Photo: Stained glass windows of Old Adobe Mission

This is one of about a dozen stained glass windows in Scottsdale's Old Adobe Mission. They are remarkable for several reasons.  First, they were made by a Mexican-American laborer who had no experience in stained glass.  He thought the Mission needed stained glass windows, and he taught himself to make them.

They stained glass windows were lost for 23 years and were recovered and restored only a few years ago.  The Mission building had been used as the rehearsal hall by the volunteer Scottsdale Symphony Orchestra, and when some work on the building was being done, someone took the windows to an artisan in Phoenix who did stained glass work.

No one paid the artisan, however, so he never did the work.  23 years later, people wondered what happened to the windows, but no one knew.  Someone heard of the stained glass artisan, contacted him, and he still had them in storage, waiting for someone to pay him to do the work.  The money was then raised, the windows have been restored and returned to their original locations.

Tomorrow I will show you how we know the name of the person who originally made the windows.

This week we have photos of the elegant villas and gardens of the Borromean Islands in Lake Maggiore, Italy, posted on our Viva la Voyage travel photo site.