We took a tour after dinner on one of those double-deck buses. Two hours, I recall. Maybe 8pm when we started. Dark out.

After passing around and through city streets, stopping next to shuttered churches and in empty city squares, the bus cut across the river and up a winding road that climbs a high hill. As we neared the top, the private homes and hotels became luxurious and sprawling.

At the top was a broad, flat parking area and a look-out with a walled promenade overlooking nighttime Florence. A bronze copy of Michelangelo’s David dominated the view.

It was a warm evening. A group of Chilean musicians, probably all cousins to the ones performing at this same time on Lower Broadway, just off Houston, were gathered under a lamp.

Off to the side, a male fortune teller was explaining their future to an eager young couple.

The recorded guide was unintelligible. The sound was not much more than “blurg garble blah schmoob, waz facicrank.” So I took the annoying things out of my ears. My companion, in an attitude I’d become to realize as too controlling, tried to “help” me by forcing her own earplug set on my head. It took some serious and forceful repetition of “no” before she stopped.

Things are getting tense. We leave for Rome (at her persistence insistence) tomorrow.