Home again, home again
The prodigal daughter returns from Italy. This time with photos. For reals.
Welp, we’re back from our trip to Italy. Vacation is definitely not the right word. Though adventure would work. The kind of thing in which you do not get second breakfasts, or even first ones, and more than once find yourself choking back sobs on some random street corner while trying to navigate back to your hotel room in a shimmering heat so extreme (103 F 39.44 C) that the explosion of your aging cell phone with its failing battery literally burning hot in your hand is a real possibility.
Of course there were moments of wonder, too, and beauty. And strangeness which deranged the senses by layering and folding time, like in Rome when we descended into Nero’s thankfully cold Golden House, the Domus Aurea, which had been an immense palace, before it was incorporated into the foundations for some baths, filled in, forgotten until some guy fell through a hole in a field, then rediscovered by artists like Raphael or Michelango who spelunked to see the art there, and incorporated it into their own, giving it a new bizarre life.
I would like to remember that. I need to, even as I exclaim, “But the heat! My god, the heat!” And my fucking cellphone! Which I didn’t think was all that old but just a few days before the trip, all my travel apps quit working. And as a special treat, the online dashboard to my newsletter which worked fine a few weeks before, was inaccessible in Italy despite several exchanges with the tech people who apparently couldn’t conceive of someone with a cellphone older than six months, or without constant access to a laptop.
To subscribers who received an essentially blank email because I was unable to add notes and photos to my pre-programmed letters—thanks for your patience. I will make it up to you.
In the meantime, I am including a few photos below as an amuse-bouche. I need time to digest the trip, catch up on sleep, and missed meals. Did I mention we got sick and spent our time taking Covid tests? That was interesting, too.
At any rate, happy 14th of July, or as Americans call it, Bastille Day. I used to celebrate it gleefully, entranced by the idea of knocking down tower prisons, beheading tyrants. Now, I think we take too much pleasure in it. There’s nothing we won’t destroy.
Until next time.
Ciao,
Bilbita Cogswell
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