Studying for the Patente and Learning the Language of Road Signs

Road Signs as a Language ~ The Vienna Moment ~ Sign History Timeline 

~ Why Italy’s Road Signs Feel So Chatty ~ Words vs. Pictures: Europe and the United States

~ How Many Signs Are We Talking About? ~ Reading the Street Differently

 

Studying for an Italian driver's license (patente) has introduced us to an unexpected new language: the language of road signs. What once looked like visual clutter—triangles, circles, arrows, and the occasional startled deer—turns out to be a carefully structured system with grammar, vocabulary, and very precise meanings. The deeper we go into the study materials, the more we realize that Europe’s road signs aren’t random at all. They are part of an international visual language born from a 1968 treaty in Vienna, designed so that a driver from Milan, Munich, or Marseille could read the road the same way.

Once you start noticing this, every signpost becomes a small lesson in translation.

Recently, we’ve been walking up in Bergamo’s Città Alta with a slightly different goal than most visitors. Tourists arrive looking for churches, frescoes, and views over the Lombard plain. We arrive hunting for road signs. A narrow street might reveal a perfect little stack: a red circle announcing a restriction, followed by two or three smaller plates explaining who the rule applies to and when. While others are admiring Romanesque façades, we find ourselves studying metal rectangles attached to poles and quietly trying to decode their syntax.

Road Signs as a Language

Like any language, road signs in Italy have a kind of grammar. Once you start studying them, patterns emerge.

• Shapes signal the type of statement. Triangles warn about hazards ahead. Circles regulate behavior—either prohibiting or requiring something. Rectangles generally provide information.
• Colors provide tone. Red usually signals prohibition or danger. Blue often indicates required actions or services. Yellow typically marks temporary situations such as construction.
• Supplemental plates—those small rectangles stacked underneath the main sign—act like modifiers in a sentence. They add conditions: times, exceptions, vehicle types, or directions.

Seen this way, a typical Italian signpost starts to look less like clutter and more like a sentence diagram. The main sign delivers the core message, and the smaller plates underneath modify the meaning. What once felt chaotic starts to feel almost grammatical.

Seen another way, many Italian signposts resemble a little piece of syntax. A pole becomes a vertical sentence:

Main clause (the primary sign) + modifier (time restriction) + modifier (vehicle type) + exception (residents, deliveries, etc.)

You begin to read them the way you might parse a sentence in a grammar exercise: first the main statement, then the qualifiers. That chaotic stack of metal plates begins to feel surprisingly structured.

And that realization leads to a bigger question: where did this visual language come from?

The Vienna Moment: 1968 and the Birth of the Modern Road Signs

The system most of Europe uses today traces back to the 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals. The goal of the convention was simple: make road signs understandable across borders. By the 1960s, car travel had exploded and European drivers were regularly crossing national boundaries. A French driver entering Italy or Austria might encounter completely different signage systems, often relying on text in unfamiliar languages.

The Vienna Convention attempted to solve this by standardizing the basic grammar of road signs. Shapes, colors, and symbols were assigned consistent meanings so that a driver could understand a sign even without reading a word. A red circle generally indicates prohibition. A red triangle warns of danger ahead. Blue signs indicate obligations or services. The idea was to shift road communication away from language and toward universally recognizable symbols.

Today most European countries follow this system, including Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and many others. Once you start noticing it, you realize the remarkable effect of the convention: a driver can move across thousands of kilometers and still understand the road’s visual language.

Of course, not every country signed on. The United States, for example, relies on its own standard, the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), which historically favors text-based instructions like "No Left Turn" or "Wrong Way." That difference becomes obvious when you compare American signs to their European counterparts—one reads like a sentence, the other like a pictogram.

For someone studying for the Italian license (patente), this historical footnote becomes surprisingly practical. What you are really learning is not just Italy’s road rules, but a shared visual vocabulary that stretches across much of Europe.

Sign History Timeline

1909 — First international road sign agreement

The Paris Convention on Road Traffic introduces the first attempt to standardize road signs internationally. Only a small set of four warning signs are agreed upon (such as bumps, curves, railroad crossings, and intersections), but it establishes the idea that drivers should be able to recognize signs across borders.

1935 — United States standardizes road signs

The first edition of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) is published in the United States, creating a national standard for traffic signs, signals, and road markings.

1949 — Early international attempt

The Geneva Convention on Road Signs and Signals attempts to harmonize signage internationally, but adoption is uneven and many countries continue using different systems.

1968 — The Vienna Convention

The Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals establishes the modern symbol-based system used across most of Europe. Shapes, colors, and pictograms are standardized so drivers can understand signs regardless of language.

Today, thanks to these efforts, much of Europe shares a common visual vocabulary for the road. A driver can cross borders—from Italy to Austria to Germany—and still read the road almost instinctively.

The Vienna Convention defines the grammar of European road signs, but each country still speaks the language with its own accent. Italy’s ZTL signs, driveway permits (passo carrabile), and local traffic zones are good examples of how national systems layer their own rules onto the shared visual vocabulary.

Why Italy’s Road Signs Feel So Chatty

If the Vienna Convention established the grammar of modern road signs, Italy sometimes feels like the place where that grammar gets… enthusiastically used. Spend time walking or driving through an Italian town and you quickly encounter the phenomenon of the sign stack: a pole with several plates layered underneath the main sign.

A typical example might look like this:

• No entry
• Except residents
• Except deliveries
• Between certain hours
• For vehicles under a specific weight

Each additional plate modifies the rule above it. By the time you reach the bottom of the stack, the sign has effectively become a small paragraph of traffic law.

This density is not accidental. Italy’s urban landscape is unusually layered. Many streets in historic centers were laid out centuries before cars existed. Modern traffic rules—parking zones, delivery windows, pedestrian protections, resident permits, and tourist access—have all been added onto streets that were originally designed for horses, carts, and pedestrians. The result is a regulatory palimpsest where each generation adds another plate to the signpost.

What initially looks like bureaucratic overcommunication is often simply the city explaining how to make a medieval street work in the 21st century.

Words vs. Pictures: Europe and the United States

Another thing you notice once you start studying road signs is how different the European system feels compared to the American one.

In Europe, thanks largely to the Vienna Convention, the system leans heavily on pictograms. A driver sees symbols—arrows, bicycles, falling rocks, deer—and interprets them visually. The goal is immediate recognition regardless of language.

The United States took a different path. American signage developed under the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) and historically relied more on written instructions. Signs often spell things out directly: "No Left Turn," "Wrong Way," or "Do Not Enter."

Both systems work, but they communicate differently. American signs read like short sentences. European signs behave more like icons in a visual language.

For someone studying for the Italian patente, this difference becomes clear very quickly. The challenge isn’t memorizing phrases. It’s learning to read a symbolic vocabulary—and once you do, you begin to see the road itself as a kind of text written in shapes, colors, and stacked modifiers.

How Many Signs Are We Talking About?

All of this raises an obvious question: does Italy actually have more road signs than other countries, or does it simply feel that way?

Precise numbers are difficult to find because traffic authorities usually track signs as infrastructure assets rather than reporting them per kilometer of road. Still, transportation studies and municipal inventories give a rough sense of scale.

On urban roads in Europe, you might expect somewhere between 10 and 20 signs per kilometer, depending on the complexity of the street network. Countries such as France and Germany tend to fall within that range. The United States is often somewhat lower, partly because its road networks are newer, wider, and less layered with restrictions.

Italy—especially in historic cities—often pushes toward the upper end of the spectrum. Narrow medieval streets, pedestrian zones, resident parking rules, delivery windows, and vehicle restrictions all require additional signage. Each exception or condition usually appears as another plate attached beneath the main sign.

The result is not necessarily more rules than elsewhere, but rather more visible explanations of those rules. A single intersection in a historic Italian center might display a full stack of signs describing who can enter, when, and under what conditions.

Once you start studying for the patente, these stacks stop looking like bureaucratic noise and start looking like something else entirely: a dense but readable grammar of how the street is supposed to work.

Reading the Street Differently

Studying for the patente has changed how we look at Italian streets. What once felt like visual overload, with poles crowded with signs and small metal plates, now feels oddly reassuring. The system isn’t haphazard. There is logic behind it, and even a bit of European diplomacy.

Those circles, triangles, and pictograms are part of a shared agreement stretching across the continent. The same visual language that guides a driver through Bergamo or Bologna can also guide that driver through Innsbruck or Lyon. It’s a quiet form of European integration, embedded not in speeches or treaties we read about in the news, but in the everyday choreography of traffic.

And the density of signs that once felt excessive starts to look different as well. Each additional plate is a clue about the place you’re in: a narrow street protecting pedestrians, a delivery window negotiated with local shopkeepers, a resident permit that reflects the rhythms of neighborhood life. What looks at first like clutter is often simply the visible record of a city balancing many interests at once.

In that sense, a crowded Italian signpost is a small historical document. It reflects layers of time—medieval streets, modern cars, tourism, and local life—all negotiated through a few shapes, colors, and carefully stacked rules.

Once you begin to read them that way, the signs no longer feel chatty or chaotic. They feel expressive—and, strangely enough, a little elegant.

Travelmarx Spring 2026 Playlist – Powerless

A composite image of 36 albums used in this playlist.

Our spring playlist's title is Powerless, from the first song in the list by Balthazar. Theodor W. Adorno (1903 – 1969) said in 1951 “The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.” Happy listening. Spotify link.

Balthazar – album “Sand”, track “Powerless”
Matt Berninger – album "Serpentine Prison", track "Silver Springs"
Aim – album “Cold Water Music”, track “Cold Water Music”
Fabienne Debarre – album “Welcome to the Age of Broken Minds”, track “Welcome to the Age of Broken Minds”
Shana Cleveland – album “Manzanita”, track “Faces in the Firelight”
Wallners – album “Ships”, track “Ships”

Doc Rhombus – album “Distant Generation”, track “Never Thought”
Black Sea Dahu – album “Ants on the Wall”, track “One Day Will Be All I Have”
Honahlei – album “Nosara Tapes”, track “Gone Away”
Fellini Félin – album “Oddy”, track “Charlie”
Eola – album “Dang”, track “And I Know”
Heartless Bastards – album “A Beautiful Life”, track “A Beautiful Life”

RHODES – track “Sleep is a Rose”
Bertrand Belin – album “Watt”, track “Watt”
Jode – album “Jode”, track “Tomorrow is Gone”
Blanco White – track “So Certain (Something Reminds Me)”
Ocie Elliot – album “In That Room”, track “Forest Floor”
Al Nicol – album “Only Hoping”, track “Marylebone”

Sabine McCalla – album “Don’t Call Me Baby”, track “Sunshine Kisses”
Nick Hakim – track “Waiting”
Midori Hirano – track “Illuminance”
La Luz – album “News of the Universe”, track “I’ll Go With You”
Thomas Dybdahl – single “Hard Liquor”
Anna von Hausswolff – album “The Miraculous”, track “Stranger”

These New Puritans – album “Field of Reeds”, track “Organ Eternal”
Little Element – album “Fire”, track “Tel Aviv”
Timmy Thomas – album “What Can’t We Live Together”, track “Why Can’t We Live Together”
John Martyn – album “Grace & Danger”, track “Some People Are Crazy”
Nicolas Michaux – album “Les Chutes”, track “Amusement Park”
Pedro Mizuntani, Skinshape – album “Mostrando Os Dentes”, track “Sozin”

Robot Koch – album “Hypermoment”, track “Dreams”
Common Saints – album “Cinema 3000”, track “Sweet Release”
David Bowie – album “Young Americans”, track “Win”
Lapcat – album “She’s Bad”, track “Lavender”
Duke Garwood – album “Garden of Ashes”, track “Blue”
The Bamboos – album “Medicine Man”, track “The Wilhelm Scream”

Voting Against Our Own Interests: A Three-Layer Puzzle

Layer 1: The Human Mind Is Not a Calculator ~ Layer 2: Politics Is About Identity as Much as Policy ~ Layer 3: The Information Environment Shapes What We Believe ~ Putting the Layers Together ~ Laminated Card Version ~ The Real Question

Every election cycle someone asks a version of the same question:

Why do people vote against their own interests?

The question usually arrives with a mix of frustration and disbelief. It’s often asked about someone else: rural voters, urban voters, young voters, retirees. Whoever the speaker thinks should “know better.”

But the more we read and think about it, the more slippery the question becomes. What exactly counts as someone’s own interests? And why do we assume that voters make decisions the way economists imagine them to—coolly calculating costs and benefits like shoppers comparing tomatoes at the market?

Recently, our Scrapbook assistant pulled together ideas we’ve collected over the years. None of them fully explains the puzzle. But together they suggest a layered way of thinking about it.

The answer seems to live in three layers: psychology, politics, and the information environment.

Layer 1: The Human Mind Is Not a Calculator

Start with psychology.

People like to think they reason their way to political opinions. In practice, it often works the other way around. We adopt beliefs first, then construct reasons afterward.

Jonathan Haidt famously compared human reasoning to a lawyer defending a client rather than a judge evaluating evidence. Once we adopt a belief, we instinctively search for arguments that support it.

Several well-known mechanisms reinforce this tendency:

Cognitive dissonance.
When evidence contradicts our beliefs, we feel psychological discomfort. Instead of changing the belief, we often reinterpret the evidence.

Confirmation bias.
We seek out information that reinforces what we already think and quietly discard the rest.

Motivated ignorance.
Sometimes people avoid information entirely because knowing the truth would force them to reconsider their identity or social group.

In that sense, sticking with a belief—even when evidence mounts against it—can actually be the psychologically comfortable choice.

So before we even get to politics, the first complication appears:

People are not neutral processors of information.

Layer 2: Politics Is About Identity as Much as Policy

Now move up one layer—from psychology to politics.

If voters were motivated purely by economic self-interest, elections would look very different. Instead, political choices often reflect identity and belonging.

People vote in ways that signal

• who they are
• which group they belong to
• what values they want to express

That’s why voters sometimes support policies that appear economically harmful to them. The policy may conflict with their wallet but align with their moral worldview or group identity.

There is another wrinkle here.

Political scientist Suzanne Mettler documented what she calls the "government–citizen disconnect." Many people benefit from government programs without recognizing them as such. Tax credits, subsidies, or infrastructure investments simply appear as part of normal life. Because the connection is invisible, voters may support cutting programs they indirectly rely on.

In other words, people are not always voting against their interests. Sometimes they simply don’t see the connection between policy and outcome.

Layer 3: The Information Environment Shapes What We Believe

The third layer sits beneath both psychology and politics: the information system.

Democracy depends on something we rarely think about—a shared information environment. Citizens need some baseline agreement about facts in order to debate policy.

That shared environment has been fragmenting.

For most of the twentieth century, people in many countries consumed roughly the same news sources. Today, information is filtered through personalized feeds, partisan media ecosystems, and algorithmic recommendation engines.

The result is what some researchers call "bespoke realities".

Different groups encounter different information streams, reinforcing different interpretations of events. In such a landscape, arguments about competing realities quickly turn into arguments about reality itself.

And once reality becomes contested, identity becomes an even stronger guide for decision-making.

The cycle feeds itself:

• identity shapes which information people trust
• trusted information reinforces identity
• political choices follow from that identity

Putting the Layers Together

Seen this way, voting behavior isn’t a simple puzzle of rational choice.

It’s the outcome of a three-layer system:

Psychology
Identity and cognitive biases shape how individuals interpret information.

Politics
Group belonging and moral narratives influence how people translate beliefs into votes.

Information Systems
Media environments determine what information people encounter in the first place.

Put those layers together and something important emerges.

Voting decisions often reflect identity and narrative coherence more than economic calculation.

Laminated Card Version

Layer 1 — Psychology

Why individuals believe things.
identity → motivated reasoning → cognitive bias

Layer 2 — Politics

Why certain leaders and movements succeed.
anxiety → populism → demagogues → democratic erosion

Layer 3 — Information Systems

Why the environment amplifies these forces.
media fragmentation → algorithmic outrage → collapse of shared reality.

The Real Question

So maybe the question “Why do people vote against their interests?” starts from a flawed assumption. It assumes that interests are purely economic and that voters approach politics as rational calculators.

But humans rarely operate that way.

We vote as members of tribes, participants in narratives, and inhabitants of information worlds that shape what we see and believe.

Seen from that angle, the mystery isn’t why people sometimes vote against their interests. The mystery might be why we ever expected them not to.

A Hike from Val Taleggio to Piani di Artavaggio

Sometimes a food comes first and the place comes later. For us, Taleggio cheese showed up in our lives long before Val Taleggio itself did. Back in the 1990s we remember buying wedges of it at Whole Foods, intrigued by the orange rind and the slightly funky smell that promised something interesting inside. If someone had told us then that decades later we would be walking in the very valley where that cheese originated, we probably would have laughed. Yet here we are, boots on the trail in Val Taleggio, hiking toward the high meadows of Piani di Artavaggio.

  

View of Pizzino from just above Reggetto trail 150.

The tracks from Reggetto (Val Taleggio) to Piani di Artavaggio.

Monte Sodadura - Piani di Artavaggio (Lecco).

Overview

Length: 15.9 km
Duration: 4.5 hours (not including lunch, this time is up and back)
Elevation: 911 m, start point 960 m, highest point 1860 m
Location: Italy, Bergamo, Val Brembana, Val Taleggio

Notes

Today we took a hike from Val Taleggio to the Piani di Artavaggio. Val Taleggio is in the Province of Bergamo and Piani di Artavaggio is in the Province of Lecco.

Val Taleggio is a valley reachable from Val Brembana. From Bergamo you pass through San Pellegrino (perhaps you’ve heard about its water 😉) and continue up valley to the next town San Giovanni Bianco and take a sharp left and head west. After a few kilometers, you enter what is called in Italian Orrido della Val Taleggio or the Val Taleggio Ravine, a 3-km-long gorge carved by the Enna River.

Most people arrive at the Piani di Artavaggio via the Artavaggio cable car (from Moggio) as we did when we were last here hiking in August of 2023. (See Hiking Between Piani di Artavaggio and Piani di Bobbio.)

The “piani” of Piani di Artavaggio refers to the high meadows or alpine plains that characterize this area. Artavaggio could be a medieval Lombard or pre-Latin name describing a rocky, high pasture or a pasture associated with a person named Arto/Harto.

The CAI Bergamo Trail 150 is a mix of trails and dirt farming roads and isn’t the common way to reach the Piani. With trail 150, you start in Reggetto (Vedeseta), at around 960 m. Then you follow the signs, slowly climbing past summer pastures and serene stone structures in various states of disrepair. Once we reached the Piani, we kept climbing to reach Rifugio Nicola at around 1860 m.

Reggetto is a settlement of 13 full-time people as we learned at the local bar Nonno Fifi run by Fifi’s granddaughter. Fifi has been gone for about 15 years, but the fluorescent green building housing his bar remains as well as a small cheese shop located across from the bar. We couldn’t resist the temptation of getting some cheese where it is produced, so headed over. It’s called Società Agricola Locatelli Guglielmo. And we bought… you guessed it: Taleggio, but also strachítunt – a cheese not well known outside of Italy.

With our haul – our friend called it our bottino in Italian – we started to head back to Bergamo. But we didn’t make it far before we ran into the Coop. Agricola S. Antonio, a local cheese cooperative just below Reggetto. We said hello to the cows and popped inside to buy some yogurt, butter, and formaggella. After that, it really was back to Bergamo.

A carpet of snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis).
Trail 150 Reggetto (Val Taleggio) - pastures and old buildings.
View northeast from Trail 150 above Reggetto into the Orobie Bergamasche.

 
Piani di Artavaggio - vew from below Rifugio Nicola looking southwest toward Monte Resegone.
Trail 150 from Reggetto to Piani di Artavaggio.

  
Trail 150 from Reggetto to Piani di Artavaggio.

Cheese

Why is the area so famous? The answer is simple: pasture, tradition, and geography.

Val Taleggio and the surrounding Bergamasque Prealps have long been ideal terrain for alpine dairy farming. The steep slopes and high summer pastures (alpeggi) mean cattle are moved seasonally from valley farms to higher grazing areas. During the summer months cows feed on diverse alpine grasses and herbs, which in turn influence the flavor of the milk.

That milk becomes cheese.

The most famous product is Taleggio, one of Italy’s oldest soft cheeses, with roots going back at least to the 10th or 11th century. Historically it was called Stracchino, from the Lombard word stracch meaning “tired,” referring to cows returning from summer pastures. The cheese was later named after the valley where it was widely produced. Today Taleggio is a DOP cheese (Denominazione di Origine Protetta), meaning production is regulated and tied to this region.

Less well known internationally—but arguably even more interesting—is Strachítunt. This rare blue cheese originates specifically in Val Taleggio and neighboring valleys. It’s made by layering curds from two different milkings, creating natural blue veining without the industrial inoculation typical of many blue cheeses. Production nearly disappeared in the late 20th century but was revived by a handful of local producers and now holds its own DOP designation.

Walking through Val Taleggio you see why cheese production took root here. Pastures surround nearly every settlement, barns sit tucked into the slopes, and aging stone structures hint at generations of dairy work. The landscape itself feels built for milk and grass.

  
Views from Trail 150 Reggetto (Val Taleggio) to Piani di Artavaggio. Cows graze here starting in June.

Flora

The dominant colors today were late-winter earth brown in the lower parts of the hike or snow white in the upper parts. Piani di Artavaggio was still covered in snow. But that earth brown of the lower parts was punctuated by loads of late winter flowers, the usual but always welcome suspects listed below.

I’m surprised by how many Italians who we go on hikes with ask what this is. It’s one of the easiest to spot in late winter because of the color and shape of the flower. The three-lobed leaf shape and color reminded medieval herbalists of the human liver, and from that came the common name "liverwort". This is when people thought that God marked plants with a signature indicating which organ they could heal.

Spring crocuses are not where saffron comes from. It’s the autumn crocus, Crocus sativus. Spring crocuses have white or yellow stamens compared to Crocus sativus.

The lower regions of this hike, just outside of Reggetto, had some of the most beautiful stands of snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) that we had ever seen.

[Family] Genus species – {Common names in English; Italian}

[Amaryllidaceae] Galanthus nivalis – {Snowdrop; Bucaneve}
  

[Asteraceae] Petasites albus – {White butterbur; Farfaraccio bianco}
(no photo)

[Asteraceae] Tussilago farfara – {Coltsfoot; Tossilaggine comune}

[Iridaceae] Crocus vernus – {Crocus; Zafferano di primavera}
 

[Primulaceae] Primula elatior – {Oxlip; Primula maggiore}


[Primulaceae] Primula vulgaris – {Primrose; Primula comune}
 

[Ranunculaceae] Anemone nemorosa – {European Wood Anemone; Anemone dei boschi}

[Ranunculaceae] Helleborus niger – {Christmas Rose; Rosa di Natale}
  

[Ranunculaceae] Helleborus viridis – {Green Hellebore; Elleboro verde}
 

[Ranunculaceae] Hepatica nobilis – {Liverwort; Epatica erba trinità}
 

[Thymelaeaceae] Daphne mezereum – {Mezereon; Dafne mezereo o fior di stecco}

Late Transmissions

Late Transmissions: How AI (and good software engineering) surprised and delighted me.

Catalyst

The catalyst was an innocuous New Year's message we received from a friend. It was a short, fantastical AI-generated video that was uncanny and oddly charming. Watching it, we started wondering about the soundtrack. Was the music AI-generated too? Or was it stock audio stitched in afterward? We never quite answered the question, but it started us down the research path where we discovered tools that can be used for song generation.

We already knew that AI tools for music existed. A family member had even created a full album of country songs using them. We found it impressive, it didn’t spark any urgency in us to try it ourselves. That changed when we realized that some of these tools weren’t just about generating music from scratch. They allowed you to upload your own audio.

That’s when a light bulb went on. Somewhere in cloud storage sat a folder I rarely opened, filled with forgotten work: rough recordings with and without vocals, incomplete takes, old .wav files paired with scanned lyric sheets. Songs that had been written quickly, recorded imperfectly, and then set aside. The digital artifacts were from 30 years ago and suddenly had more currency.

The question wasn’t whether AI could write new songs. It was simpler and more personal: what would happen if I fed these old original-composition songs back into a new system? Would anything recognizable come back? Would it be interesting? Or would it flatten everything into something generic?

Experiment

After a bit of fiddling around, I tried my first test using Suno AI. The results were immediately pleasing and brought a smile to our faces. The tool didn’t feel like it was replacing the songs so much as re-voicing them in interesting ways. (In fact, in Suno it’s called a cover.) With some guidance in prompts and settings, the output came back remarkably close to what I remember wanting to do thirty years ago but couldn’t quite execute at the time. It was thrilling not because it was perfect, but because it felt like I was completing something left unfinished.

I think of these new versions as drafts that are an order of magnitude better than the originals. They’re not finished songs, and perhaps I don’t really want them to be. They aren’t finished because the AI process can introduce noise and artifacts into the final output. These can be removed in remastering Suno output (stems). We didn't go that far for our first attempt because we didn’t know how. And even with the noise and artifacts in our final songs, we were happy.

My preference for these songs is for real people to perform them someday. Or is that idea anachronistic? At least now these drafts can properly communicate the idea, the mood, the structure I had in mind. That, to me, is magic: not automation, but translation.

Expression

During the rediscovery and reimagining of these songs, I came around to the idea that songs function for me much like blog posts. They are audio blog posts. (Yeah, I know that much of the world has moved on from longer-form writing like blogs, but I haven’t.) Blog posts—and now songs—are formats in which I can express my thoughts or feelings.

Some of the messages from thirty years ago survived surprisingly well. Others needed a small amount of tuning, though I resisted changing the lyrics more than necessary for this first try. I wanted to hear what that earlier voice was actually saying, not rewrite it from the comfort of hindsight.

I was surprised at how many of the themes addressed in the songs are still relevant to me today: my voice, my sense of freedom, and ability to deal with modern life. In short, timeless themes.

In that sense, reinterpreting of these songs isn’t about reviving the past so much as finishing a sentence or blog post.

Release

Using AI in the process wasn’t about polishing or correcting the past, but about filtering it. It acted like a lens, separating signal from static, letting certain ideas come through more clearly than they ever had before. The result isn’t a set of finished songs so much as clearer drafts, and that feels right for now. Releasing them now isn’t a performance or a bid for attention; it’s simply a form of publication. It’s much easier to send a link than a batch of files. Publishing lets these transmissions complete their journey so I can move on to the next phase.

This post—and the album that shares its name—are both called Late Transmissions (Spotify, Apple, YouTube). The title felt unavoidable. These songs were written long ago, partially broadcast, and then abandoned mid-signal. They’re late not because they were delayed on purpose, but because they took a long route to their current form. 

A Sunday Walk to Find Il Becco di Dossena

Il Becco di Dossena was inaugurated in 2023, but it seems like we’ve been hearing about it longer. Recently, on the way home from a ski day at Piani di Bobbio as we were heading down Val Brembana, I looked up, saw it for a moment, and decided we should go. Then some friends said “hey, would you like to go for a walk on Sunday” and by the way “do you have any suggestions”. And voilà, a few days later we are standing on the beak (becco).

  

Left: Il Becco di Dossena in Dossena, Italy.

Center: Horses on Trail 599C in Dossena, Italy.

Right: The artwork Eco della Montagna near Il Becco di Dossena.

We think we followed the trail outlined here: Sentiero 599C: Dossena (SS. Trinità) - Miniere del Paglio | CAI Bergamo. We parked at the Chiesetta SS. Trinità and just started walking. After a short time, we arrived at the Parco Giochi (where you could also just as easily start from). If you're pressed for time or simply don’t want to walk, you can drive to the Parcheggio miniere and start from there. From the Parcheggio miniere, it’s a steady uphill climb on an old road.

The whole area leading up to Il Becco is well curated, with little bits of art to see. In particular, before the last push to the top there is an art installation called Eco della Montagna that celebrates the memory of all the people who worked in the former mining sites of the Dossena territory. The project consists of a circular fence, 25 meters in diameter, which "embraces" a large stone, sculpted by the artist Francesco Paterlini, isolating it from the surrounding landscape and giving it a symbolic and contemplative nature.

The piece is very Zen-like and fun to wander around.

After the “Eco” and just below Il Becco is another stopping point – again very Zen-inspired in our opinion – with a circular form, seating and a beautiful view east.

Il Becco is a 16 m (52.5 ft) walkway sticking out from the cliff edge. It’s about 250 m (820 ft) above Val Parina. Yours truly had a bit of trouble making it to the end without holding on tightly to the railing.

All in all, a beautiful project and a beautiful setting. And, free to visit.

Below the Parcheggio miniere there is the Miniere di Dossena, where you can find out more about the mines that once operated there and even visit inside the mines. We were there too early on our Sunday walk and missed the opening hours. Another reason to return.

  

Left: Dossena with Cima di Menna in the distance.
Center: Entrance to mines in Dossena, Italy.

Right: Horses in Dossena, Italy.

  

Left and center: Eco della montagna - Dossena, Italy

   

Left: Helleborus niger along Trail 599C.

Center left: Leucojum vernum along Trail 599C.

Center right: Trail 599C in Dossena, Italy.

Right: View to Parina in Val Brembana from Il Becco.

  

Il Becco di Dossena, Italy

 

Left: Sole - a whimsical art installation just below Il Becco di Dossena.
Right: A whimsical artwork on the way to Il Becco di Dossena.