Posting from Italy. Just went up on top of Il Duomo Cathedral, near my hotel in Milan. I'm typing at a terminal in the hotel lobby now, so no chance to edit, bear with me. The punctuation key are all crazy on this thing too, to accomodate letters like ù, à, and ç.

Strange sensation up top there, looking out over the "bow" of the Cathedral (top of the cross) like Leonardo in Titanic, as if the church really were a ship of some kind, moving ahead through something like time, or the world. The exterior is just covered with decoration and especially human figures. Seemingly mostly with names, at their bases. All the countless but not anonymous people manning the ship.

There's a real exuberance to its management of water and rainfall. You can follow how it flows into channels, spilling out through gargoyles into other channels, and finally out through the final gargoyle overlooking the street. I thought it must be a spectacular and almost giddy thing to see this all flowing like rivers in a real storm.

And, it so happened, that storm clouds and thunder presaged such a thing, luckily as I was leaving. Didn't rain that hard though. I bought some roasted chestnuts and a "coke light" (looks like diet coke anyway) from a street vendor.

Before going up on the roof, I went subterranean, down below the church to see an earlier church. It looked like an underground ruin, with a central sunken octoganal altar, I supposed, area, surrounded by four rectangular spokes of the cross, and four curved regions in between them. St. Augustine was baptized here in 387. I had the entire room to myself for the first 4 or 5 minutes I was down there.

At this point I'm mainly stressed about finding a hotel room in Florence, which I think is my next stop after my business here is done Wednesday.