My candidate for world’s greatest espresso bar is the Zucca in the galleria off the Duomo square. It’s got great Art Nouveau tile, a fifty-foot-high ceiling, you get your cappuccino at a zinc bar for less than $2 a cup, the barristas are sharp dudes, and they do some artisan-type move to marble a brown and white fern pattern into your cappuccino foam.
The Italians always have great graffiti, as well they might, having invented the word.
I had a peaceful picnic lunch on a bench in this square at the university.
There’s a roving troop of Chinese-Italian hawkers selling up-to-the-nanosecond toys. This woman had radio controlled robot cars that do flips and were covered with flashing lights. She explained the robot to me in Italian, which I don’t know. A cyberpunk moment. And then one of her cohorts held a ball of flashing lights up to my face and Bela’s blogware entered my soul.
I happened onto the most fashionable street yet, Via della Spiga. In this outfit, the top is a mixture of fur and macram. (This isn't a real Street Fashion photo, it's a photo of a window display, munged a little in PhotoShop to make it look more lifelike. What is reality?)
Actually I saw a better outfit at the flea market this morning, two girls in tight, ribbed black unitards, high-heel black boots, and loose leather belts with clunky silver hardware — but I wasn’t able to get their picture, I made the mistake of asking and of course they said no, it seems better to just sneak, unless you’ve got the presence of a Diane Arbus, which I don’t. I so deeply admire the way Diane was able to get everyone’s picture, I always get the sense that her subjects thought she was the colorful character, like they’re so busy watching her that they hardly notice they’re being photographed, but I don’t think that’s an act I could bring off. “I run this international fashion website.” Every blogger a photojournalist. Maybe if you printed up cards and handed them to people when you took their picture. Not that I use most of the pictures I take.
This shot of a planaterium’s dome in the park near my hotel is an example of a picture I wouldn’t normally use. It’s a nice shape, and the branches echo the curve in a good way, but it’s not worth posting, save an example of something that I didn’t post. “This statement is false.” Winnowing out the pictures to put in one’s blog is analogous to editing a film or, again, analogous to winnowing out which anecdotes to put into one’s memoir. One of the desiderata of blogware for the lifebox is that it should automatically edit the data down to the interesting stuff. Maybe your blogring could track your pulse and skin conductivity and tag the stuff that happened when you were more physiologically hyped. Aw, that still wouldn't do it. In the end, there’s no known way to automate art. And, after all, blogging does have the ability to be an art medium. Automating art involves (a) finding an unpredictable algorithm, which is actually easy, as so many algorithms, even CA rule 30, are unpredictable (b) having the output seem meaningful and relevant to many people, which is the hard part, as it means putting in hooks to common social knowledge.