This year’s lesson in technology is plastered all over the Stazione wall, kindly translated for the foreigners among us to read right along with the natives:

Much the same lesson, reportedly, is stamped on the walls of Apple stores, all the way from our little Umbrian town here to the great job’s kingdom come:

We inform our customers that, following the deployment of our new operating system, you likely will experience erratic connections with Wi-Fi devices everywhere. We deny any inconvenience whatsoever.

Apprentice to a trade, I am unclear of the ground rules.

What, for instance, is in the public domain? (Or, rather, who?)

Of the broom, I feel certain. But I hesitate to intrude upon the sweeper, and so I can barely bring myself to shoot from the hip.

What I wanted, of course, was the old-world tool. But how do you separate the sweeper from the swept?

Two answers to the rhetorical question present themselves. Which do I use?

But forget all that. Lesson 1: Think a bit before you shoot. (Or should I say: fire up all those pixels? Either way, perhaps, U’ll eventually get the point.)

By contrast, notice the figure in the chair. Rebecca’s sense of color astounds me. I’m snapping all these pictures, while she just sits in silent meditation, drinking in the chiesa before heading off with all deliberate speed to one chosen spot, where she takes the single photo that she needs to come home and paint a series from that one archetype.  (With her works in progress, permissions to post are scant.)

Me, I’m all over the place. With nothing to show for it, once we get home. Or nothing, it seems to me, at first glance.  Lesson 2: look, and then look again. With Rebecca’s responses to guide me, I find hints and guesses of promise, one crop at a time, one push over the line. There will be other places, other days. Hopes perhaps to amaze.

Not as many “finds” this year, alas. One favorite, a school desk:

Another purchase, this one a challenge, turned up in Italian:

Still I’ll have to try to peek and poke my way through the story.