This is a place called Little Italy, a part of an old steel mill town in Luxembourg, called Dudelange. Today, Dudelange is no longer a steel town, and little Italy is now little Portugal. In the 50's, the Italians made their homes here. The men went to work in the steel mill or in the iron ore mines and the women tended their gardens and cooked noon dinners. Today, a few Italians still call it home, but most have died, or moved into more modern homes somewhere else and left to make room for the newer immigrants, the Portuguese. The charm is still there but different.
I took some photos this past October on a visit to my old town of my youth and decided to create some art with them. This piece is actual a composite of a photo of the town, and a photo of an early morning reflection of sunlight on the Mexican tile floor in our Indian River home. I spent a few hours doing photoshop magic using Topaz software on both photos and combining them into the final piece. The warm earthy tones of the piece conveys the rich colors of the iron ore that was pulled out of the ground for many years in the surrounding hills above Dudelange. It also reminds me of the rusty dust that belched from the steel mill's chimneys that settled each day upon every window sill of every home in town.
