The castle town of Burgos, Sardinia
Fujifilm GFX100S II, 55mm lens, f11 @ 1/250 second, ISO 160.
Work in progress - colours are in experimental phase!

I’ve been travelling through Sicily and Sardinia the past few weeks, partly as a reccy for potential photo tours, and partly because they are two areas in Italy I had yet to explore. However, my choice of timing is far from optimum. I’ve always known that summer in Europe is busy, yet I have been totally overwhelmed by the sheer volume of humanity at almost every place we visited.

Almost. While most photo tours are based on a few ‘hero’ destinations, it’s the in between moments on roads less travelled that interest me the most. It’s where I hope to find photographs that haven’t yet appeared on every second Instagram feed.

Burgos is such an example. Tucked away in the hills of central Sardinia, it’s a tiny village sitting beneath a towering castle on a headland jutting out into the valley below. With the right light and weather, it will make a sensational photograph - one day. The photo above is still a work-in-progress.

However, the reason for this blog isn’t the photograph, but the experience. After photographing the castle from the approach road, we walked into town. A couple of locals were parking their cars and one of them, seeing me with a camera, jovially asked me to take his photograph. We had a laugh, I took his photo and I walked on.

A short time later, it being very warm, we stopped into a little café for a drink. My subject was there with half a dozen friends, I imagine having their pre-siesta beverages.

We ordered a drink and a gelato. The locals turned to us (it was a very small bar) and started talking to us.

I speak very little Italian, he very little English. However, I found out his grandmother lives in South Australia and sells tobacco, while his aunt is somewhere in Perth. As I said, I don’t speak a lot of Italian, so it might have been his aunt who sells the tobacco!

But I loved the interaction – we all had a laugh, talked about their castle, my kangaroos and there were smiles all around. When I went up to the cashier to pay, I asked if I could buy everyone in the bar a round of drinks as ‘my new friends’.

No, was the answer. In fact, I couldn’t even pay for my own drinks and ice creams because the gentleman I had photographed had already picked up the bill and, when the bartender asked him if I could reciprocate, he refused my kind offer! What a show of hospitality in a tiny town, miles from anywhere!

The experience is so much better than my photo! It’s also what makes travel so much fun. If we had more interactions like these, perhaps there would be no senseless wars!

And I’ll be back there this October with Tony Hewitt on our next photo tour to Italy – with hopefully a point of difference: the autumn colours. You can see photos from our tour to Italy last year on my personal website - https://www.petereastway.com/portfolio/explorations/italy-2025?ct=2

And if you’re interested in how I do my post-production in Lightroom (but not the photo reproduced here which I'm still working on), there’s an online reference course you can purchase at the Better Photography Education website - https://www.betterphotographyeducation.com/online-courses/post-production-travel/about-the-post-production-masterclass