Rebecca reverses springer & tirare, opposed signs
Of instruction frequently appearing on doors;

Whereas I have been accused of bungling chiuso,
The Italian word for “plumb out of luck, again!”

Much the way I felt during Wednesday’s final exam,
When my Italian teacher stammered for faint praise.

Let it therefore be said, first and foremost,
That we did get inside SS. Giovanni e Paolo.

But to get the photograph that we returned for,
I had to make do, sadly, with a reproduction.

As for the other chance at personal redemption,
My own translation without a peek at Google.

Particularly deserving of notice is the representation of the martyr Thomas Becket of Canterbury, dated from the first quarter of the 13th century. This is one of the oldest examples illustrating the scene of the assassination of the English Bishop and {the verb confounds me all the way to the end of} the reign of Henry II.

All of which I suspect goes to prove that reading
Is lots easier for me than hearing and speaking.

These basic materials, familiar to sight and touch,
Prove suited to expressing elements of the faith.

There in the wood sculpture from the 13th century
A translation of scripture from John 19: 38-42.

Or here in the Romanesque Church of St. Euphemia
Each pillar between a column is a salvaged antiquity.

All the more impressive, the tall stone church itself:

Today, 25 Aprile, is celebrated as a national holiday:
Festa della Liberazione, as all the many posters say.

Our routine remains the same: Cappuccino at the Cioccolateria.
Then, since good weather holds, we climb the hills and circle the Rocca.

The only change: we adjust our schedule to arrive on Italian time
At Piazza della Libertà, the site of today’s town ceremony.

In our apartment, the paintings on most of the walls
Go with the reds of the chairs to enliven the room.

On the way out the door, you confront a darker frame
With black and white images in three vertical planes.

All are set in Spoleto. Most are clearly dated anni 1930.
The undated one, closest to us by far, shares an address:

Porta Fuga, the famous door from which Hannibal fled.
But there is no escaping the Fascismo and a time of dread.

In Spoleto, you often see the elderly around town.
Even the infirm have help and ways of getting around.

One day, as we cross Piazza della Vittoria with groceries,
An older woman stops her nurse, determined to talk to us:

“Inglese,” she asks in one of the few bits of the language
I have at my command. To our reply, “Non, americano”

An insistent “thank you” issues repeatedly from her lips.
Why she might be speaking in tongues we wonder ever since.

After the failed endeavor with lentils last year:
In our infinite wisdom, we ask our patient waiter
(Previously the cook, later a harried multi-tasker)

How, pray tell, to cook the lentils right this time.
Only his answer, of course, comes back in roughly
The same Italian as what Dante immortalized in rhyme.

Cameriere e cuoco, I now know. Should we listen
Long enough it may reveal why the word bathroom
(Bagno) keeps getting spoken in our cooking lesson.

According to the due lingue directions on the bag,
There’s no English translation of Non mettere a bagno.
Google informs me it means “Do not bathe” (soak them?).

But the hypothesis of this entire experiment, set forth
By our kind native witness, seemed to be (beyond a doubt)
That any cuoco would have to know to soak the lentils first.