10.16.18 {in italy}

roma! it's just before seven, and the lip of morning light beneath the cloud cover is a shade that is only for sophia loren. i sealed my fate when i said we were not traveling in the direction of my proclivities, sort of: no matter when i turn in, i pop up at, say, four to consume weird quantities of gorgonzola (Night Cheese has become a thing, we've expanded the lyrics). we aren't due at the vatican until half past two, but i hoped i might catch an early dawn glimpse of the hawk moth that visits our rooftop garden at dusk each evening. his proboscis is so impressive and his darting-and-hovering so precise that i was sure we were seeing the world's tiniest hummingbird, but he is merely a comely example of convergent evolution, it seems. the internet tells me that on d-day in normandy, the armada saw a swarm of his fellows flying across the english channel, and they're considered a good omen. he certainly augured a glorious night of opera on saturday. opera! the things we begin to love as our beards grow long.

we visited the cats that live in the ruins where caesar was murdered across the river. they are trapped and spayed or neutered when they first materialize among the columns, and the littler and more adoptable ones are brought inside to meet potential guardians (not americans or canadians, alas, for the sanctuary staff are wary of countries with a lot of kill shelters). many others are free to roam the archaeological site and bask like the turkish cats i met in ephesus a few years ago. an australian reporter on that press trip with me would scream in terror each time a calico arranged herself beneath our cafe table to make eyes at her kebab. still no sign of the black cat our host mentioned, one who lives with neighbors and likes to visit the folks at our place. ("he has a collar and is friendly. do not hurt him?") i have night cheese for you, black cat! so much night cheese to give!

gulls and those devastatingly handsome eurasian magpies one meets in cities like this one perch on the television aerials that sprout like century plants and queen anne's lace from the rooftops around st. peter's basilica, and they seem to have a long-standing beef with the church bells next door. it's understandable, really: the bells don't seem to announce anything in particular, so their calls don't sound especially clever. i think of the "flirtatious starling" mozart met in vienna a few centuries ago that sang him a variation on the piano concerto he had been whistling (no. 17 in g major)—one he preferred to his own version, they say, and he held a funeral for it when it died three years later (he did not arrange a funeral for his father). a tame starling lived at my bird hospital for a few months before relocating to a sanctuary upstate and developed the charming/unnerving habit of trying to clean our teeth as we tried to clean his recovery room. it could be that i will never develop a winter cold again, as i suppose i swapped spit with every bird lover on the upper west over those months, or i might start eating meal worms? insects are the future of protein, they say, but i tend to give meal worms to chickens. when chapulines turn up in oaxacan food i make joe eat them. he will fare better in the end times than i will, i suspect, though i am better at making myself understood in languages i don't speak. i have chapulines for you, ragtag bands of survivors! so many chapulines to give!