Zagora, View with Cypresses

The dark cypresses rise like columns against the pale sky. Heat sits over the hills, slow and still.

The whole valley seems to be holding its breath. You follow the slender verticals of the trees, and then your gaze drifts back across the rolling slopes to where the ridge meets the soft sky. The light feels so high, catching the pale stone of the rooftops and warming the ochre earth. Against all that warmth are just the dusty greens and the near-black of the foliage. The paint itself seems to change—broad and smooth in the sky, then looser across the hills. The cypresses feel built, stroke by stroke. A held quiet rests over everything, the kind of silence that only the afternoon holds.