Today the museums were closed so I spent all morning looking at the fashionable boutiques on Via Della Spiga. It's kind of beyond Rodeo Drive, not so purely a matter of familiar upscale chain stores. Essentially any brand you see advertised in Vogue has a presence in Milano: Dolce & Gabbana, Moschino, Prada/Miu Miu, Armani, Valentino, Gio Moretti, and many more that are less well-known. Marni had maybe the most outrageous item: a tweed diaper for women. Why hide so much as a single millimeter of those gorgeous gams! Wear a nanoskirt with a swaddling strap!

I walked the half-mile length of Via Della Spiga three or four times, studying it, going into some of the stores, mulling it over, also killing time till I could have lunch. There weren't many shoppers, it being Monday morning. More fashion-biz types in the street than anything else. A Mercedes limo picking up some guys at D&G. Here's a cheerful fashion couple, probably in the biz. Hard to make out, but she's wearing bicycle-riding bands to clamp in the bottoms of her pants.

What is fashion about? In some sense it's an art of making colored shapes, a kind of sculpture. Purses in particular can get quite abstract, like this D&G number.

But there's layers of meaning as well; a purse is perhaps a symbol of a woman's essential femininity. And in this Gio Moretti offering, we see the purse in bondage, perhaps subjugated to the male, yet wearing an outrageous girls-world color and sprouting a hopeful pair of hearts. Love springs eternal.

Fashion is plumage, adornment with various alternative purposes: call attention to you as an individual, make you look like a member of the in-crowd or of the powerful crowd, display your wealth, make you blend in, make you look like a poor person, make you look sexy, make you look like a leprous but memorable clown.

One odd thing to me is that many high-fashion customers look frozen-faced, uptight. Seems like fashion ought to be fun? Think back to high-school, to the rich kids who had the best clothes. Often as not these were nasty, unhappy people. Like — Paris Hilton? In the most negative sense, we might imagine a fashion plate to be a dish with an empty center.

But there are always the people who do fashion for fun, perhaps in a freestyle way. I have to reach no further than daughter Georgia, famous among her family and friends for her striking thrift outfits. I seem to recall that she got her high-school prom dress for a dollar…and some of her classmates wished they had one like it!

Eventually I escaped the cyclotron of Via Della Spiga and found a nice free art show honoring a local 20th century artist, Dino Caponi. The show's title was, “Il Metafisica dell'Esistensa.” More up my usual street, that.

In what ways is making a beautiful painting different from making a beautiful shoe?

A painting or a novel tends to be about expressing something about the external world, the artist's inner self, the interface between the two, and the relation of work to other works in the history of art/writing. A shoe expresses something too, but what? Aren’t these Prada jobbies nice? Why don’t men get to wear nice clothes? The world grows its strange forms, including humans and their actions.

This is all research, you understand, what with the possibility of an SF fashion angle. As the Sheck-man once said, “The SF writer is consumed by a rage to extrapolate.” The better I can understand fashion now, the better I can write about what they’ll be wearing in the year Y3K. (I don’t think it will be Star Trek uniforms!)

And yes, I know, for a man, even worse, a mathematician-hacker, to be trying to understand fashion is a bit like a dog trying to understand haute cuisine, standing all four legs on the dining-table gobbling down the Thanksgiving turkey. “This is good. Woof!” I wish Sylvia could be here to share this with.

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 macramé. (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.