U be the judge and jury.
Slim and None, attorneys
for the prosecution and
the defense of poetry,
belly up to the bar.

Summarily the queen has delivered her orders.
A plot summary, my wiki.vassal, of La Traviata:

Act I
The courtesan Violetta, recovering from an illness, throws a lavish party.
There, her current lover and would-be one vie for the favors of her affection.
By night’s end, Alfredo the usurper has Violetta singing to herself differently.

Act II
After the lovers live together in the country, they naturally fall apart.
Then they get back together. Then they fall even further apart. Etc.
All this time, in the country and the city, they keep up their singing.

Act III
Almost together, the lovers keep singing in the grim face of death.
Alfredo survives a duel with the Baron, the wicked former lover.
Lovers reunite. Violetta regains her strength to sing. She expires.

While Rebecca is working hard on her art,
I (every bit the fool) am playing the part.

And a horse in the name of the movie house.
Yet what they screened last night was human,

All too human. Eating and drinking, even
Copulating and thieving: a full two hours.

A remarkable look at a rag-tag “family,”
None of whom (?) are related precisely.

Un Affare di Famiglia as translated here.
I have no idea what it is in giapponese.

There’s an app for that, it just dawns on me.
Manbiki kazoku, it seems, means relentlessly.

A far cry from “Shoplifters,” the English title.
Apt enough, so far as it goes, to cover the plot.

When it comes to the States, be sure to catch it.
Camera work alone will insure that you watch it.

For such a small and unheralded town, Spoleto has a long and rich history.
Much there is worthy of study. But as far as the city of today is concerned,
Spoleto is the Umbrian hill town that remade itself by investing in the arts.

Or, more precisely, it might be said that Gian Carlo Menotti remade the city.
And if the truth be told, Gian Carlo set out to remake Lucca in the first place.
But we were headed toward another piece of the puzzle before truth broke in.

Each year, if we are lucky, we find a new artist. Ground rule double: a local one.
The third requirement, to fit in our suitcase, has us stumped with this discovery.
The medium, to be revealed here below, is more than just a little bit recalcitrant.

The name of the artist is Luigi Piccioni. As often the case, we chatted at length.
Hanging on to each unfamiliar word, we pieced together the puzzle between us.
Using our phone apps to fill in the gaps, we figured out how he paints on metal.

In the slightly garbled translation on the back of the evening’s program, “La Furba e Lo Sciocco [The Clever One and the Fool] is a comic 18th-century intermezzo by Domenico Sarri, a composer not well-known or executed today.”

Now I don’t know about anyone else, but that seems like an excessive form of punishment to apply to a modestly ambitious entertainment. And besides, unlike Lontano da Qui it had rather good rhythm and the characters were dancing to it.

Lots of broad laughs. Even a couple of costume changes for Madame Sofia while she was onstage. Not something you get to see very often, and you wouldn’t believe how sexy she looked dressed up like a man in those white leather boots.

Was I supposed to say that? Non c’è problema. I just won’t tell Rebecca there’s a post today. I mean, “You think it’s as easy to crank out these things as it is to rhyme words in Italian? Or to earn a major role on the Neapolitan opera scene?”

That way, while remaining unknown and in character, the “stupid and pompous” composer will at least avoid being executed by the “clever, smart, cunning, etc” heroine, who once again had her hair in curls and her fine evening clothes on.

If only I had had my camera! But with the weather app calling for two days of rain, I took on responsibility for the two umbrellas. (And Rebecca isn’t given to taking selfies. So the best I could do was get her to photograph the curtain set.)