The Loops of August

Coding Loop ~ Vacation Loop ~ AI Loop ~ Duke Loop ~ Loops Within Loops

The Loops of August: Coding, AI, YouTube Algorithms, Vacations

August is strange in Italy. Shutters come down, regular routines disappear, people vanish, and then toward the end of the month everyone materializes again, tanned, rested or claiming to be, and faintly optimistic about September.

We mostly sat out this August. While other people were heading for beaches, islands, mountains, and increasingly complicated travel connections, we stayed home and worked on projects. There was coding to do. There were long conversations with AI assistants. And, for reasons that will become clear, there were an alarming number of dukes.

The disappearing and reappearing of Italy is the obvious one, an annual cycle so regular that you can practically set a calendar by the appearance of handwritten chiuso per ferie signs. But once we started looking, other loops appeared around us: bursts of obsessive coding followed by months of silence; conversations with AI assistants that circle the same problem without quite landing on it; and a YouTube algorithm that has decided we have an inexhaustible appetite for overlooked stepdaughters marrying scarred members of the British aristocracy.

These are not really the same kind of loop. Some loops we create ourselves. Some loops society creates for us. Some loops we get stuck in. And some, apparently, come with a ducal seal.

The Coding Loop: Three Weeks On, Three Months Off

The evidence is sitting in our GitHub contribution charts.

We used to imagine that we worked on our Scrapbook project continuously, but slowly realized we actually didn’t, and the little green squares of the contribution chart tell that story. There will be three or four weeks of dense activity, commits stacked on commits, followed by long stretches of almost nothing. Green squares appear in a row showing activity. Then white, the digital equivalent of abandonment.

GitHub contributions going in cycles.

Scrapbook is not a toy app we occasionally tinker with. It is a long-running project built and maintained by the two of us, with roughly 80,000 lines of code, about 25,000 of them executable. It lives in the cloud, uses a range of technologies, gets fixed, acquires new features, and often just needs attention because something it depends on has changed. We have been working on it for years and, importantly, we don't want to finish it.

There is language for the pattern visible in our GitHub charts. Researchers studying human activity call one aspect of it burstiness: concentrated periods of activity separated by long periods of relative quiet. Our weeks inside those bursts can also feel a lot like hyperfocus, the state of becoming so absorbed in an activity that time and everything around it recedes.

And coding is particularly good at keeping a burst going. One fix suggests another. The new feature almost works. Then it works. Now that it works, we can finally clean up the thing beside it that has annoyed us for two years. While we are in the code, we notice something else. At some point it is midnight, and a perfectly reasonable Saturday has disappeared into a C# and JavaScript methods that should have taken twenty minutes.

Then, just as mysteriously, coding stops.

For months we might barely touch the code. Our Scrapbook project continues to run. Other interests take over. The green squares disappear.

A few years ago, we noticed this pattern and wondered whether it was something we should worry about. Now we are less sure. This is coding for pleasure. There is no product manager waiting for a sprint review, and no investor is asking about features. Perhaps the periods of inactivity are part of what makes the periods of intensity possible.

The coding loop may be one of the loops we don't need to escape. We just disappear from it for a while, until something pulls us back in again.

The August Loop: Everybody Leaves, Everybody Comes Back

Our little two-person coding cycle takes place inside a much larger and considerably more organized loop: August in Italy.

Starting in late July, the country begins its progressive emptying-out. Shop windows display hand scrawled chiuso per ferie messages. Offices become harder to reach. Automated out of office messages in email start to become the norm. Conversations increasingly revolve around when you are leaving, where you are going, and when you are coming back. Then comes Ferragosto, August 15, the symbolic center of a summer vacation season treated with a seriousness we still find impressive after living here for years.

We have written about this before: Bergamo – Street Sign Language Lesson X – Ferragosto!, Abbronzatissima: Notes on the Allure of the Suntan in Italy, and most recently Escape to Isolatos: Notes on Curated Remoteness. In the last post, we were interested in the slightly paradoxical Italian search for escape: everybody getting away from it all at approximately the same time.

But escape is only half the loop.

Toward the end of August, people begin appearing again. The shutters go up. Familiar faces return, various shades darker. There are stories about beaches and mountains and islands, mixed with complaints about traffic, ferries, delayed flights, excessive heat, and all the other inconveniences encountered while getting away to relax.

Then comes that brief September feeling that everything is beginning again. Schools reopen. Offices refill. Out of office messages just become the normal delayed responses. Plans are made. People seem faintly renewed. For a few weeks, September has the same quality of January without New Year’s resolutions.

The return completes the loop. Unlike our coding bursts, this one is based on the calendar and is collective. Everyone knows roughly when it is going to happen and participates willingly.

There is something slightly funny about the annual acceptance of it all. Italy empties out in August, businesses close because everyone is away, people complain that nothing is open and nothing can get done because everyone is away, and then the whole system starts up again. Next summer, we will do it all over.  

The AI Loop: Down the Rabbit Hole

During the hotter days of August, we spent quite a bit of time indoors with air conditioning and AI assistants, sometimes while coding and sometimes asking about whatever question had wandered into our heads that day.

This introduced another kind of loop.

The transaction often starts innocently enough. Take a coding task. We ask an assistant to solve something. It misunderstands one small but important part of the problem. We correct it. The assistant apologizes, usually enthusiastically: “You’re absolutely right!” It then produces another answer based on substantially the same misunderstanding. We correct it again.

Twenty minutes later, we are no longer solving the original problem. We are trying to make the assistant understand the conversation we have already had. We see our AI credits are going to zero, and we bump our spending budgets because the problem needs to be solved.

Part of what keeps us stuck is sunk cost. We have already supplied the background, pasted the code, explained what we tried, and corrected assumptions. Surely one more prompt will do it. Meanwhile, the conversation itself is getting longer, accumulating failed approaches and explanations that may now be part of the problem. We find ourselves not so politely telling the assistant that we are burning our credits while going around in circles. Response: empathetic with yet another attempt at a fix.

The problem is that AI answers are often very plausible. A wrong answer doesn't necessarily (immediately) look wrong. It can arrive neatly formatted, confidently explained, perhaps with five helpful headings. This makes it surprisingly easy to follow an assistant a considerable distance down the wrong road before realizing that neither of you remembers where you intended to go.

We used to jokingly call some of this being “gaslit by the AI,” but that isn't really what is happening. The assistant isn't trying to convince us of an alternate reality. More often, we and it have diverged on what problem is being solved. It thinks we asked one thing; we thought we asked another. Sometimes the fault is ours because we were imprecise, withheld context we didn't realize mattered, or assumed the assistant understood something that existed only in our heads.

We are slowly getting better at recognizing the warning signs.

Sometimes the answer is to narrow the question. Sometimes it is to start a fresh conversation rather than keep dragging the accumulated baggage forward. And sometimes the best solution is simply to leave one AI assistant and ask another.

That last technique has become surprisingly useful. Instead of asking the second assistant to solve the whole problem again, we can show it what happened and ask questions: Were we talking past each other? What is the first assistant misunderstanding? Here’s a plan to fix a coding issue the first assistant gave us. What do you think of it?

We have, in other words, begun taking one artificial intelligence aside to complain about another artificial intelligence. It sounds faintly absurd translated into ordinary life, but it works. Different assistants approach the same question differently, notice different assumptions, and get stuck in different places. Increasingly, knowing how to use AI assistants means knowing not only what to ask, but when to stop asking the same one.

The AI loop is therefore unlike our coding loop. Coding can pull us forward because every solved problem exposes another interesting one. The AI loop at times can keep us in place because every attempted solution seems as though it might finally resolve the previous attempted solution but doesn’t.

The trick is noticing when supposed progress has turned into circling.

The Duke Loop: Algorithmic Pulp Fiction

Meanwhile, YouTube has discovered that apparently what I need in August is an overlooked stepdaughter, a cruel stepmother, an estate ledger, a mysterious duke with a scar who perhaps recently returned from fighting somewhere on the Continent.

And apparently YouTube is correct.

I fell into a genre of long-form historical romance stories, many clearly produced with some combination of AI-generated writing, narration, and images. They tend to be set in an elastic version of 19th-century England, somewhere between the Regency and Victorian periods. If our duke has recently returned from war, it may be the Napoleonic Wars in earlier stories or the Crimean War in the later ones. Historical precision is not necessarily the main attraction, just that vague historical events produce our broken duke.

What has been surprising is how quickly I have acquired the vocabulary of this faux-19th-century universe: reticule, ducal seal, signet ring, dowry, marriage contract, estate ledger, bombazine, duke versus earl, and the ton, the fashionable upper reaches of British society. There are carriages, neglected estates, double entries in ledgers, invisible stepdaughters, nasty stepmothers, well-tailored jackets of broadcloth, shy heroines hiding behind potted palms at the ball, marriages of convenience, and an astonishing number of men who speak in a "low scrape."

I didn't set out to learn any of this. The vocabulary arrived through repetition, one little algorithmically encouraged click at a time.

What I'm listening to is a kind of algorithmic pulp fiction. The technology may be new, but the machinery of the story is old. A wronged, overlooked woman is humiliated. Someone powerful finally sees what everyone else has failed to see. The nasty relatives are exposed. Fraud is revealed. Goodness is rewarded. And the duke eventually understands what the viewer (and most often just a listener) understood forty-five minutes earlier.

Then the story ends happily, and I click on another one.

That is the loop. YouTube learns that I will watch a story about an ignored stepdaughter and offers me another ignored stepdaughter. Perhaps this time with two cruel stepsisters and a disputed dowry. I click again, which presumably confirms that what I really need is a third ignored stepdaughter. Somewhere along the way the duke acquires a more prominent scar from temple to jawbone, just to add interest.

Why can't I stop listening?

Partly, I think, because good winning out has a universal appeal and perhaps even more so at this moment and time in my life. These 45-to-90-minute stories are auditory comfort food. We know roughly where they are going, and knowing is part of the pleasure. The attraction isn't suspense so much as promised emotional payback. However badly things go for the heroine in the first forty minutes, the ducal seal is waiting somewhere in the final twenty.

This makes the Duke Loop almost the inverse of the AI-assistant loop. In the AI loop, repetition postpones resolution: one more exchange might finally get us out. In the Duke Loop, repetition guarantees resolution. The same machine starts up again, and that is precisely what we came for.

Loops Within Loops

By the end of August, our four loops were beginning to look less alike.

The vacation loop is a ritual. It repeats because repetition (in Italy) gives shape to the year: leave, disappear, return, begin again.

The coding loop is a cycle of enthusiasm. Pleasure and curiosity arrive in clumps, followed by stretches when our attention goes somewhere else. Nothing is particularly wrong with that.

The AI-assistant loop is different. It is a trap. We stay in it because every next exchange looks as though it might finally resolve the previous one. Plus, the technology is still new, and we are all still learning how to use it efficiently.

And the Duke Loop is a reward machine. It keeps turning because it reliably gives us what we came for: recognition, justice, a happy ending, and apparently another estate ledger.

So perhaps the useful distinction isn't that loops are bad or good. Life contains plenty of repetition, and August itself is proof that repetition is not necessarily something to escape. Rituals, hobbies, seasons, stories, and habits all depend upon coming around again.

The more interesting question is how much control we have over the circle. In some loops, we are in the driver's seat. In others, we are passengers. Sometimes society has set the route long before we arrived as with vacations in Italy. And occasionally an algorithm is quietly deciding where the next turn will be as with our YouTube consumption.

That gives us a rough rule for these particular August loops. The coding loop doesn't need to be fixed. The vacation loop couldn't be fixed even if we wanted to; acceptance is better. The AI loop needs a circuit breaker. The Duke Loop...well, perhaps one more story, just until we find out whether poor quiet Lucy wins over the scarred duke. (Spoiler: she does.)

There is one final loop hiding inside this post. We wrote about AI loops using research produced through conversations with AI assistants, including research about AI-generated romance stories being fed to us by another algorithm. At some point the snake begins eating its own tail. Is the future a form of funhouse recursion? Loops within loops?

And then, while finishing this post, I remembered that I wrote a song called Endless Loop, about getting stuck inside expectations and repeating patterns around us.

Apparently even our observations about loops come in loops.

Capù at the End of the Trail – Lago Branchino

Overview ~ Notes ~ Geology ~ Flora ~ Photos

  

Left: View north toward Passo dei Laghi Gemelli.
Center: Hike route from Valcanale to Lago Branchino and back.
Right: Food - Capù con polenta at Rifugio Alpe Corte.

The Third Time’s a charm? Maybe.

We generally don’t repeat hikes, except for destinations very close that we start out on foot from the house like Canto Alto, Canto Basso, Maresana, or Misma. So, it is interesting that we’ve been to Lago Branchino three times over 10 or so years. We generally want the next valley, the next rifugio, the unexplored trail. But today, we were invited to participate, and when a free and easy ride to the mountain arrives at the doorstep, you get in and don’t make too much of a fuss even if it’s been a hike, you’ve already done.

Overview

Duration: 4.5 hours with stops for snacks and lunch (3 hours walking)
Elevation: 736 m
Length: 10.8 km
Location: Val Seriana – Valcanale

Parking for this hike is typically in one or two big lots at the end of the Valcanale when you can’t go any more like here and here. The higher lots (or maybe all) require a ticket that you can buy at a bar/cafe on your way in or at a ticket machine.

From the parking lots, just follow the well marked trails. You’ll be following bits of Sentiero 218A: Giro dell'Alpe Neel, Sentiero 218: Rifugio Alpe Corte - Baita GAN, and at the start Sentiero 220: Ardesio - Valcanale - Rifugio Alpe Corte.

Notes

We have a “three nights minimum in a city” rule when traveling for more than a few days. Why don’t we have a “three visit rule” for hikes? Maybe we should start thinking about that: three hikes are how a trail starts becoming a place rather than an itinerary. And as you will see, we learned a little more about Lago Branchino and ate something interesting!

In fact, during this hike we had a small sense of becoming local through repetition. Times we've passed this way:

• Hike in Valcanale: Rifugio Branchino and Lago Branchino - early July
• An Early Spring Hike to Lago Branchino in Valcanale (Ardesio), in the Upper Val Seriana - early April
• Seven Days on the Sentiero delle Orobie – A Journey Through the Bergamo Alps - mid July

And we sort of lied; this would be our fourth time passing by Rifugio Alpe Corte (lower part of the hike). We forgot we did it on our Sentiero delle Orobie trek. How easily do we forget.

On the other hand, some things are hard to forget, like where to stop for coffee on our way up Val Seriana whereas our companions (Bergamaschi) forgot. That place is Minuscoli, where we always stop on our way to hike or ski in Val Seriana. We’ve stopped so many times with different friends; it’s a habit.

Parking for this hike is typically in one or two big lots at the end of the Valcanale when you can’t go any more like here and here. The higher lots (or maybe all) require a ticket that you can buy at a bar/cafe on your way in or at a ticket machine.

From the parking lots, just follow the well marked trails. You’ll be following bits of Sentiero 218A: Giro dell'Alpe Neel, Sentiero 218: Rifugio Alpe Corte - Baita GAN, and at the start Sentiero 220: Ardesio - Valcanale - Rifugio Alpe Corte.

After parking, we headed straight for the Lago Branchino (1,784 m) bypassing the always busy Rifugio Alpe Corte, which we would return to later. Just before the lake, we stopped at Rifugio Branchino (1,787 m) for coffee and cake. After coffee and cake we went up the pass just beyond and above the lake. A mass was in progress, people spread out on the hillside listening to the sermon.

We left before the amen and headed back down to Rifugio Alpe Corte (1,410 m) for lunch. It’s there that we saw on the menu and much to our surprise capù con polenta. (Love culinary surprises!)

A friend’s aunt once made something similar, but she called it nosècc, another name for it. But this was the first time we ever saw it in a rifugio. (See, this is why we want new rifugio for every hike.... our stomachs demand it.)

Capù con polenta is a dish that belongs to the Bergamo valleys through and through. Capù are cabbage rolls traditionally filled with breadcrumbs, local cheese, egg, garlic and parsley; later versions often include pork or sausage. The historic Parre/Val Seriana version is di magro, without meat. The name means “capon” in dialect, and your lunch note includes the lovely folklore about poor mountain families making a cabbage-leaf “capon” for a child who couldn't have the real bird.

Geology

While we have visited this small lake before, we didn’t truly appreciate the geology of this area until we wrote this post.

Lago Branchino is a small, alpine karst lake located at an altitude of approximately 1,784 meters within the Orobie Bergamasche Regional Park in Lombardy, Italy. But what does that mean? A karst lake is a geological formation dictated by karstification. Thanks, but still not helpful. Karstification occurs when soluble bedrock is dissolved by water. Karst lakes are formed as the result of a collapse of caves, especially in water-soluble rocks such as limestone, gypsum and dolomite.

Intriguing, tell me more.

The vast majority of alpine lakes in the Orobian range are formed by glacial excavation carving out impermeable granite or slate basins, Lago Branchino is an exception because:

• Soluble Limestone Bedrock: The lake sits in a high-altitude basin surrounded by the limestone and dolomite peaks of Corno Branchino and Corna Piana. Over millennia, acidic rainwater and melting snow slowly dissolved the calcium carbonate in the rock. This chemical weathering ate away at the mountain surface, opening up cracks, fissures, and ultimately collapsing underground voids to form a natural depression known as a doline or sinkhole.
• The Sealed "Lakebed" Effect: Usually, water in a limestone landscape immediately drains straight down through the porous rock into subterranean cave networks. Lago Branchino holds water because its shallow bed is layered with a thick buildup of insoluble clay, silt, and organic sediment. This residual material has acted as a natural waterproof plug, blocking the underlying rock fractures and allowing water to collect pool-style in the basin rather than draining into the mountain.
• Exclusively Rain and Snow-Fed: True to karst lake behavior, Lago Branchino has no surface inlets (streams or rivers) flowing into it. It is entirely fed by precipitation, surface runoff, and subterranean snowmelt. Because it lacks a steady surface river supply, the lake water level can fluctuate significantly depending on the season and dry spells.

Nearby the lake are the limestone peaks of Corno Branchino and Corna Piana. 

Lago Branchino serves as a central hub for hikers traversing the Bergamasque Alps. Right next to its western shore sits the seasonal mountain hut, Rifugio Lago Branchino. Someday, we going to do the Sentiero dei fiori, which passes through the pass (where the mass was being held).

Flora

The end of August was not the best time for flower spotting. We managed to get just a few.

[Asteraceae] Carlina acaulis
 

[Asteraceae] Centaurea sp.


[Asteraceae] Solidago sp. with hoverfly
 

[Gentianaceae] Gentiana asclepiadea
 

[Ranunculaceae] Aconitum napellus
 

Photos

  

Left and center: Mass at Passo del Branchino (1,821 m).

Right: One of the flock has escaped. Bergamasca - pecora gigante.

 

Left: Baita Bassa Alpe Neel above Valcanale.

Right: Sign showing biodiversity of the area - all the flowers and butterflies we didn't see today!

  

Left: Capù con polenta at Rifugio Alpe Corte.
Center: Penne con crema di porcini, tartufo and taleggio at Rifugio Alpe Corte.

Right: Rifugio Alpe Corte coffee and cake.

 

Left: Coffee and cake at Rifugio Branchino.

Right: Rifugio Alpe Corte menu.

  

Left: Above Valcanale, looking east over Alpe Neel.

Center: Pasture above Valcanale with view toward Passo dei Laghi Gemelli.

Right: View from pastures looking east with Monte Secco on the right.

Street Sign Language Lesson LVII

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In this round of Street Sign Language Lesson, we find Bud Spencer in the canned-bean aisle, learn the job description of an alpine sheepdog, get warned about a sobbalzo while walking in Bergamo, and encounter an organo in movimento in Milan. We also get watched by many eyes in Genoa, wait for medicine at Papa Giovanni XXIII hospital, and read two lost-pet notices.

As usual, the signs start out as language lessons and wander off into film, shepherding, road paving, machinery, public transportation, hospital logistics, and dogs that look sort of like Beagles.  Let's begin.

Fagioli alla Bud Spencer. Ricetta originale.
"Bud Spencer-style beans. Original recipe."

The grammar isn't the interesting part here. Alla Bud Spencer simply means roughly "Bud Spencer style." The more interesting question for an English-speaking visitor looking at a can of beans in Carrefour might be: Who is Bud Spencer?

Bud Spencer was the screen name of Carlo Pedersoli, an Italian swimmer who represented Italy at the 1952 and 1956 Olympics before becoming an actor. In 1967, when he was asked to adopt an American-sounding name for an Italian western, he combined Budweiser, his favorite beer, with the surname of actor Spencer Tracy. His co-star Mario Girotti similarly became Terence Hill, and Bud Spencer and Terence Hill went on to become a hugely successful screen duo, especially in comic westerns and action films.

And the beans aren't random. Beans cooked in a pan became strongly associated with the Bud Spencer-Terence Hill films, particularly the Trinità movies, enough that Italian food writing has referred to an entire comic "fagioli-western" tradition.

So, there is quite a lot packed into a €3.35 can sitting between the mushrooms and lentils. The label assumes you already know the joke.

Il cane da raduno raduna e sposta il bestiame seguendo le indicazioni dell'allevatore.
"The herding dog gathers and moves the livestock, following the farmer's instructions."

We liked this sentence because of the repetition: il cane da raduno raduna...

The noun raduno comes from radunare, meaning to gather or bring together. We usually encounter raduno referring to a gathering of people: un raduno degli Alpini, un raduno automobilistico, a rally, meet, or gathering.

Here, though, cane da raduno is literally a "gathering dog," what we would normally call a herding dog in English. Then comes raduna, the third-person singular of radunare: the gathering dog gathers. The Pasturs sign itself contrasts this job with that of il cane da protezione, whose task is to defend livestock against predators and other threats.

Then we get sposta, from spostare, "to move," and seguendo, "following": raduna e sposta il bestiame seguendo le indicazioni dell'allevatore = gathers and moves the livestock according to the farmer's instructions.

The distinction between the dogs took on a little more meaning after our recent long hike up the Vò Valley to Rifugio Tagliaferri, where we came across a herd of roughly 1,000 Pecora Gigante Bergamasca and spoke with the shepherd tending them. With that many sheep, radunare e spostare stops sounding like a vocabulary exercise and starts sounding like quite a job description.

Attenzione, sobbalzo di corsia.
A natural translation here would be something like “Caution: uneven lane surface” or “Caution: sudden change in lane level”.

We saw these signs while walking in Città Alta as a road was being resurfaced. Sobbalzo was new to us.

The noun sobbalzo comes from the verb sobbalzare. Treccani defines sobbalzare as making small repeated jumps or jolts, particularly when talking about a vehicle traveling over an uneven road. With a person, it can also mean to jump or start suddenly from surprise or fear. Sobbalzo is the resulting jolt or sudden movement.

So:

• La macchina sobbalza sulla strada sconnessa.
  The car jolts along the uneven road.
• Ho sobbalzato quando ho sentito il rumore.
  I jumped when I heard the noise.

What we like about sobbalzo is that it doesn't really name the physical bump or unevenness in the road. It names the jolt or sudden vertical movement produced by it. A car can sobbalzare when it hits an uneven patch of pavement, and that movement is un sobbalzo. So attenzione sobbalzo di corsia is effectively warning that the difference in road level may make your vehicle jump or jolt.  

 

Organo in movimento.

Moving part / moving machinery.

We saw these two signs in Milan. Our first reaction was to organo in movimento, which translated word for word gives us organ in motion. This sounds considerably more medical than mechanical.

But organo has a technical meaning in Italian. In machinery, an organo can be a component or functional part of a machine. Italian safety literature routinely uses expressions such as organi in movimento, organi ruotanti, and organi di trasmissione for moving, rotating, and transmission components.

The other question we had was whether in movimento means that the thing is moving right now, or that it could move.

Grammatically, it simply means "in motion." There is no "might" or future sense built into the phrase. But as a safety warning, organo in movimento is better understood as a category of hazard: moving part. The component does not have to be moving at the instant you read the sign, any more than an English "Caution: Moving Parts" label becomes false when a machine is switched off. The warning is that this thing moves when the system operates, so don't assume it will remain where it is

That is particularly useful information when the thing in question looks, at first glance, rather like part of the floor.

OCCHIO!
Watch out! / Careful!

We saw this AMT sign during our weekend in Genoa, a city where getting around can involve buses, elevators, funiculars, and a fair amount of vertical thinking.

Occhio literally means "eye," but by itself as an exclamation, Occhio! means Watch out!, Be careful!, or Pay attention! Treccani specifically lists it as an interjection used to call someone's attention to a danger.

You can also say:

• Occhio alla macchina!
  Watch out for the car!
• Occhio a dove metti i piedi.
  Watch where you step.

The AMT poster has fun with both meanings. It says: Tutti i mezzi AMT sono dotati di molti occhi, quelli delle telecamere e quelli di tutti noi. "All AMT vehicles are equipped with many eyes, those of the cameras and those of all of us."

So OCCHIO! is simultaneously "watch out" and an actual eye, reinforced by the camera lens sitting inside the eye in the image. It is one of those cases where the Italian is considerably more compact than the English explanation required to understand why it works.

A causa delle diverse modalità di trasporto la consegna potrebbe non rispettare la successione del numero di coda.

A fairly literal translation is: “Because of the different methods of transport, delivery may not follow the sequence of the queue numbers.” A more useful translation in context would be: “Because the medications arrive by different transport methods, they may not be dispensed in queue-number order.”

We encountered this sentence while waiting at the Farmacia delle dimissioni at Papa Giovanni XXIII hospital in Bergamo. This is not simply a pharmacy conveniently located near the exit. After a patient is discharged from the hospital with a newly prescribed drug therapy that must continue at home, the Farmacia delle dimissioni can provide the drugs for the first treatment cycle, enough to bridge the period until care passes back to the patient's general practitioner. It also dispenses certain hospital and chronic-therapy medications.

So dimissioni here means hospital discharge, and Farmacia delle dimissioni is reasonably translated as discharge pharmacy.

The sign becomes easier once it is pulled apart:

• a causa delle = because of / due to
• diverse modalità di trasporto = different transport methods
• la consegna = the delivery or, here, dispensing of the medication
• potrebbe non rispettare = might not follow
• la successione = the sequence/order
• del numero di coda = of the queue number

The smaller sign underneath explains what is really going on: the medication kits are handed out in the order in which they arrive from the pharmacy warehouse, which may not match the order in which patients took their queue numbers.

There is even more machinery behind that sentence than we realized. Papa Giovanni uses an automated pharmacy warehouse and a pneumatic transport system to move some medication kits from the warehouse to the Farmacia delle dimissioni.

In other words, if you are number 46 and they call 48 first, this does not necessarily mean the Italian queue has finally abandoned all pretense of numerical order. Number 48's medicine may simply have arrived before yours.

We were already in the intellectually receptive state produced by sitting around watching a hospital queue display, so naturally we photographed the explanation.

Avvistata l'ultima volta nella chiesa di Sant'Alessandro di via Pignolo.

Last seen in the church of Sant'Alessandro on Via Pignolo.


This was a notice for a missing black-and-white cat. What was that cat doing in the church?

The useful verb here is avvistare, from vista. It means to sight or spot something, traditionally with the sense of beginning to see or recognize something from a distance. It turns up particularly in contexts such as sighting a ship, aircraft, person, or something being searched for.

The full sentence could be: È stata avvistata l'ultima volta... She was last seen... On the notice, è stata disappears and we are left with the compressed: Avvistata l'ultima volta...

Also note that it is avvistata, feminine, because the missing animal is una gatta.

English normally reduces the whole idea to the very ordinary "last seen." Italian's avvistata feels closer to last spotted or last sighted, which seems particularly appropriate when everyone in the neighborhood has temporarily become part of a cat-search operation.  

Light a candle in your local church for this cat.

Simil Beagle, femmina, taglia medio/contenuta.
Beagle-like female, small-to-medium size.

This was another missing-animal notice, this time for Bella (who prefers shopping at LIDL over churches?).

The interesting word is simil. It isn't the adjective simile with the final e casually dropped. Simil- is a combining form derived from simile and is used to indicate something with characteristics resembling something else. Treccani gives examples such as similpelle, imitation or synthetic leather.

So simil Beagle means Beagle-like, resembling a Beagle, or, more loosely in English, Beagle type.

We might be tempted to translate it as "Beagle mix," but that says slightly more than the Italian does. Simil Beagle describes appearance or type; it doesn't necessarily make a claim about Bella's actual parentage.

It's useful shorthand for a lost-dog sign. If you don't know exactly what she is, but she looks enough like a Beagle that "Beagle" will help someone recognize her, simil Beagle gets the job done.

The Sound of Convenience

The Sound at 23:50 ~ Buying a Ticket ~ Why Is the Plane Awake? ~ 

The Sound Ledger ~ It's the Freight, Stupid ~ What Does Convenience Cost?

An apologetic flight taking off
over Bergamo at night

The Sound at 23:50

Bergamo, 23:50, a low roaring rumble. Then silence. Another one follows. Eventually, things quiet down. At 05:30, it starts again.

What we first thought was an aberration of a late or early flight here and there has become something we recognize as part of the acoustic day in Bergamo. We live near Milan–Bergamo Airport, the third busiest airport in Italy. As the crow flies, we are about 3.5 kilometers from the runway. Most of the time we hardly think about it. At other times, especially late at night or early in the morning, it sounds as if the airport is next door.

The sound isn't necessarily enormous. During the day it would probably disappear into everything else: cars, motorcycles, construction, voices from the street, bells. But at 11:50 at night the city has mostly gone quiet, and the sound of an airplane climbing out of Bergamo has the sky largely to itself. The same is true around 05:30 in the morning, when the first departures begin before much of the city has properly started its day.

After a while, we began to notice the pattern. Why so many planes at precisely these edges of the day? Who wants to leave Bergamo at six in the morning? Who wants to arrive somewhere close to midnight?

At first these were idle questions prompted by lying in bed listening to airplanes. Then we started looking for flights ourselves.

Buying a Ticket

One evening recently, we were looking at tickets on Ryanair. Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the dashed hope of truly low-cost flying unless you travel with a backpack and are prepared to wear five layers of clothes onto the plane.

We were looking at tickets to Pescara: departure at 05:50. Later looking at tickets to Helsinki: departure at 06:30. Arrivals back in Bergamo from these destinations were late evening, close to midnight. Slide forward or back a day or two, and the choices often seemed to stay at the edges of the day: very early in the morning or very late at night. 

These are just two examples. We’ve seen the same pattern with other destinations from Bergamo: departures and arrivals clustered around hours when most reasonable people are either still asleep or thinking about going to sleep.

There was probably a time when we would have shrugged and booked the flight anyway. A cheap ticket was a cheap ticket. Get up at 03:30, stumble into a taxi, arrive at the airport before sunrise, and recover later. These days, we are much less willing to organize an entire trip around an unpleasant flight time. We have changed days, changed destinations, chosen another airline, chose another mode of arriving, or simply abandoned an idea because the available flights were too early or too late.

And then came a realization.

The airplanes disturbing our sleep and the flights we routinely refuse to book might be part of the same phenomenon, viewed from opposite sides of the booking window.

At home, we hear the 11:50 departure climbing into the night and think, ah noisy. On the Ryanair website, we see the 05:50 departure and think, ah absolutely not.

The question became: Why are flights scheduled at the edges of the day?

Why Is the Plane Awake?

Our first theory was obvious enough: perhaps the early-morning and late-night slots were cheaper. Ryanair is famously focused on keeping costs down, and its own annual reports say that it favors airports with competitive charges and negotiates aggressively over airport and handling costs. Secondary and regional airports can also offer fewer slot restrictions than larger primary airports.

So maybe 05:50 was simply the bargain hour.

Except, at least at Bergamo, we couldn't find evidence for that. The airport published charges and fee schedules don’t indicate any special discount for taking off at 05:50 in the morning or 23:50 at night. Ryanair certainly cares about airport costs, but cheap airport and cheap time of day are not the same thing.

Slot availability is another possible factor. A flight leaving Bergamo early may need to arrive at another airport at a particular time, and the same aircraft has to fit into a whole day's sequence of flights. There are crews, airport restrictions, passenger demand, and the schedule at the other end to consider. It isn't as simple as Ryanair sitting in Bergamo and deciding that 05:50 is a particularly amusing time to send us to Pescara.

But the explanation that we kept coming back to was aircraft utilization.

An airplane is an expensive piece of machinery, and it only earns money when it is being used. In its 2025 fiscal year, Ryanair reported an average of 9.57 flight hours per aircraft per day (see Ryanair Holdings plc, Annual Report FY2025, Key Performance Indicators section, available at https://investor.ryanair.com). The figure isn't uniquely high. Some airlines, including other low-cost carriers, report even greater utilization. But Ryanair reports it as a key operating statistic, which tells you something about how important it is to the business.

A long working day for an airplane has consequences. If you want to squeeze several flights out of the same aircraft, somebody has to be on the first flight of the day and somebody has to be on the last.

The 05:50 departure begins to make more sense when you stop thinking of it as our flight to Pescara and start thinking of it as the first movement in an aircraft's entire working day. That plane may return to Bergamo and head somewhere else, return and leave again. The unattractive hour for us may be what makes another flight possible later in the day.

In other words, the plane is awake because it has work to do. And suddenly the roar at 23:50 starts to make a little more sense.

The Sound Ledger

It turns out that in the bureaucracy of Italian aviation, our annoyance at the 23:50 flight has already been anticipated, has a formula, and is extensively measured.

Italy measures airport noise using an indicator called LVA (Livello di Valutazione del rumore Aeroportuale) (see SACBO / Milan Bergamo Airport environmental noise page), roughly the Airport Noise Assessment Level. LVA isn't the decibel reading of one airplane flying overhead. It is an overall measure designed specifically for airport noise. The annual LVA is calculated from 21 observation days: three weeks selected during different parts of the year, with the highest-traffic week used in each period. During those weeks, noise is measured continuously. See following Italy’s DM 31.10.1997 (article 1) for methodology for measuring airport noise.

From the May 2026 data (from the linked noise page above), Bagnatica and Seriate show some of the highest noise levels (mid-to-high 60s dB(A)). Bagnatica and Seriate are noisier because they sit directly under the runway 28 (heading toward 280 degrees) arrival path, and arrivals consistently come from the east. Given Bagnatica's position beneath the Runway 28 approach, much of that exposure comes from low-altitude arrivals from the east. Arrivals can come from the west (Runway 10, landing toward 100°) and land eastward at Bergamo, but it is rare.

 

Monitoring stations around the Bergamo airport

Bagnatica’s numbers give a hint of what it feels like to live under the runway 28 arrival path. In May, the station recorded a minimum LVAj of 58.3 dB(A) and a maximum of 70.1 dB(A)—an 11.8 dB spread that is not just a technical fluctuation but a substantial difference. Sound is logarithmic, and a 10 dB increase is often perceived, for comparable sounds, as roughly twice as loud. But LVAj is not a continuous background-noise reading: it summarizes the accumulated effect of aircraft events during the day. In other words, Bagnatica is not sitting under a steady 70 dB roar. What changes is the frequency, intensity, and cumulative impact of aircraft passing overhead.

We are glad we are not in bed in Bagnatica. But someone is.

And the LVA formula makes an important distinction between day and night.

For LVA calculations, daytime runs from 06:00 to 23:00 and nighttime from 23:00 to 06:00. Noise events occurring at night receive an additional penalty, meaning that—within the LVA index—a single nighttime aircraft event can influence the result roughly as much as ten comparable daytime events. Note: the Bagnatica numbers cited above are daily averages. The day/night numbers are not published. A nighttime LVAn could theoretically exceed 70 dB(A) at Bagnatica, but the bulletin’s published numbers would not show it — they only show the combined daily LVAj.

The airplane at 23:50 isn't literally ten times louder than the airplane at 11:50. The multiplier is there because context matters. At noon, an aircraft competes with traffic, voices, construction, motorcycles and the general noise of a city going about its business. Near midnight, the same aircraft has the stage largely to itself. More importantly, people are trying to sleep.

Bergamo has quite an elaborate system for keeping track of all this. SACBO, the company that operates Milan Bergamo Airport, runs eight permanent noise-monitoring stations, operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, supplemented by two mobile stations. The system combines microphone readings with radar tracks, weather information, and flight logs so that individual noise events can be associated with aircraft movements. The results are analyzed monthly, published publicly, and periodically checked by ARPA Lombardia.

Three of the fixed stations are actually within the Comune di Bergamo: Via Linneo, Via Quasimodo and Via Colognola ai Colli. The other five are in surrounding communities: Orio al Serio, Bagnatica, Seriate, Grassobbio and Azzano San Paolo.

In other words, it’s not just me hearing the noise, there are microphones scattered around listening to it too. But the microphones don't need a good night's sleep.

Bergamo also has Noise Abatement Procedures intended to reduce the impact of aircraft on surrounding communities. Of particular importance for the city are restrictions on nighttime departures using Runway 28, the westward departure direction, during the 23:00 to 06:00 period. Exceptions can be made for weather, unusual traffic conditions, or operational safety, and ENAC can sanction airlines for violations of the procedures.

So, it would be unfair to say that Bergamo does nothing about aircraft noise. In fact, when it comes to monitoring and mitigation, the airport appears to take the issue quite seriously.

But monitoring noise and preventing noise are two different things. This is where a few comparisons with other European airports heavily associated with low-cost flying make that distinction clearer.

• At Brussels South Charleroi Airport (curfew info), there is a curfew between 23:00 and 06:30, together with a quota system for late operations, restrictions on the noisiest aircraft, noise thresholds and fines when airlines exceed them. The surrounding region has also carried out a large soundproofing program for affected buildings.
• At Eindhoven Airport, scheduled flights have not been allowed after 23:00 since October 2020, apart from limited provisions for delayed arrivals. The airport also caps the total number of flights and charges lower airport fees for quieter aircraft.
• London Stansted, one of Ryanair's largest bases, takes yet another approach. It continues to allow nighttime flying, but the British government imposes both a limit on the number of aircraft movements and a separate noise quota during the core nighttime period. The current regime, running from October 2025 through October 2028, retains those controls. In other words, even if quieter aircraft makes more flights possible, there is still a ledger keeping track of both the number of flights and the amount of noise they collectively produce.

Bergamo has chosen a somewhat different balance. It measures extensively, publishes the measurements, uses special flight procedures and restricts certain nighttime runway operations. But it does not have the broad nighttime curfew found at Charleroi or the prohibition on scheduled flights after 23:00 used at Eindhoven. Compared with those airports, Bergamo seems stronger on mitigation than on prevention.

And that seems important. The 05:50 departure isn't simply an unavoidable fact of low-cost aviation. Similar airports have drawn the line in different places.

How much of the airline's long working day a community is willing to hear is, at least partly, a choice.

It's the Freight, Stupid

At this point, we thought we had the story more or less figured out. We live near a major low-cost airline hub. For example, Ryanair sells tickets at 05:50 in the morning and close to midnight. Its airplanes work long days. We hear airplanes at 05:50 in the morning and close to midnight.

Case closed.

Except it wasn't.

While looking through SACBO's noise information, we came across reports of nighttime departures from Runway 28. Runway 28 sends aircraft westward (280 degrees), in the general direction of Bergamo, and its use for departures between 23:00 and 06:00 is restricted. SACBO publishes lists of the flights authorized to use this runway during those hours because of weather, air-traffic conditions, safety or other permitted circumstances.

We opened one of the reports, from 2020, expecting to see Ryanair flight numbers everywhere. Instead, a surprising number of flights were cargo and courier operations.

This required a recalibration of our theory.

The report doesn't tell us that all, or even most, nighttime flights at Bergamo are cargo flights. It covers a specific subset of nighttime departures from a specific runway, and 2020 was hardly a normal year for aviation. But it was enough to remind us that the roar we hear in bed cannot automatically be blamed on the person flying to Pescara for €29.99.

There is another wrinkle in using 2020 as our window into freight traffic. DHL, once a major courier presence at Bergamo, was in the process of moving its air hub operations to Malpensa, where its new international hub began operating in 2020 and was formally inaugurated the following year. Cargo traffic at Bergamo subsequently fell substantially. Today, UPS is the airport's principal established courier operator, flying from Bergamo to its European hub in Cologne and other destinations. There are also smaller logistics operators handling, among other things, e-commerce traffic between China and Italy.

2020 also appears to be the last year for which SACBO published these Runway 28 nighttime lists. Another small mystery for a layperson to wonder about.

SACBO has stated that Bergamo’s future in cargo lies in becoming a specialized e‑commerce logistics hub — focusing on fast, efficient courier operations rather than competing with Malpensa’s large‑scale freight volumes. (L’Eco di Bergamo, Bergamo News). I hope efficient means less noise.

Freight has its own reasons for liking the night, because express cargo works particularly well while the rest of us are sleeping. Packages collected during the day can be flown to sorting hubs overnight, moved again, and arrive somewhere else in time for another day's deliveries. For passenger airlines, the edges of the day help extend the productive life of an aircraft. For express freight, the night itself is part of the product. Yesterday's package is supposed to become today's delivery.

Cargo operations can also have different "acoustic characteristics". Freighter fleets tend to include older aircraft than passenger fleets, in part because passenger aircraft often spend a second career carrying freight. Older generations of aircraft generally have larger noise footprints than their newer counterparts. At Bergamo, meanwhile, a growing share of passenger traffic is flown by newer aircraft such as Ryanair's Boeing 737 MAX, which SACBO's own measurements show to be several decibels quieter than the older 737-800.

It would be tempting to turn this into another overly simple explanation: cargo airplanes are old, heavy and loud; passenger airplanes are new, light and quiet. A cargo aircraft isn't necessarily heavier than a passenger aircraft, and carrying freight doesn't inherently require more thrust or make an airplane noisier. Aircraft type, age, engine technology, actual takeoff weight, weather and operating procedure all matter.

What is different is the timing. Cargo and express-delivery networks have a strong economic reason to use hours that passenger airlines and passengers might prefer to avoid.

And so, our neat story about the sound of low-cost flying became messier.

Some of the early-morning sound really may be the Ryanair flight we saw on the booking screen. Some of the nighttime roar may be freight moving through the European logistics system. Both use Bergamo Airport. Both have reasons to stretch activity toward hours when much of the surrounding community is asleep.

The common denominator isn't Ryanair and other low-cost passenger airlines after all. It's an airport working around the clock.

What Does Convenience Cost?

By now, our original theory had become considerably less tidy. Maybe what we are hearing isn't simply the sound of low-cost flying. Maybe it's the sound of convenience.

We want inexpensive flights to Helsinki. We also want the thing we ordered online to appear at our door tomorrow. Neither expectation seems particularly remarkable anymore. Behind both, however, are complicated systems trying to squeeze time out of the day.

Online shopping in Italy has changed enormously. The Osservatorio eCommerce B2C at Politecnico di Milano/Netcomm reports that Italian online purchases were €16.6 billion in 2015. In 2016, product purchases alone were €9 billion. For 2025, the same research group put total e-commerce above €62.3 billion, with products above €40 billion.

Not all those packages fly, of course. Many don't. And we can't draw a straight line from Italian e-commerce growth to freight traffic at Bergamo. In fact, cargo flights at the airport are much less numerous today than they were before DHL moved its courier operation away from Bergamo in 2020. But overnight freight remains part of the airport's activity, and the larger logistics system exists because we use it.

It's easy to complain about a Ryanair departure at 05:50 when we don't want to take it. It's also easy to complain about an airplane passing overhead at midnight. It's harder when we recognize ourselves somewhere in the demand that keeps the entire system running.

Bergamo Airport works hard. In 2025, SACBO handled nearly 17 million passengers, more than 104,000 aircraft movements, and about 24,500 tonnes of freight. The airport officially operates on a 24‑hour basis, and its development planning — as reflected in ENAC’s approved masterplan — is built around distributing annual traffic across the full H24 operating day. (See SACBO).

But there is another piece of infrastructure immediately beside it: Bergamo, where people live.

That brings us back to the question we stumbled into while listening to airplanes in bed: where should the productive day of an airport end and the sleeping day of a city begin?

One obvious answer would be a curfew. But Bergamo doesn't have one.

We wondered whether that was simply because Bergamo has only one runway and needs to squeeze as much traffic as possible through it. A single runway does certainly create pressure to use the available hours efficiently. Yet it doesn't make nighttime operations inevitable.

Eindhoven has one runway and closes to scheduled flights at night. Charleroi also operates a single runway and normally closes between 23:00 and 06:30. Stansted, another huge Ryanair base with one runway, remains open through the night but operates under government limits on both the number and cumulative noise of nighttime flights.

So, Bergamo's 24-hour operation isn't simply an engineering necessity imposed by having one strip of asphalt. It is also a choice about how that infrastructure is used.

We couldn't find an official SACBO or ENAC statement saying, in so many words, Bergamo has no curfew because... And perhaps there isn't one simple answer. A curfew would reduce operating flexibility. It would constrain passenger schedules and overnight freight. It could push flights into already busy periods immediately before and after the closure, move some activity to other airports, and ultimately make some services more expensive or less attractive.

Those are real costs.

But allowing flights through the nighttime has costs too. They simply appear somewhere else on the ledger.

There are ways of drawing the line short of closing the airport. Night flights can be capped, as at Stansted. Airlines can pay more to operate at noise-sensitive hours or with noisier aircraft. Airports can give preference to newer, quieter planes. Certain runway directions can be restricted, as Bergamo already does. Homes can be insulated and noise continuously monitored, also things Bergamo already does.

In other words, there isn't a choice between having an airport and not having an airport. There are many choices in between those extremes. And that's perhaps where this investigation finally landed.

Low-cost airlines aren't the villain. Freight isn't the villain. Nor are those of us who like inexpensive flights and packages arriving at the door. The interesting question is how we divide the benefits and costs of all that convenience.

Commerce would happily use all 24 hours of the day. Human beings tend to reserve a few of them for sleeping.

At 23:50 in Bergamo, we can sometimes hear where that line has been drawn and not be happy with it.

Following the Cool: Observations from Helsinki in the Summer of 2026

The Real Reason We Chose Helsinki ~ Are We Part of a New Wave? ~ 

Speaking of Tourists ~ The North Knows ~ Public Space as a Measure of a Society ~

A City That Doesn't Need to Perform ~What Helsinki Taught Us About Travel ~

Photos

  

   

Top: Left and center Suomenlinna. Right: Temppeliaukio Church (Temppeliaukion kirkko), Helsinki.

Bottom: Left: Helsingin päärautatieasema - Lyhdynkantajat - the Lantern Bearers at the main train station. Center left: View of Helsinki Cathedral. Center right and right: Facades in Helsinki.

While we were walking Helsinki's waterfronts in light jackets, much of southern Europe was enduring another summer of extreme heat. June 2026 was the hottest June ever recorded in Western Europe, and the heat continued into July, driving wildfires in France and the Iberian Peninsula. 

We hadn't come to Finland as climate refugees, at least not consciously. We came because Helsinki had also attracted our intention as interesting, yes cooler, but also because we like museums, coffee, public spaces, and cities near water. Yet by the end of the trip, a question kept resurfacing: Were we simply tourists in Helsinki, or were we following a larger movement north?

 
In this travel post, we won’t tell you where to get salmon soup or list museums you must see. We’d like to take this opportunity to use Helsinki as a lens for thinking about how climate may already be reshaping where people choose to spend their summers. And to talk about things that we noticed in Helsinki.

The Real Reason We Chose Helsinki

We admit it, the original attraction was practical as much as cultural. Helsinki was appealing because it offered something increasingly rare in late July: moderate temperatures. In our planning notes from months before the trip, Helsinki was explicitly chosen as a cooler weather target as compared to Italy.

We arrived in Helsinki on a Saturday in July. For us arriving in a city with gray skies and cool weather felt like a feature rather than a disappointment. At the Sibelius Monument north of downtown Helsinki, in our travel notes, we wrote: "Gray and cool, and we love it."

Besides the weather, we would come to love our 5 days in Helsinki for more than cool weather. The city has a lot to recommend, like walkability, great transit, nice people, great museums, and tons of food options.

Are We Part of a New Wave?

So is our trip an escape north, looking for cooler temperatures? Is this the wave of the future? Answer: likely yes.

For years, Mediterranean Europe was the obvious summer destination and still very much is (c.f. the post Escape to Isolatos: Notes on Curated Remoteness)

Increasingly, northern cities may be becoming summer destinations not despite their climate but because of it. Helsinki felt full of a different type of traveler, perhaps skewing older, more families, and people moving at a slower pace. You specifically noticed a different tourist profile than what you often encounter farther south. This wasn’t the average tourist we encountered in Porto Venere in 2021 or Elba in 2019. No one was furiously protecting a rented deck chair and dutifully rotating every 20 minutes to even out a tan.

No, these tourists were dressed smartly in light jackets and scarves.

Speaking of Tourists

We stayed at the Lapland Hotel - a Finnish hotel chain with 20 hotels. Of these, 14 are located in the region of Lapland, five city hotels further south like the one in Helsinki. The hotel is all reindeer antlers, Sámi music (pleasing, slightly droning and rhythmic), carefully placed lighting, and natural color palettes, curated signifiers — a kind of thematic shorthand meant to evoke Lapland quickly and comfortably for visitors who may never go there. Or maybe we will? 

The hotel experience was pleasing and relaxing. There was the subtle context of the unknown north as a horizon for travelers. Lapland as a global brand: aurora borealis, reindeer, Sámi culture, wilderness minimalism. Was our Helsinki hotel a gateway product — a sampler?

The staff at the Lapland were super nice, and the breakfast buffet was the best we've had. Smoked salmon with pickled spruce tips in the morning? Hell, yes. A special oat porridge produced daily by the hotel, Finnish squeaky cheese, and spruce yogurt with lingonberry. 

On a gray Sunday (love it!), we walked from the Kiasma Museum to the Old Market Hall (Vanha kauppahalli). As we approached the hall, we couldn't help noticing a few large cruise ships anchored in the harbor. Argh! Even here? Yes.

Two days later, on a trip to Suomenlinna on a ferry, we would pass by these behemoths, strangely silent as all the tourists were injected into the city. Near the Helsinki Cathedral (Helsingin tuomiokirkko) and the Sibelius Monument, we would see some of these tourists hustled on and off buses with earbuds tuned into someone explaining a quick history of this or that.

The North Knows

The north knows what winter is, but now it may need to prepare for summer and tourists in the coming years.

Until then, some north-related things we noticed in Helsinki:

• Buildings are engineered around snow and ice. Just look at those metal, steep roof pitches, and snow guards.
• Downspouts with ice-management systems. What are those curious electrical wire loops doing in drainpipes?
• Public infrastructure that adapted to climate reality. Extensive underground passageways and facilities...some are designed to double as bunkers.

What caught our attention as almost futuristic at first glance really isn’t. Helsinki is a city visibly shaped by environmental conditions. Climate is not an abstraction there; it is built into everyday life.

Also, an interesting fact in our what-we learned on our Helsinki vacation is this: the water surrounding Helsinki, though being seawater,  is less salty than ordinary ocean water.  We noticed this walking around Lapinlahti, a shallow enclosed inner bay not far from the city center, where the common reed, Phragmites australis, grew in the water. Odd we thought. Isn't there too much salt in the water for this grass? 

The Baltic Sea is a brackish sea, meaning a mixture of salt water and fresh water. It receives enormous amounts of freshwater from rivers, rainfall and runoff, while relatively little salty Atlantic water enters through the narrow Danish straits. Around Helsinki, coastal salinity is typically only about 4.8–5.5 parts per thousand, compared with roughly 35 parts per thousand in the open ocean. The Baltic Sea is a brackish arm of the Atlantic Ocean. And in fact, the common reed can grow well in brackish and moderately salty water, but not so well in ocean water.

Public Space as a Measure of a Society

A second major theme of our trip was public space and what that says about a city/place/culture. We approached Helsinki with hungry eyes. We are on vacation after all and are much more attuned to differences. And the Nordic countries (more correct than using Scandinavian for referring to Finland) don’t disappoint in terms of ingenuity and efficiency in doing things that is obvious after arriving from Italy. No shade on Italy.

Some observations:

• Integrated walking paths and green spaces thought out with pedestrians and bikers in mind. 
• The seamless movement between city, shoreline, and nature.
• A clean city.
• Efficient transit that requires little thought on how to purchase a ticket and use.
• Family-friendly and one might argue people-friendly details everywhere: benches, bathrooms, and space to maneuver.

The argument is less that Helsinki is perfect. It's that many of its public spaces seemed designed around people, trust and inclusion, not defensiveness, hostility, or exclusion.

A case in point is Helsinki’s Central Library called Oodi, the Finnish word for 'ode'. It opened in December 2018 on Kansalaistori—Citizens’ Square—directly opposite Finland’s Parliament. That position is intentional: Oodi presents access to information, culture, technology and public space as part of democratic life, not simply as a municipal book-lending service. Almost all of the building is devoted to public use.

The library has three levels.

• The glass-walled ground floor functions almost like a continuation of the square outside. It is open, busy and easy to walk through, with several entrances and relatively few psychological barriers. Architecturally, the building seems to lift itself up and invite people underneath it.
• The middle floor is the enclosed, darker, and more intimate part of the building. It contains meeting rooms, workspaces, gaming rooms, music and recording studios, photography and video facilities, a communal kitchen and an extensive urban workshop. Equipment includes sewing machines, 3D printers, a laser cutter, electronics workstations, large-format printing and other creative tools. This floor expresses one of Oodi’s central ideas: knowledge is not only something you read—it is something you produce, practice and share. A person can record music, edit a video, sew something, hold a meeting, play a game or learn a technical skill without needing to own the equipment privately. We were blown away when we saw this floor!
• The top floor returns to the recognizable idea of a library, but in an unusually open form. Known as Book Heaven, it is a bright, gently undulating landscape of bookshelves, reading areas, children’s spaces, trees and informal seating. Its glass perimeter offers broad views across Töölönlahti and toward Parliament, while the Citizens’ Balcony extends the reading room outdoors during the warmer months.

When we pulled open the doors of the library, we felt a positive vibration: happy people, moving and meeting with each other. Oodi feels democratic because it treats knowledge, technology, comfort, and creative space as public goods rather than privileges. People can read, work, meet, make things, or simply spend time there without being expected to buy anything. Its openness suggests that every citizen has an equal claim to the building. It feels less like an institution serving the public and more like a place the public collectively owns.

A City That Doesn't Need to Perform

One thing that emerges from your notes is how often the city surprised us by not trying too hard.

Examples:

• Oodi as we mentioned above. We mistook it for a second (and only a second) as yet another shopping mall from the outside but how wrong we were.
• Kiasma, a contemporary art museum located on Mannerheimintie in Helsinki, Finland. Its name kiasma, Finnish for chiasma, alludes to the basic conceptual idea of its architect, Steven Holl. The collection and curation were top notch.
• A long meandering walk (like many you could take) to Temppeliaukio Church (sunk in the ground), to the curious Sibelius monument, a coffee stop at Cafetoria Café & Shop, and back to city center, hugging the Seurasaarenselkä open sea inlet and Lapinlahti bay. Along the walk back, we passed Hietaranta Beach, a proper beach, just minutes from the city center.
• Great coffee experiences at Cafetoria, Rams Roasters (visited twice), Andante, and begrudingly Kaffa Roastery (if indifferent baristas don’t bother you).
• Helsinki's architecture moving between neoclassical grandeur, National Romantic stonework, Nordic modernism, and bold contemporary design. What unites it is a distinctly Finnish restraint: buildings tend to value light, natural materials, human scale, and usefulness over spectacle.
• A visit to Suomenlinna, windswept views of the Baltic and a chance to tour the Sukellusvene Vesikko (submarine).
• EMMA – a hidden gem of a museum just a short metro ride away from downtown. The Futuro house, Collection Kakkonen, and the extensive Bryk & Wirkkala Visible Storage.

Let’s take our EMMA visit as an example. EMMA impressed us partly because it did not seem to be performing for visitors or trying too hard to announce its importance. It was simply there: confident, spacious, and deeply integrated into the cultural life around it (the Espoo area). That restraint felt Finnish to us, especially compared with museums that rely on spectacle, branding, or architectural drama to attract attention. Yet EMMA has plenty of drama once you enter, beginning with the vast former printing house and the visible logic of its industrial past. The building gives the art room to breathe, while its history adds another layer to the experience rather than competing with it. The collection itself felt thoughtful and wide-ranging, with enough surprise to keep the museum from seeming overly curated or self-conscious. What stayed with us was the combination of modesty and substance: an extraordinary museum that never seemed to insist that we find it extraordinary.

What Helsinki Taught Us About Travel

We left Helsinki wondering whether we would return in the future, perhaps in autumn or spring. We also left wondering whether our travel habits are quietly changing. For years we chased a tolerable amount of warmth with access to azure-colored water and swimming possibilities.

Now we seem to be chasing something different, perhaps moderation. Helsinki may not have provided an answer, but it sharpened the question. If summers in southern Europe continue to become hotter and more fire-prone, perhaps the future summer itinerary for many travelers will not point toward the Mediterranean. Perhaps it will point toward the Baltic, the Nordics, and places that once seemed too cool to consider.

And if that shift happens, what does it mean for the people who already live there? This question was raised partially in a beautiful exhibit at Kiasma We Who Remain - Sámi Art in Focus.

Exhibition description: The Sápmi region, which today spans four countries, existed long before the emergence of Nordic nation-states or national ideologies. The exhibition invites viewers to explore Sámi identity as expressed by the Sámi themselves. The exhibition highlights the complexities of Sámi experience, showing how Sámi identity endures and remains vibrant despite externally imposed pressures.

The Sámi exhibit highlights the pressures that a more northerly world could place on northern communities that already have struggled through past exploitation.

The exhibit’s broader question is what does a changing climate, changing habits, and ever more tourists worldwide mean for places like Helsinki? Is it a future where tourists arrive in Helsinki not for snow, but for shade?

Photos

  

Coffee experiences in Helsinki at Ram Roasters, Cafetoria (try the Brookies), Andante.

  

Left: Collection  Kakkonen at EMMA- Annikki Hovisaari (1918 - 2004) - five vases. Futuro house at EMMA. A barnacle goose.

  

EMMA - Antti Laitinen Chiming Forest, EMMA - Bryk & Wirkkala Visible Storage, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art EMMA - Espoon modernin taiteen museo.
 

  
Helsinki facades and roofs.

  

Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (Nykytaiteen museo Kiasma), Osmo Valtonen (1929  - 2002, Finland) - Circulograph (1983), Siri Baggerman (1978 The Netherlands - Sápmi) - The Drone (2021).

  

Temppeliaukio Church (Temppeliaukion kirkko), Amos Rex, Sibelius Monument - Helsinki.

  

Left and center: Helsinki Central Library Oodi (Helsingin keskustakirjasto Oodi). Right: Marina Abramović (b. 1946) - Counting the Rice - Räkna ris (2005) at EMMA.