By the time we are meant to leave our little town, the sweltering heat will be gone and this window will be closed.

Rebecca says as much, half-marveling and half-grieving the passage, as she wonders what moved me to shoot it.

Even if I knew, I might not say to her or U. The artist rightly holds her tongue, letting the brush do its work (or not).

Yes, but the novelist can’t help himself. (Just a girl’s muddy drawers sets Faulkner’s imagination off on The Sound and the Fury.)

Between two aesthetic theories falls the shadow of the absent owner at Osteria del Trivio. A night off? Or intimations of mortality?

On the way to the art store earlier today, I composed an album of shop fronts: mostly vacant, a few newly opened in the intervening year.

Of time and the river, they sing (like Jackson Browne?). Then might it be said (about “19”), so much always depends on the frame?

The bells of S. Gregorio herald our return to the terrazzo.

We answer back with our toast of Prosecco: “Ciao, bella!”

<Monday evening>

But one of several pastimes, our Italian lessons catch the accomplished ear of the young guy at the table beside us.

He’s been typing feverishly (writing what I wonder?), when suddenly he breaks off to ask, “Going or coming?”

Huh, is the first sound thing that trips through an addled brain. Next, the voice of Father Guido Sarducci on Saturday Night Live.

Luckily, I manage to refrain from speaking either of these non sequiturs. Instead, “Just arriving” sends us off on a quick set of Italian vocabulary lessons, some hesitant geography, and a few tasty morsels of his biography.

Dual-citizen. Exeter year abroad. Now grinding away in Med School. With summer breaks in a little Italian town, whose name on his tongue our ears muffle. (With a little help from a map, we trust, triangulation will find it.)

A flurry of good feelings, with well wishes at the close. He, back to his keyboard. We, back to our bored games. Happy campers one and all.

<Later on, Sunday night>

In the war on jet lag, sleep at 20:00 is the enemy. So we occupy a spot, long after dinner, in Aeroporto di Roma.

Bored games help. Nationality Profiling, a politically incorrect update of the classic Clue, keeps us smiling.

<Sunday night>

No reputable critic recognizes or touts this genre, so far as I know. But I go for movies of a certain type for part of the time, while stuck in a cabin over the Atlantic.

Last year, it was Draft Day. This year, The Longest Ride. Both, to my mind, are slight films at best, probably much worse. Never a temptation in first run.

So what’s the attraction? This elective affinity between slight movies and long flights? A comic rhyme, or ironic reflection of the expense of time in a waste of shame?

I leave the question to philosophers and film critics, as I turn an eye to more weighty stuff: yet another remake of Far From the Madding Crowd. My Hardy in Cliff Notes yet again!

<Saturday night: 11:00PM>

On a site hand-picked by Archduke Maximillian, Castello Maramare was built between 1856 and 1860.  From the Gardens beyond, it thrusts out into the sea.

Hotel Silla

Ends with dinner, around the corner, in the crypt from the church next door:

Osteria Antica Mescita S. Niccolo