A small boy falls into his own cliche, skipping down cobblestone, a balloon sword cast overhead. His father slows behind him, some unseen limb connecting the two that peak into speed at the same time. His t-shirt fades on the chest, but his boy is vibrant beneath the balloon, lassoing the space in front of him with each gallop.
White drifts through the streets here, little molecules shocked into static, one for each moment of misplaced touch, one for each unrolled R in the mouth of a foreigner.
In a cafe on Corso Mazzini, Eminem and Karma Chameleon shoulder in around the rain-drop tones of Pomp and Circumstance, a march not for graduation but espresso and mini cannolis. A drum roll ushers in the crescendo, exploding in the heart of the cafe in a way that reminds me of the heavy syllables of our American tongue. Later, trying to recall each beat, the sound echoes from my own headphones, brushing against a British woman's request for a cappuccino.
When we take pictures from up above, the city is quaint, something we can capture in one sweep--of a flash, of our gaze, of words. I stitch each section into squares, into creases between my palms, into cloth napkins folded at dinner, into manageable parts. From here, we see everything, perched on the quintessential stone wall in a Nike position beside a farm-to-table sort of house. Here, we see from Spoleto to Middle Earth, hear the waltz of a wooden bowl hitting the table, of a group of students smudging dirt beneath a climbed mountain slope, of a woman kneeling inside the cloth pouch of her dress at the Duomo.
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