating something original, although it's hardly possible.
I leave comments here and there, when I randomly navigate through other people's blogs: I leave my footprints like Pat - I'm not gonna explain here who Pat is. But the truth is that I don't like to comment, if I cannot choose the topic. And my topics never are the ones others choose.

So: no, I'm not gonna create a blog or a photoblog. I'm going to change the name of our page (Emanuela, can I?) and I'm going to put any kind of content in it. For instance, I'm going to put this, because it's a part of my daily travel, and because it's also somehow disturbing:

And then I'm going to fill it with what has silently entered Orizzontintorno during the last month: Leonardo, Milan, and, again Milan. And also, everything that "Close Up" already contained: Cambodia, Murat Street (I still have to take a picture of it), Emanuela's Faces, the time we were expecting Zuz.
And this is just the beginning. Also because, now, I finally got rid of this monthly appointment: I can write, take pictures, make you bored whenever I want. Well, Manu, are you also going to jump in?

(What do you guys say? Is this called a blog? Has it already been invented? Really...? Well, then, as soon as I will find the time, maybe I will open this space to your comments. Until then I will refuse to call this space a "blog").

And if this is no Travel...

12:30pm