ICAN 4 Event Intro and Photos, Trieste, Italy

Submitted by dawn on 21 November 2009 - 9:19am.

Sunday, 15 November 2009

The many participants of ICAN Workshop 4, representing at least 12 countries, made their way to beautiful Trieste, Italy. The map to the below shows the layout of the UNESCO International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) campus where we met. Click on the map to go to the ICTP Virtual Guided Tour page. We were hopeful that the weather would be as nice as that shown in their pictures. Unfortunately, we had a very persistent and gloomy marine layer hovering over the area, which weather.com said would clear up on Thursday, but never did! A scientist at the local oceanographic institute told me that this weather pattern was quite unusual, and that they had not seen such cloud cover and fog only twice in the last 10 years! But despite the gloominess, we really were in terrific surroundings, with three charming little restaurants just down the hill from our guesthouse, a lovely yacht harbor (which many of us could see from our guesthouse rooms), and the beautiful grounds of the Miramare Castle just a few steps further. The Miramare grounds stand on a rocky promontory overlooking the Adriatic Sea, and featuring also a World Wildlife Fund exhibit about the marine protected area just offshore. And directly underneath the Adriatico Guest House is the Immaginario Scientifico, a science and interactive multimedia museum. So there was plenty to occupy our free time outside of workshop activities. The ICTP campus is around 6 miles or 10 km from the Trieste city center. Click HERE to download a full ICTP visitor's guide in pdf.

Thanks to Dylan Keon for the photography!