In the woods

Hey all,

wandered down the street a bit today near my apartment in the morning with a coffee I made myself (on the stove that I can use) – and found a park. This is the first kid's park I have seen yet in the whole country – and I have walked around a lot – it was pretty crappy, just a couple of swings, but good enough to do a set of pull-ups and push-ups on (10+50, 9+45 etc down to 1+5) when my brain started to flake out after a couple of hours of study. First time I have worked out in about a month – will feel it tomorrow I think. Anyway, another tick for this place – I can work out for nothing about 50 meters from my door. Weird the little differences you see – I guess they have a heap less space than Australian towns, but other things are oddly different too. Back home I never buy milk in anything less than a two litre container, and then only when I miss the supermarket and have to go to the servo. At the supermarket I buy it in three litre bottles, two at a time, which does not last me that long. Here, you can't buy milk at the supermarket in anything larger than a one litre carton, apparently the same in Germany and England (I have asked around) – and the servos don't seem to sell anything but petrol. And there are no bottle shops at all in the Australian sense – the concept of a drive-through astonishes everyone.

Anyway – wandered into town with opera singer – he went to one garden, I spent a couple of hours wandering around the Boboli again, which was a nice way to spend an afternoon – a lot of people wandering around there, but it is so huge you can find lots of places where you can sit and just think for an hour or so, with maybe one or two people wandering by – which is a luxury here. It does not have the views of the other garden, is a much more sprawling kind of place altogether, lovely in a very different way. Then started the journey home – more tiny little alleys, three stories on each side up to a crack of sky, the odd Maserati picking its way along the cobbles at walking pace, snarling and impatient. Got cocky and took a shot-cut home, which went about as well as I should have expected it to, that is, it turned into a two hour exercise in circular futility; but I did find a nice church to sit in for about three minutes before they closed up for the night and told us all to leave, the first church I have been in since Rome. So that was nice.

Photos – a Capricciosa here, very different to what they are in Rome, and frankly pretty average, served to me by an Indian fellow, as apparently all the good Italian chefs work in Paris or London or Madrid. Then three of the gardens, giving some sense of its scale. Then a little spot I had to myself for the length of time it took to smoke a cigar, apart from one individual who wandered in, sat for a moment on one of those circular objects, got up, went and sat for a moment on the other, then, very carefully, walked around it exactly three times before wandering off again. Probably to sacrifice a small animal.

Been amusing myself laboriously translating Dante into clumsy English, which is difficult to do honestly, given the amount of English translations I have read. It takes me forever and is way beyond what I know, but at least I now understand why smarrita is not in the dictionary, but smarrito is. Have managed three lines so far...

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Mezzo is middle – cammin the way, or the path, or maybe the journey – nostra is our – vita is life – ritrovai is found myself – selva is woods or forest – oscura dark – diritta straight – via is road or path – smarrita is lost.

So, basically: in the middle of the journey (or path) of our life, I found myself in dark woods, the right way lost. Hmm.

Cheers, B.