A repeat of the first of our full meals at home (a simple recipe, brought with us, that uses little more than pasta, cannellini beans, garlic, greens) leaves plenty of time for the first performance of La Commedia (I attempt to read the Italian, as Reb gamely provides a translation to be checked against Longfellow’s own).

With 3 cantiche (Inferno, Purgatorio, e Paradiso) each divided into 33 canti (with an introductory one to grow on), there’s really a pretty long row ahead to hoe. Especially when you consider that between the two of us, going at full bore, we make our way through four tercets (basically, 12 lines out of 14,233 in total).

For homework, vocabulary flash cards remain to be made.  But if you stand far enough back from the alien tongue alone, there’s some mighty fine images to contemplate: dark woods, straight paths, slumber, and one’s being lost along the way in the middle of life’s journey.  Nel mezzo del cammin nostra vita.

“So you are here to live,” Pa-mel-a explains it to herself and us, when she has learned the date of our departure, while finishing a fashion transaction today.

So simple, and so precise, her words.  Not at all unlike the Movida piece of transformable clothing made in Italy by VagaMé.  Elegant and intricate, too.

Is it extravagance, or arrogance, that prompts Thoreau to add “deliberately” to the common verb of human experience (to live)?  If only to wake his neighbors!

Flipping my way through The Senses of Walden, I shall try to take up such impertinent questions in a fashion adapted for slow travel.