The Getty Villa

From New England I continued to Los Angles. It has been a while since I last visited here. Since I was in town for few days I got a chance to go on few excursions.

One of the destinations I wanted to go to for a while is the Getty Villa. This is a museum built by Paul Getty near the Malibu coast in the late 60s. It is built as a replica of a Roman Villa from Pompai with the aim of accurately reflecting how that Roman nobel house looked at the time.

I remembered the Villa very strongly from a childhood visit. When I revisited Los Angles few years ago I learned that it was closed for renovation. It reopened in 2006, after almost 10 years of renovations. And so I took the rental car and drove to the museum.

This was also an excuse to try out my new camera. It is a "mirrorless" camera, a new generation that attempts to combine classic dSLR with compact camera. This is a very small camera, but with exchangeable lens of good optic quality. I wanted to see what I can do with it.

The Villa is surrounded by a formal garden with pools, shaded walkways, and many sculptures.

The house itself is built around a center courtyard with its own pool.

Inside there were display of the large Roman/Greek collection.

From the second floor balcony I could finally capture the size of the large formal garden.

The dining hall was a room that had views to both the inner and the outer gardens. Its ceiling was decorated by elaborated painting, and the floor was colorful marbles.

Going back out to the garden, the sun was low on the horizon, and very few people about.

On my way back toward the city, I was driving next to the sea shore. I could see large pelicans hovering over the water. I decided to stop and enjoy a bit of the shore before continuing. My camera did not have the zoom lens for capturing pelikans, but I did get to see many other water fowl.

It was a good thing I took a break, because immediately after I hit the notorious LA rush hour traffic. It took me over an hour and half to drive back (the outgoing drive was 20min).