The Tuscan Countryside from the Palazzo Pitti in Florence

Click the image for a larger version.

This is a view of the Tuscan countryside from the gardens of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. I took it using the iPhone camera with the panorama setting.

The original image out of the phone is 8798 x 3150px with a 9.3MB file size. The EXIF data also tells me that the exposure time was 1/1,014 second.

Plainly, that cannot relate to the whole period I was scanning the scene with the phone so it must relate to the frame rate. That would mean, of course, that each slice of the shot is taken in less than 1/1,000 second.

Pretty neat – and the way it stitches the panorama so flawlessly is nothing short of amazing.

When I was writing the word ‘Tuscan’ just now, I had a moment of hesitation wondering about the origin of the name ‘Tucson’, the city in Arizona in the USA.

Of course the ‘s’ and the ‘c’ are the other way around, so there is not reason the two names should be connected, and in fact they are not related.

Google and its resources (Wikipedia etc.) tells the story:

The name of the city in Arizona derives from the Spanish words meaning ‘at the base of the black hill’.

Tuscany in Italy gets its name from the Etruscans, who date from before the Roman period.

They inhabited Etruria, an ancient land around the Arno and Tiber rivers, corresponding to modern day Tuscany, Lazio, and Umbria – in other words, covering most of central and northern Italy.

Florence is on the River Arno, and if my sense of direction can think back correctly to when I took this shot, the Arno and central Florence is off to the left, out of the frame.