6 June--Santuario Santa Maria

The church has alcoves down the sides and frescoes, paintings, and reliefs in each. The ceiling is separated into many [what’s the word?] that all connect honey-comb-like. They are painted in startlingly pagan geometric designs, almost Greek, or Byzantine, or Klée or Kandinsky. The colors fill the spectrum, yellow and orange and orange-red, and burnt gold and dry blood red and slate royal blue, and white and a little gilt, and sky blue and light green. There are circles and squares and repeating groups of rectangles that are filled with circles, and lines that twist and thicken and thin. The moldings (?) are elaborate, in white that is turning fast to gray and casts pale blue shadows; there are circles, circles within half circles, flowers, lines that might be leaves, and thin horizontal lines crowded together.

Here are two tickets for the trolleys/streetcars/trams that take you all around the city. When you walk onto it you place one end of it into a hole in a little yellow metal box on a pole behind the driver’s seat, and it makes a sound like a hole punch but really just stamps it. But no one checks to see if you have a ticket anyway. Sometimes they are just one car, sometimes they are three or four strung together and make a noise like a crashing train as they fly down cobble-y streets and around corners. The seats are orange and plastic, and the trams stop so quickly that one risks sliding to the ground even if sitting. There are doors marked “uscita” and “entrata” but no one looks at them, so embarking and disembarking is just a matter of elbowing gently so as to get where you want to be before the doors shut.