Sundial paradise

Kremsmünster, Austria     23 September 2009

Here’s my first entry from Europe. Confusingly, I’m going to work my way backwards in this text, but photos are in forwards order (click on an image for a larger view).

I’m in Austria now, in the town of Kremsmünster (50 miles east of Salzburg), and just had a marvellous day touring around with Walter Hoffman, a local sundial expert and former high school math teacher. We found 7 dials in various villages (putting my total count now at 105 for this trip), but most of the day was devoted to enjoying the mountains. The weather was glorious, so we took a cable car up to a high plateau, had lunch on a restaurant balcony as is typical for the Alps, and then did a one-hour walk (he is 71, so could not do too much). This particular region is similar to a National Park (although with a full-blown ski area), so there were many interpretive signs regarding the geology and flora and fauna. The last of the photos shows me enjoying an apfelstrudel that was truly heavenly (the “soft look” is because the photo was blurred).

Two other photos record the marvellous sundial that I successfully located in a vineyard near Piacenza, Italy during my 600-mile, 2-day car trip from Briançon in the French Alps via Italy and the Brenner Pass to here in Austria. It was a good break from the intense autostrada (“freeway”) driving with its much higher % of trucks and speeding cars than in the States. This dial is truly one of the world’s finest, painted in 2005 and using two mirrors (supported on the edge of the roof) to create, depending on the time of day, two time-telling spots of light, or sometimes even shadows of the mirrors on the wall. I chatted with the vineyard owner at length and he ended up giving me two bottles of his vino rosso!

The various other sundial photos are all from the Briançon region, taken during two days in which a French astronomer friend and his collegaue and I tracked down (with the aid of a good catalog) 89 dials in two days, amongst beautiful Alpine scenery – just a dusting of snow could be seen on the highest peaks of 9000 ft or so, but green pastures and brown, gray and white cliffs more describes the set of hues. The weather was good most of the time – just a few showers, and even ~3 hours of sun. The region is a National Park filled with villages chockablock with sundials – I of course was in overdose heaven. The large wooden object in one photo is not a bear, but an overgrown marmot, a much beloved animal in that part of the world (like hedgehogs in England).

Lastly, my first gnomonic stop (after much driving from Zürich, where I landed on Friday morning) was in Grenoble, where I made a pilgrimmage to a private school that has a 17th c. Jesuit, marvellously complex and fascinating ceiling-reflection dial (shown in the top 2 photos, one including me). There are two mirrors on adjacent window sills and their spots of light are cast inside onto the ceiling and walls of two flights of a staircase. This of course is over-the-top inspiration for what I am doing in the man-lodge!

- Woody