I love making Sketchy Memory drawings for people I know and travel with. This latest one (and it’s my largest to date) is for my friend, Lisa, who came over to Italy to join me for a week this past spring. We travelled from Rome south to Calabria eating, drinking great wine, and trading photos from our phones.

We both loved the original photo used for this drawing because it caught an iconic Roman scene – a busy outdoor café, an elderly woman leaning out of an open window to observe the street action, lots of greenery amongst crumbling ancient buildings, and a younger woman on her smartphone! In days past, this young woman might have been reading a book or journalling alongside her glass of Vermentino. The woman on the phone is my friend, Lisa, and when I stepped out of the church across the street (Lisa had had enough of churches by this point) and saw this scene, I quickly snapped this photo. It struck me as past and present merging into one.

When I showed the photo to Lisa, we talked about the old and new ways of travel and observing the world, but also about how Rome’s enduring beauty will always shine through in any photo… even those with people on cell phones. La Grande Bellezza!

In Piazza della Scala, Rome

Ciao, tutti!