Anantara Convento di Amalfi

Anantara Convento di Amalfi

300 piece jigsaw puzzle. I started with the edges and the blue areas and that went together pretty well.  The skyline and the left portion of the building was next. After that it was 'try one piece at a time'. In the first pass less than half of pieces found their place, so then we go around again. After that it's kind of like Euler's disk, more and more pieces are finding a home until you are down to half a dozen pieces and half a dozen holes and then, boom, you're done. The purple flowers weren't much help, scattered as they are all over the right hand side. 

Kind of cool looking building, so I go looking around for information. Found this on the Anatara Hotel website:

Old photo of the building
Look at those paths and stairs

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS 

A Cistercian Abbey 

The site was given to Cistercian monks from Fossanova in 1214 with the promise of forthcoming funds from the Pope to build on the foundations After nearly 10 years. it became an Abbey under Emperor Federico II of Palermo.

Frederick II

So the place is old. Federico, known in Wikipedia as Frederick the 2nd, Holy Roman Emperor, was a Wonder of the World:

For his many-sided activities and dynamic personality Frederick II has been called the greatest of all the German emperors, perhaps even of all medieval rulers. In the Kingdom of Sicily and much of Italy, Frederick built upon the work of his Norman predecessors and forged an early absolutist state bound together by an efficient secular bureaucracy. He was known by the appellation Stupor mundi (Wonder of the World), enjoying a reputation as a brilliant Renaissance man avant la lettre and polymath even today: a visionary statesman, an inspired naturalist, scholar, mathematician, architect, poet and composer. Frederick also reportedly spoke six languages: Latin, Sicilian, Middle High German, Old French, Greek, and Arabic. As an avid patron of science and the arts, he played a major role in promoting literature through the Sicilian School of poetry. His magnificent Sicilian imperial-royal court in Palermo and Foggia, beginning around 1220, saw the first use of a literary form of an Italo-Romance language, Sicilian. The poetry that emanated from the school had a significant influence on literature and on what was to become the modern Italian language. He was also the first monarch to formally outlaw trial by ordeal, which had come to be viewed as superstitious.

 Amalfi is just south of Naples, Italy. Fossanova Abbey is about halfway between Naples and Rome.

Fossanova Abbey (left) and Amalfi, Italy (right)

Fossanova Abbey and the hotel in Amalfi are about one hundred miles apart, as the crow flies. Probably take two weeks of walking to get from one to the other, unless you could catch a boat.