The other night at 9 Cento, I met a gentleman who once worked in “signage.”
A job he’d taken after early retirement, it amounted to repricing merchandize.

Maybe this explains why he and I shared a good laugh over the signs in Spoleto.
When you look at them, there’s simply no telling which way they want you to go.

This morning I imagined he’d enjoy the bikers being had at the sign’s expense.
They looked and looked, crosschecking their apps, as if to make it make sense.

While we sit and talk, the children from la gelateria next door
Move about the street with a two-way radio ready to restore
Communications at the instant it should prove to be needed.
As, of course, it always is: forever thus is a mystery seeded.

Italians appreciate their weekends. Often well into the wee hours.
Not just the teens. (More wee ones and elders than you’d expect.)

Last night, with me sound asleep, Rebecca had to face the music:
Choosing between a well earned breeze and la finestra shut tight.

According to TripAdvisor, there are sixty-four things to do in Spoleto. I’ve yet to check their list, but I suspect we’ve done most of them on one trip or another.

So when our new neighbors ask what we’ve done today, I find myself at a loss. The business of living alone can keep the two of us well occupied on most days.

Between the spring and the fall
Comes the Spoleto arts festival.

It provides a special incentive
To give some places a face lift.

When I set Google Translate to work on the Latin,
“Lake on the Old Market” starts out making sense.

Only then nouns and verbs fall out of agreement
And the sense of direction turns back on itself.

“The place of the forum were restored to the dungeon
Of the oldness of the Senate’s decree of Spoleto,

The most exhausted…” by the end of the line I reach
the same place. Note Bene: The water sounds sweet.

Slowly … slowly …. The reconstructions begins.
Yet all the while that the re-building is going on,
You can’t have it looking just any haphazard way.
Keeping the stair’s beauty is the only Italian way.

Up near the Rocca, at another restoration site,
A scrim of deception upholds the lines of sight.

In the time it takes us to pick up some focaccia at the end of the corso, a familiar Italian famiglia has progressed only so far (in meters) up the street.

If only I could take the measure of painted walls, I would know how far they’ve come. Or if I could put time in a bottle, I would pour a glass and raise it aloft.