Sant'Andrea della Valle

@Michael Skorulski: This church is indeed different: the High Altar is quite small and makes room for these three paintings.

@Ted: Thanks, Ted!

@Michael: Danke! Händchen und Stativ wäre noch besser gewesen :-)

@MaryB: Thank you so much! There are still more wonderful places to visit, word!

@Tracey: Hehe, I agree, when publishing this photo I wondered if I should have clicked the 'violence' warning button. But of course, I didn't do that. The depiction of St. Andrew's suffering is quite decent, every crime TV show has more blood and violence. The origins of Christianity are violent (the Colosseum is virtually soaked with the blood of early Christians), and the crimes in the name of God still are; violence is an everyday phenomenon and I think this was more obvious when Calabrese worked at his paintings than it is today. We want to believe that crime, violence and torture are products coming from sick minds, or that they are born in extreme situations and that we can control them through the law and by jailing the bad ones. However, I don't think so. The cultural varnish of mankind is a very thin one and the old ape is still within us, violence is still a vital part of our existence. Calabrese's paintings remind us of that, and this is a bitter memento. (Though there are some aspects in the depiction of Christ's suffering, especially in early Baroque churches, that I don't like and that were changed for the better thanks to protestant influence. But this would be another story.)

Cathedrals in the US - well, I'm an old-world catholic, so I'm getting quite highbrow when it comes to churches (call me superficial if you want ;-) I wouldn't be in the right mood without old rich decors, colourful stained glass windows and lots of marble. I guess the southern US would be a good place to start, at least a catholic church in a wealthy parish. I wouldn't be too happy with the assembly-rooms of protestant or other evangelical churches (call me arrogant if you want ;-)

But if you want to enter a church, just ask the priest or the sacristan - if they wouldn't be pleased to let you in then there's something wrong with that church!

@António Pires: I have another shot of this place, taken at a different day, when the lights were on: completely different atmosphere. The original of my photo for today was very dark with a quite cold atmosphere, as dusk had already begun and there was very few light. With my processing I tried to reconstruct the original colours as much as possible without disturbing the atmosphere, and I'm glad you like it! I'm still learning this image processing stuff and I'm not nearly sure about what I'm doing there :-)

@Observing: I have one with better illumination and more details that I'll show sometime. This one you can see here is the result of pixel torture :-)

@JoeB: Or a toy for... well, do a search on 'Saint Andrew's Cross' at Wikipedia :-D

@Ina: Thanks a lot! That was not easy as the original image was extremely dark.

@Laurent: If you could see the original... ;) I'll post a better one sometime, this one here is a mere technical practice :)

@Steven: You're completely right, that are indeed light bulbs! 'Glowers' was just a suggestion of my dictionary, as I was looking for a word less ordinary than 'lamp'! :-)
Btw, when I was in Florence 25 years ago, I noticed these ultra-ugly electric lights at the offertory boxes: when you dumped a coin one of the bulbs was lit! When all bulbs were lit a cleric came out and did a sort of 'reset', thus switching off the light. I've never seen a practice like that before and I'm glad that I don't see it anymore! Hilarious! :-D

@Twelvebit: No doubt about that! My motivation is to rediscover all the details in photos I almost was trying to delete and I'm still intrigued by the possibilities of image processing. However, we had a small B/W photo laboratory in school and developing our own photos was really interesting and entertaining.

@Japanalia: Wait until you see my image with better lightning! That makes a big difference!