A few blues

 

At last ~ a new post (my apologies for the long absence), with a few blues for this month's edition of ROY G BIV*, the photo challenge inspired by artists Jennifer Coyne Qudeen & Julie Booth...

The view through an airplane window is pretty commonplace for most of us these days, but I haven't witnessed it for a very long time. Heading over to the US this week, after a seven year absence, gazing out of the little airplane window gave me quite a thrill (and I probably took enough photos to make quite a substantial flip book—people must have thought it was my first time on a plane!)... For me, this glimpse out in the great blue beyond also illustrates my word for this month: 'Imagine'. After a period of transition, new possibilities are now filling my imagination.

My mother's enormous bushes of hydrangeas seemed like another perfect subject for 'BLUE'—and the timing couldn't have been better. There are dozens of blooms in various states of flower, and almost all in my favorite shade of hydrangea-blue (sprinkled with a few verging toward purple-y-pink).

 

I am very behind in posting photos of studio projects (as well as visiting other 'virtual' studios), but will enjoy catching up when I return to Italy in a few weeks... In the meanwhile, happy summer solstice to those of you in the northern hemisphere—and those of you in the south can take comfort in knowing your days will slowly be growing 'longer' once again!

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{*A note on ROY G BIV in case you haven't seen it mentioned here in the past... Each month is devoted to a different color of the rainbow—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo & violet. This is the second year of the photo challenge, and all are welcome to join in; guidelines are here.}

 

Green, part IV - A vertical garden

This may look like it just another lawn—a lawn that could be just about anywhere in the world for that matter—but it might come as a surprise that this particular patch of grass is actually growing on a wall.

As you walk (or drive, or take a bus) along the tree-lined & traffic-busy Viale Giovane Italia, at first you may notice that what appears to be someone's garden is spilling over the top of its wall. But as you draw closer, rectangles of varying shades & textures of green, not so random after all, begin to distinguish themselves.

 
As you come directly upon the tableaux of green, you will probably find yourself stopping to look skyward, and marveling at the arrangement of grass, herbs, ivy & other plants bringing the wall alive, then walking the full length—and back again—as you try to figure out how such a thing came to be...

Crossing over to the other side of the road, it's possible to get the full gist of what's happening on this crenelated wall; interspersed with metal panels, the composition of greenery reveals the geometry behind its design...

With its plethora of road signs, parked cars & a nearly non-stop flow of traffic, it wasn't easy to photograph this seventy-meter-long stretch of wall (which originally bound a convent, then a prison, and now a recently-transformed housing complex complemented by cultural/commercial activities). But these 'obstacles' did give me a chance to spend more time considering the garden from several vantage-points, and I also really enjoyed observing people's reactions to the unusual wall treatment.

I like the three-dimensional aspect, how the shadows (and some of the plants) extend below the rusty edges of the 'box' that contains the garden—not to mention the natural palette of rust that's formed in the few seasons since the vertical garden was a installed (seen in the quartet of images below). All in all, it's brought a rather inspiring, if fairly discrete, new landmark to keep an eye out for when in this part of Florence.

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It's worth pointing out that this recent addition to Florence's landscape alludes to one of the patterns from Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language—No. 246: Climbing Plants. While the carefully conceived, orchestrated & maintained design means it only loosely follows the premise set out by the pattern—that "A building finally becomes a part of its surroundings when the plants grow over parts of it as freely as they grow along the ground"—this vertical garden certainly captures the spirit of the pattern by helping to smooth the transition between built form & nature. And it is undeniably more alive & intriguing than the continual conglomeration of posters that once covered this wall (fascinating though these fleeting records of city-wide events can be, in their many-layered stages of pasting/peeling).

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I'll close with a photo of my once-blue hydrangea, which has now turned mostly green. It reminds me of how many other photos of 'GREEN' didn't make it into May's series of ROY G BIV-inspired blog entries, but they may well be used for an idea that's slowly evolving from the imagery of the lovely vertical garden composition. It has truly piqued my imagination!

{Click here to learn about Patrick Blanc, the Parisian botanist whose work has led to a recent emergence of vertical gardens in urban spaces.}

{Click here to read about Le Murate, the ex-convent-turned jail-turned-housing complex bounded by the vertical garden (it's in Italian, but there are some photos & additional links).}

Dancing in the street

April nearly slipped away without the chance to post a monthly pattern from Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language. I had chosen a pattern & taken some photos for it, but there hasn't been time to do the writing part...so I decided instead to focus on No. 63: DANCING IN THE STREET. I like the idea of this pattern, but have wondered a few times how I might work it in. Considering the warmer weather/change of season, as well as what's happening in Florence tonight (more details on this below), it seems quite appropriate for this last day of April. 

'Dancing in the Street' is of course fairly self-explanatory, but I will describe where Alexander goes with the concept. He begins by asking, "Why is it that people don't dance in the streets today?" As he points out, many cultures have managed to stay in touch with what he believe is a basic need, but outdoor dancing is quite absent in 'modern' societies. The pattern suggests a resolution that includes some type of covered structure with a raised platform & space for refreshment stalls, which is surrounded by a paved area. Realizing that the mere existence of a simple built form is not enough in and of itself, he suggests building them in places where there are a number of local musicians who might otherwise not have a place to share their music. Citing the controversy over regulating street musicians in the San Francisco Bay area (in progress at the time the book was being written), he says, "It is in this atmosphere that we propose the pattern. Where there is feeling for the importance of the activity re-emerging, then the right setting can actualize it and give it roots."

For me, this seems to be the key to the pattern: as opposed to the common wisdom that form should follow function, sometimes the form (i.e. structure) is what invites/permits an activity to occur in the first place. Time and time again, I have found that creating a new space—or reworking an existing one—can influence/encourage/stimulate an activity that may not otherwise be possible. On a small, personal scale, this has certainly been true for the homes I've lived in. It brings to mind something I read once about how much easier it traditionally was for 'housewives' to be writers than painters. I recall that one writer used her ironing board as a desk—talk about efficient! On the other hand, painting large canvases can require a considerable amount of space. Sometimes I dream about having enough room for multiple easels and all of my canvases, but as it is, when I want to oil paint I need to do some furniture-rearranging first (and it therefore doesn't happen as naturally or often as I would like).

Getting back to the pattern at hand, while the 'architecture' that Alexander describes to facilitate it doesn't seem to have evolved anywhere in Florence, this doesn't mean there's no dancing in the streets. One place you might see people dancing is Ponte Vecchio, Florence's oldest & most famous bridge. From when spring first begins to warm up the city, and lasting until it's too chilly to strum a guitar outdoors, music wafts from the bridge as Claudio Spadi plays his guitar while singing Italian, English, Spanish & Portuguese songs in the evenings (often accompanied by his guitar- and violin-playing friend). Sometimes it's a young couple dancing, perhaps on their honeymoon, and intoxicated by the setting sun, a familiar, favorite song and the romance of walking across a bridge that's stretched across the Arno for nearly seven-hundred years. (One time, after a couple had finished swaying to a ballad, the man got down on his knee and proposed!) Or it may be a pair of four- or five-year-olds twirling, fascinated by their skirt-flaring potential. Other times it's a local care-giver who does enough clapping & dancing for both herself and the wheelchair-bound woman she brings to the bridge.

Another example was one night last summer, when the little sandwich shop in the narrow street that runs below our apartment stayed open late to host a birthday party. As those so-familiar strains of tango music started up, many people were drawn to their windows to witness the dramatic tango-esque strutting happening down in the street. I love how some of the passersby would pause to join in for a few minutes of impromptu dancing...

And I can't help but think of the final scene in the movie Pane e Tulipani (Bread & Tulips): there's a merry little music-filled gathering at the edge of a Venetian canal, with the main character dancing happily with her recently-found soul mate.

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As I mentioned in my last post, celebration has definitely been in the air as the earth wakes up again. (And my, is it full of good smells these days!) Liberation Day was last Thursday, which meant a ponte—a 'bridge', i.e. long weekend—for most people...and tomorrow we are heading into a mid-week break for Labor Day. Plenty of reasons to dance. But 'Dancing in the Street' is especially relevant tonight, which is a notte bianca ('white night'). For the past several years, Florence has sponsored at least one of these long evenings of art & music. Performances are organized in piazzas all over the city, and many shops, restaurants & museums will stay open as late as 3 or 4am. A program for this year's notte bianca, with the theme 'volare' (to fly), can be found here.

As my daughter & I walked along the river at dusk tonight, we came upon the first sign of the special night ahead: yellow LEDs spelling 'BE HAPPY' along Ponte Vecchio. Here's one last gesture of celebratory yellow for the month—and a little reminder to 'be happy'...

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And this seems like a fitting way to end the post ~

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{Past entries & more information about Christopher Alexander's patterns can be found here.}

Like the lines of a poem

After writing about patterns relevant to the wintery months of the year, when we in the northern hemisphere tend to be more focused on cozy thoughts of home, March's pattern finally brings us outdoors. (I suspect it may be equally appealing to those of you beginning to feel the nip of autumn too.) If you missed the introduction to this monthly series of posts inspired by Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language, you can read about the previous patterns by clicking on 'patterns' in the listing of 'Things I like to write about' in the sidebar.

This month I've chosen pattern 125: STAIR SEATS. There's nothing like sitting on the steps at the edge of a piazza in the spring, welcoming back the sun again. As Alexander explains, stair seats afford that perfect balance between being able to both observe and participate in the action of a space. He says, "When there are areas in public places which are both slightly raised and very accessible, people naturally gravitate toward them. Stepped cafe terraces, steps surrounding public plazas, stepped porches, stepped statues and seats, are all examples."

As focal points of each neighborhood, a fair number of Florence's churches have piazzas in front of them, and since they tend to be raised above the main grade there are nearly always at least a few steps in front of (or even wrapping partway around) them. The same is true of major public buildings; in other words, there are steps at nearly every turn. And of course when people use them it creates an element of interaction in the piazza or street, which in turn adds an extra dimension of energy & life. Below are a few examples from around Florence (and one in Venice).

Stone benches surround many of Florence's grand palazzi, and are used much in the same way as the church steps.

 

Steps in front of the church of Santo Spirito

 

Steps in front of the church of San Lorenzo

Steps leading up to the church of Santa Maria della Salute in Venice, which has a lovely position at the lagoon's edge.

 

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While these steps are considerably off the beaten path (near Ponte San Niccolò), and not as popular nor well-used as those in front of Florence's churches & public buildings, they are the ones that inspired me to choose this pattern. Each patinaed, overgrown step is like the line of a poem. I love how alive they are—as if they are 'growing' right along with everything else on the hillside.

  

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Lying at the edge of Piazzale Michelangelo, these generous—and numerous—steps (shown above & below) accommodate a lot of people, and offer a wonderful place to pause while enjoying a sweeping view of Florence. It's not unusual to see brides traipsing up the stairs, trains and all, hand-in-hand with their grooms as they pose for what must be some pretty amazing photos.

These 'stairs with a view' make me think of pattern 133: STAIRCASE AS A STAGE, which encourages us to think of a staircase as a space/'room' in its own right. In fact, the pattern is interpreted mainly for internal staircases, but I think it also alludes to the role played by outdoor steps in certain cases. Another such example that comes to mind is the set of two dozen or so steps leading up to Cortona's City Hall. This staircase affords a wonderful view of the town's main square and, as a result, also 'holds' much of the piazza's life at any given time.

 

Winter comforts

In this indoor season that is conducive to wool slippers & feather duvets, reading, baking & tea drinking, a passage from Christopher Alexander's A Timeless Way of Building often comes to mind. (This is the book that lays the foundation for patterns such as those from yesterday's post.) Alexander asks the reader to envision this scenario, which describes the concept of 'comfortable', in an attempt to explain something he calls the 'quality with no name':

Imagine yourself on a winter afternoon with a pot of tea, a book, a reading light, and two or three huge pillows to lean back against. Now make yourself comfortable. Not in some way which you can show to other people, and say how much you like it. I mean so that you really like it, for yourself.

You put the tea where you can reach it: but in a place where you can’t possibly knock it over. You pull the light down, shine it on the book, but not too brightly, and so that you can’t see the naked bulb. You put the cushions behind you, and place them, carefully, one by one, just where you want them, to support your back, your neck, your arm: so that you are supported just comfortably, just as you want to sip your tea, and read, and dream.

When you take the trouble to do all of that, and you do it carefully, with much attention, then it may begin to have the quality which has no name.

'Comfortable' is just one of several words Alexander cycles through in an attempt to further describe the 'quality with no name'. He begins with 'alive', next is 'whole', then back to 'comfortable', and on to 'free', 'exact', 'egoless', 'eternal', and 'ordinary'. After analyzing them one at a time, he finally concludes: "And so you see, in spite of every effort to give this quality a name, there is no single name which captures it." I like his suggestion that we "Imagine the quality without a name as a point, and each of the words which we have tried as an ellipse. Each element includes this point. But each ellipse also covers many other meanings, which are distant from this point." And, whether it gets us 'there' or not, I find the passage about making yourself comfortable with tea, books, cushions & dreams to be a lovely image.

{In case you haven't come across it before, this past entry offers more

details about Alexander, his patterns, and the 'quality with no name'.}

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On the theme of such comforts as tea, every time I wait for a pot to brew I think of this passage from The other Alice: The Story of Alice Liddell and Alice in Wonderland by Christina Björk, which is, as the author explains in the foreword "...a 'mischmasch' of of what we KNOW happened, what PROBABLY happened, and what COULD have happened." (Charles Dodgson was Lewis Carroll's real name.)

Mr. Dodgson boiled the water and poured it over the tea leaves. Then he walked back and forth, carrying the pot. "Why are you doing that?" asked Alice.

"Well, you see, the tea draws better when it can move around a bit," said Mr. Dodgson. "Once upon a time, there was a T that only stood still. It became so depressed it had an attack of nerves and went all to pieces."

Mr. Dodgson drew a picture of how terrible it had been for poor T. And by that time the tea was ready. Alice ate quite a few scones with jam...

Naturally, this leads to visions of scones dancing in my head; below is how I make them.

• Preheat oven to 225 C/440 F.
• In a medium bowl combine 2 cups flour, 1 heaped tsp baking powder, a pinch of salt & 1 heaped tbsp sugar.
• Cube 60g/2 oz cold butter and work it into the flour mixture until the texture is similar to a coarse meal.
• Stir in ½ cup cream & finish pulling together the dough with your hands. You may be inclined to add a bit more cream at this point, but first try rolling the dough around the bowl to gather it together (it seems to help if it's a cold metal bowl).
• Press the dough onto a parchment paper-lined baking tray, forming an approximately 7x7-inch/18x18-cm square, sprinkle with a little sugar (I like to use castor sugar), then cut into nine squares. You may want to trim the edges before dividing into ninths; if so, you can use the trimmings to form a tenth scone.
• Separate the scones slightly and bake until just golden, about 10 to 12 minutes.

Enjoy warm, with butter and/or jam, or jam topped with a dollop of cream (though I find that, with the sugar-sprinkled tops, you don’t actually need jam, butter or cream). I've also made these with half a cup of raisins, dried cherries or dried cranberries. Sometimes I also add a handful chopped pecans or hazelnuts along with the dried fruit.
 

 

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Hoping to somehow preserve the deliciousness of the blood oranges that are in season right now, I recently I bought six kilos of them (both the Moro & Tarocco varieties) and tried making marmalade for the first time. I found a recipe for a small batch of blood orange marmalade, which requires only four or five oranges—leaving plenty to eat whole or juice—here. A broken candy thermometer (plus my lack of canning experience) led me to overcook the marmalade, but it's still incredibly good once it's been softened in the microwave—and perfect on the scones...

 

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Milky coffee is my drink of choice in the morning, but making a pot of tea is the ritual I look forward to in the afternoon. I find there's also a certain beauty in the humble tea bag, which is the 'material' I have been exploring this month. As with last month's material—paper—the exploration is not so much about making something with it, but more about the beauty of the material in its original form.

While I generally prefer loose leaf tea, Le Palais du Thés also offers very good tea in muslin bags. As I enjoyed a box of Margaret's Hope (their Darjeeling tea), I began saving the little cloth bags, with their pretty labels, hoping to use them in the studio somehow. I've considered different ideas—perhaps slitting the side of each bag and replacing the tea leaves with folded papers to write on; adding more 'pages' to the existing labels at the ends of the string (to form miniature 'books')/otherwise involving the string; or embroidering/stitching on the muslin—but for now have simply focused on playing with & photographing them. 

It seems a lot of artists find inspiration from drinking tea. One example is Heidi Zednik, who records her thoughts on tea bags salvaged from her daily tea ritual. I first came across her project via an exhibition held at the Abecedarian Gallery, One Unit per Increment, which brought together works created within the framework of a regular interval (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.—a concept I love). Another artist’s work in that exhibition was also tea-centric: '100 days' featured bowls that artist Tatiana Ginsberg crafted from paper and then used for her daily tea. Each bowl assumed a unique character as it "reacted to and recorded the specific act of drinking." An artist whose work I have come across more recently, Patti Roberts-Pizzuto, uses tea bags as the foundation for many of her lovely 'dailies' (daily drawings). It should be fun to see where my muslin tea bags lead me...

{A past blog entry about the pleasures of tea time can be found here.}

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Here's hoping that, wherever you are—and whatever season you may be enjoying—you have a comfortable place to sit and read and daydream with something wonderful to drink.

At the window

Like January's, and in keeping with the season, this month's patterns are also focused on the home (visit this post for some background on Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language, the book that has inspired this series). Just as we are growing restless and beginning to look outward again after these months of grayness, wind & rain, these patterns relate to the edge that lies between the cozy indoors and the world that's about to awaken outside our windows. 

In a blog post last April, I explained that when rearranging furniture, "My primary consideration is always to take advantage of the windows and the path of the sun—to allow daytime activities to be as close to the source of natural light as possible." I also mentioned that I make sure the windows are fully accessible because, "I love to watch the goings-on in the street & the slice of piazza that's visible from the apartment." While the apartment has seen countless re-arrangings in the months since, the windows continue to serve as the starting point.

First this month is pattern 164: STREET WINDOWS. This pattern explores how windows are not only important to the people inside the buildings, but also to the people in the street, and explains why streets only truly come to life when there are people at the windows as well. Alexander says this creates "a unique kind of connection between life inside buildings and the street,"  with people "hanging out of windows, laughing, shouting, whistling." Paints quite a picture, doesn't it? For some reason this conjures up the image of people hanging from their windows in the fashion of monkeys!

Yet this scene—people laughing, shouting & whistling at one another—is not unusual for the street that our main windows overlook. A lady in the palazzo next to ours seems to carry on her entire relationship with one neighbor via her window; sometimes he's in the street, other times out on his terrace across the way. It's part of my routine to go to the window to wave to my daughter as she passes below the apartment on her way to school or to meet friends—handy since I often remember to tell her something, or even toss down a forgotten permission slip, snack or coins for a gelato. When my daughter's friends pass our building, they like to ring the bell and ask her to go to the window for a quick hello. And, taking a cue from the nonne (grandmas) I see doing this occasionally, one time I motioned to my daughter and her friends, who were enjoying a picnic in Piazza Pitti, to come get a basket of drinks & treats I lowered down for them.

Alexander believes this pattern works best for buildings that are just a few stories high, so that people in the street and at the windows are still able to communicate with each other through gestures, words or by reading the expression on someone's face. Ground-level apartments present some limitations, since people that near to the street are more inclined to protect their privacy with curtains or shutters, but he proposes a raised alcove-type of situation in the vicinity of the window. This is generally not an issue here, as the piano terra tends to be devoted to more public spaces, like shops & cafés.

Alexander quotes a short story from Kafka's Contemplation ("The Street Window") to illustrate the beauty of the pattern:

Whoever leads a solitary life and yet now and then wants to attach himself somewhere, whoever, according to changes in the time of day, the weather, the state of his business, and the like, suddenly wishes to see any arm at all to which he might cling—he will not be able to manage for long without a window looking on to the street. And if he is in the mood of not desiring anything and only goes to his window sill a tired man, with eyes turning from his public to heaven and back again, not wanting to look out and having thrown his head up a little, even then the horses below will draw him down into their train of wagons and tumult, and so at last into the human harmony. 

Though I am not quite as solitary as the hypothetical man described, I do go through phases of not leaving the apartment for days on end (during a deadline, for example), and can very much identify with the importance of being drawn into the city's activity through the frame of my window.

Maybe I am also able to appreciate STREET WINDOWS because I've seen what happens when this seemingly simple pattern that we may take for granted is lacking. The place we stayed when we first arrived in Florence had a lot going for it—a spacious apartment at the top of the building, with plenty of light & air, it was centrally located just one block from the lovely Piazza della Signoria and had a generous terrace. Yet I remember feeling cut off from the city because the top floor was set back from the street, which therefore wasn’t visible from either the windows or the terrace. I found it so frustrating to hear, but not see, the action on the bustling Via Calzaiuoli that ran along one side of the apartment! Considering how often I am drawn to the window now, I realize that being able to see what's going on is even more important to me than having a terrace (as wonderful as one would be).

 

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In examining other patterns that stem from 'STREET WINDOWS', we are led naturally to pattern 180: WINDOW PLACE. Again, this one appears quite basic, but Alexander qualifies it by putting a familiar desire into words and offering examples of the pattern in use, as well as providing guidance in creating such a space. Based on an 'organic intuition'—that people want to sit/be comfortable, and that they are drawn to the light—the introduction to WINDOW PLACE is very simple: "Everyone loves window seats, bay windows, and big windows with low sills and comfortable chairs drawn up."

As with last month's 'pools of light', I find there's a certain poetry to many of the pattern names. I'm drawn to any concept that involves the word 'place'; it implies somewhere I want to go, somewhere I want to be. Add a window to that place, and my imagination is immediately hooked. In the case of this pattern, Alexander defines a 'place' as being identifiable as a distinct area of the room and at least partly enclosed, even if simply by an armchair. Ideally, it will have a nicely-framed view and a low sill that lessens the separation between inside and out.

We could certainly do with more windows in our apartment; in part, this is because buildings in Florence are often designed with an eye toward maintaining a uniform pattern of windows on the street elevation. (The fact that floor height varies from one building to the next—as does the total height of each building, and in turn the roof lines—ensures that the streetscape still possesses a very appealing character despite the regularity of the windows' positioning.) Also, while we consider ourselves lucky to be on the top (i.e. brightest) floor, it is the piano nobile (American second floor) that typically has the tallest windows—and they become progressively shorter with each subsequent level. 

Still, we make the best of the windows we have. The main studio table gets the prime space in the room where I spend most of my time, with plenty of space around it so I can easily reach the window. In the living room, the armchairs are situated either side of the window, while, in her own room, my daughter has integrated the window with her bed 'place', where she does homework, reads & plays her guitar. (I love that you can see Santo Spirito's church bells flying back and forth in the bell tower through her window.) The kitchen window is probably the one that I appreciate the most; when this apartment was renovated a few years before we moved in, someone went to a lot of trouble to carve a small window from the extremely thick wall. Fortuitously positioned in front of the sink, it makes the tiny kitchen an infinitely more bearable place to spend time, and I love the view of the rooftops that recede toward the local hills (which are sprinkled with snow at the moment).

 

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Yet a third pattern is intrinsically linked to the other two I've mentioned—192: WINDOWS OVERLOOKING LIFE. If you have the luxury of designing a house or other building, this pattern will help you to plan the number of windows there should be, find the right positioning, and calculate their total area according to your geographical location. Like the other window-related patterns I've mentioned, its premise is very straightforward: if people are required to be in a space for any length of time, it must have windows. This seems obvious, but somehow rooms without windows do get built; bathrooms are a prime example. We've been lucky to have two bathrooms in most of the apartments we've stayed in locally, but it seems the bathtub is always in the one without a window (which means I nearly always choose a quick shower over a relaxing bath). I still remember how much I disliked college classrooms without windows. This may not be true for everyone, but I always found that windows made it easier for me to think, and test answers seemed to come more easily when my gaze could wander to the world beyond the four walls of a classroom. I still find my thinking to be freer in rooms with windows...

 

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Some of the pleasures of living in a city apartment ended up working their way into a children's book manuscript I wrote a few years back, A House up in the Sky (which I have yet to find a home for). Here's an excerpt inspired by the life in the street below our own 'house up in the sky':

Caterina runs to the window whenever she hears something exciting going on outside. The narrow street below is full of life. Bells constantly ring out warnings as bicycles whiz past everyone: grown-ups rushing to work, students laughing and chatting on their walk to school, shopkeepers discussing the day’s news and exchanging the latest gossip. Caterina spots the owner of the little grocery store filling a basket attached to the end of a rope. Once the basket is ready, a woman hoists it up to her window and calls down her thanks. “Grazie, Mario!” she says, satisfied with the ingredients that she will turn into a tasty lunch for her family.

Plants and pretty handmade signs draw people’s attention to the many shops, and each morning the produce sellers set out the most tempting fruit and vegetables at their entrance, along with a little bench where they can sit during quiet moments.

Sadly, both the fruttivendolo (produce shop) and the alimentari (tiny grocery store) have closed since I wrote the manuscript. Though they have been replaced by other businesses, the street is not quite the same without these everyday shops.

 

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I'm looking forward to the sunshiny days and warmer temperatures that spring will soon bring, and expect that next month's pattern(s) will start looking beyond the home, and out in the city.