A postcard for your thoughts

Another weekend, another postcard post! If there are any postcard haters out there, don't fret, this isn't going to become a regular theme... at least not on a weekly basis that is.

In case anyone hasn't noticed, I've been posting a bit more than usual this past month, most of which has been sports card related -- in order for me to keep up this kind of pace, I need to throw in a few non-sports card posts here and there, hence another post about postcards (although it's just one this time).

Yesterday ended up being a "me" day, meaning that I had no plans, and could do ever whatever struck my fancy (within reason of course). Surprisingly, I actually had the urge to go somewhere, somewhere that would hopefully be fun. I don't like to waste my whole day gallivanting around, so when I do go out, it's always in the morning -- and even though I felt like going out, I still didn't feel like going very far, which did severely limit my options, but seeing as how I hadn't hit my favorite semi-local antique mall (the only good one in TN that I've found so far) in a while, I figured that would be good way to spend the morning.

As much as I like this antique mall (and the guy who owns it), I really only go for one particular booth, I've written about this booth before, but for anyone knew to the blog, it's got pretty much everything that I could possibly want in one single place: stamps, postcards, magazines, sports cards, trade cards, coins, toys (of the vintage variety), all kinds of old paper ephemera, and just a bunch of other random junk that your average modern person no longer cares about (aka my kind of stuff).

"My" booth was looking a little sparse this, which makes me think that some "new" stuff is going to be added soon (note to self: go back next week), that being said, I still spent over an hour looking through various boxes and binders, although I only ended up finding one thing of interest:

Before I go any further, I've got to admit something, and it's a little embarrassing... it took me about an hour of searching on the interweb last night to identify the location! I knew that I recognized the place, but my goldfish brain wouldn't let me recall the name. Thankfully I was at least able to still recognize Mt. Etna in the background, which of course narrowed it down to Sicily, but still, a whole hour of searching?

Anyways, what your looking is the ancient theatre of Taormina, built by the Romans - on the spot of an older theatre of Greek origin - sometime in the third century B.C. This particular theatre happens to be the second largest of it's kind in Sicily, with the Greek theatre further down the coast in Siracusa being the biggest.

As you can see from this modern picture (pilfered from Google btw), the theatre is still very much there, and is quite the tourist destination, with a panoramic view like that - Etna on the right, Ionian Sea on the left - it's not hard to see why.

Keeping with Greek tradition (the Romans would've used it for gladiatorial events), temporary stages are put together for modern performances -- most of the original seating is gone, but clearly that's been remedied as well.

I usually prefer cards that have been used, but I wasn't about to pass this one up just because of it's lack of postal history. I am far from an expert, but I'm thinking that this card dates to the 30's, and while not rare by any stretch of the imagination, I do believe that it was worth the four bits (fifty cents) that I paid for it.


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.