In the morning winter sun, everything's black and white, like an Italian Realism movie from the Fifties.

I spent the day with my Italian translator Daniele Brolli, he translated about six of my novels, including the Ware series. Daniele translates my SF word “uvvy” as “poppyno.” He's a good guy, a writer himself, journalism and novels, also scripts for Topolino (Mickey Mouse) comics. This picture was taken on Via Dante, crowded with Sunday strollers. Everyone out on the street today.

I had read in the guidebook that the Navigli (canal) district is cute and trendy and wanted Daniele to go there with me.

Whoops. The canals have been drained for cleaning, so it's not too scenic, also people mainly only go there at night. Daniele was maybe too polite to tell me this before I insisted on going there. So we cranked up on a couple of cups of tea and headed back into town.

Later he bought me a great dinner at a restaurant called da Ilia.

Speaking of Italian web addresses, they announce one in the tram every now and then over the speaker, and the initial part of the address comes out like “voo-voo-voo” — I'd been wondering why they were making that sound.

Daniele told me that zucca means “yam”, which figures, as I had zucca risotto last night and it had yellow cubes in it, this was at another good place called Le 5 Terre. Eating in Italy is where it's at.

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.

This morning was nice and sunny. I sat in the park for awhile, basking, relaxing. And then started working my way towards some sights. I passed a statue of Cavour; he rates not only an admiring nude woman but a bronze wreath.

I went into a smallish church, the Church of San Francesco da Paola. I was thinking that churches are, in their own way, a medium, expressing — what? The church as objective correlative for the human head. All the gnarly colorful stuff inside, bejeweled and layered. Dig the incense censer hanging from the ceiling.

Next I happened on the Breara Palace, a big stone building right there on a city street, it's an art school downstairs and a museum upstairs. It was great seeing all the students. There's nothing like the warm sound of human voices bouncing off that lovely, worn stone.

This picture was in the gallery or “pinacoteca” upstairs at Breara Palace, it kind of got to me, the genuine sorrow of the kneeling guy, yes, I know it's rather ripely romantic, almost like a fantasy book cover, but something about the raw emotion made me feel great sympathy for the artist. Federico Faruffini, Sordello e Cunizza, about 1850. “Oh, Cunizza, I love you so.”

Speaking of elegant Italian men, here's Gustavo, a friend of Arianna Dagnino, the woman who was my translator for the panel. I like the skulls on the velvet collar a lot. This is no raggedy-ass hippie, by the way, this a serious businessman who organizes trade fairs. After all, Armani is based in Milano as well as Prada.

We did the panel on “Digital Eternity,” with Arianna — what's the word — proctoring, emceeing, chairing, intervening. Whatever you call it, she did a great job. (I mentioned Arianna's email interview with me about the lifebox and digital immortality a few blog entries back, as regular readers may recall.) Right behind her is Carlo Galimberti, who teaches in Milano, and edited a book on Cyberpsychology. Like you can make a burn victim feel better by putting them into a VR that's a world of ice. He made the point that if you could upload people into computers, you'd want to store a bunch of them together, as humans are social.

On my other side sat Francesco Lentini, an intense programmer who's created a virtual girl called Eloisa. She uses something like an Eliza algorithm to talk to you, also she has a mesh face that moves when she talks, forming expressions. I think he actually keeps adding good snappy answers to Eloise's code, provoking Carlo to ask if he's like Flaubert, who said, “Madame Bovary, c'est moi.”

I talked about my lifebox idea, noting that all kinds of different ideas can come together to make this watered-down form of digital immortality a commercial reality soon. There's a lot about it in my forthcoming book, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.

This picture of me, by the way, was taken at the FuturShow fair right before the panel, by a Brazilian photographer Giancarlo Mecarelli who takes everyone's picture in front of these height-adjustable angel wings. I was wearing my sharpest suit to look good for the Italians, the “godfather” suit I got at Saks for Georgia's wedding.

Student of McLuhan that I am — aren’t we all? — I love to ponder how my use of this new medium, the blog, affects my thought patterns.

Usually I do weird new technological things for reasons I’m not fully aware of at the time. The lack of conscious awareness of its meaning is an essential aspect of any of new medium.

As a practical matter, it could be that by blogging, I’m doing research for Mathematicians in Love. That is, I can see some of my characters becoming bigtime lifeboxers or lifebloggers. I have a feeling Nokia has trademarked “lifeblog” but I like the word a lot, maybe more than my coinage “lifebox.” I guess the lifebox is the hardware, and the lifeblog is the content. The software is “Jenny,” like in Freeware? Naw, I need a better word for that code, which is embedded in the lifebox. Blogware.

I see my character Bela as wearing a ring with a camera in it, and that’s how he gets big. The win with putting the camera in a ring (as opposed to a brooch) is that then the users can see the lifeblogger. Just have a fisheye lens in there, and trust the blogware to run some Eric-Gullichsen-style anamorphic algorithm to flatten out the image or, better yet, to let the user put their virtual eye at the ring and look all over the place. Anamorphocam blogware. Generally it’s wise to wear the blog-ring on the opposite hand from the hand that you use for the more intimate duties. Uneasy rests the hand that wears the blog-ring.

And now strum a classic SF god-chord: Bela’s lifeblog wakes up and starts doing things.