Last day in Milano. I went to a library/museum where some of Leonardo da Vinci’s manuscripts live, the Ambrosiana. There’s one amazing room that’s all marble and tile. This view was shot looking down into a stairwell, with a marble balustrade in foreground, and that's a mosaic on the curved staircase wall.
The tile patterns in this room happen to be designed like the figure that’s often drawn to represent a hypercube. See all the cubes in there, and how they keep popping up one way and then the other way? I was fully buggin’. In my novel Frek and the Elixir, I actually made the inside of a UFO resemble a tiled Italian interior.
Then I went down to the countryside south of Milano to visit Arianna and Stefano Dagnino. They live next to a rice farm, with rice silos.
Their youngest child Morgana was at home with them; son Leonardo was at school. When Arianna was expecting him, a friend of hers who works at the Ambrosiana let her touch a da Vinci manuscript for good luck.
Stefano and Arianna are freelance journalists, and work at home, which means lots of time with the baby.
They gave me a nice lunch, we went for a walk among the rice paddies, and now I’m about outta here, God and the airlines willing. Goodbye, Milano!
P.S. Correction: “zucca” means “pumpkin.”
ADDENDUM: The symbol of Milano is a Scrofa Semilanuta, which means Half-Wooly Sow — the “lanuta” part is the “wooly” — the animal was a special wild boar or Magic Pig, which brings us back to Frek and the Elixir again. Sell it, Ru.