WELCOME to the Gupole website of David & Gail Clarke.

This site is a mixture of personal stuff about us, our family and our home in Italy that gives the site its name; and more general stuff about our travels over the last few months and years.

We are currently spending about half of each year in Italy and the other half elsewhere in the world. Our impressions and comments about our various destinations are in the Clarke Chronicles , an ongoing travelogue (however, see below) that we hope will be of interest to anyone who might be visiting some or all of the places we’ve been. It’s not meant to be a Lonely Planet alternative, more a personal view with a few tips and a lot of photos. Included in it is a set of comments on some of the hotels/hostels etc that we’ve stayed in – warts and all! Later we’ll be adding comments on various eateries.

The Image Collection catalogues a selection of David’s photos taken over the last few years according to place and subject. This is an on-going project since there are always new ones being taken as well as an increasing selection of older ones.

On the personal side, there are images of our home at Le Gupole and images ofour family who are scattered around various parts of the world – Kenya (Ben, Karina, Frank & Digby), Hong Kong (Zo, Simon, Lily & Phoebe), Dubai (Daniel) and X marks the spot (Lea, Jonathan & Mali).

There are also links to a number of websites relating to businesses run by various members of the family and extended family.

In addition to the Image collection and photos in the articles on the various destinations, we have included on this page a number of Featured Images. These recent images shot wherever our present travels are taking us. As the list gets longer, older featured images will be listed on the sidebar.

If you want to contact us, our email addresses are: david at gupole dot com & gail at gupole dot com. It would be great to hear from you.

*** Update, 17 July 2010 ***

Change of plan! This website was created in Dreamweaver; it was a manual and time-consuming process and updating it required a lot of input, not so much for the text, but for all the menus. Frankly, in Dreamweaver and probably any other web editor they are a pain. However, I’ve now discovered WordPress which, despite its name, is nothing to do with Microsoft Word or its parent company (being a devoted Mac user, this is important!). Since ascending the learning curve of WP (not at the top yet but at least the peak is not covered in impenetrable cloud), I have realised that it is the way forward if I want to keep this thing going. So there are now two new sites:

www.retiredandroaming.com which covers the travelling side of our lives; and

www.dgcphoto.com which is David’s photo site and which includes the exciting opportunity for you of buying some of my photos!

The Gupole site presently undergoing a change to a WP-based site- this page is in WP – but it is currently a work in progress it. For now, if you want to catch up with where we are and what we’re doing now, go over to the R&Rsite. We’re also both on Facebook and David is on Twitter (twitter name: gupole). Most of the links above don’t do much at present, but if you want to view the old gupole site, it can still be accessed by following this link – but don’t hit the Home button once you’re there, you’ll get an error message!

For now, we’ll leave you with a recent photo of the entire clan taken at our family reunion on 11 July 2010 at Le Gupole:

the-clan-at-gupole-2010

and one of the grandchildren!

the-grandchildren-at-gupole-2010

What is Le Gupole?

The word 'gupole' (pronounced with the emphasis on the 'u', so it is gOO-po-ley) is the local dialect version of 'cupole', the plural of the word 'cupola'. La cupola has the same meaning as cupola in English, i.e. a dome. So 'le gupole' means 'the domes' or 'the cupolas'' and it is the name given to the particular part of the hill where the house is situated. All the different parts of the hill are named on the old maps, the names presumably relating to the shape of the part of the hill.

About Us

According to six-year old grandson Frank, we are anything ranging from 7-years old, through eleventeen to somewhere in the region of 150. In fact we are both 60-somethings and both of us retired professionals trying to ward off the atrophy of grey cells by exploring as many pastures new as we can.

David spent most of his career as a forensic scientist in Hong Kong, finishing off as Government Chemist, while Gail taught for nearly 28 years in the German-Swiss International School in Hong Kong, many of those years as deputy head of the International Primary Department.

Between us we have four kids, all of whom are pursuing amazing careers in exotic locations (see the links), and an increasing number of grandchildren.

David has been taking photos for as long as he can remember and these days has gone totally digital. Hence the rather large number of images on the site. Gail's artiness extends to illustrations large - murals for children's bedrooms - and small - for greetings cards and for children's stories that she's writing.