Street Sign Language Lesson LVI

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In this round of Street Sign Language Lesson, we deal with a fascist-era sign spotted during a bathroom break, try to understand if a place is open or closed in Bergamo, and why people think drinking collagen will help their skin.

I Sigg. CLIENTI SONO PREGATI DI ORINARE ALL’INTERNO DELLA CASA ONDE EVITARE DI LORDARE LA PUBBLICA, ANNO 1929 (VIII) EF.
“Gentlemen customers are kindly requested to urinate inside the establishment to avoid dirtying the public space outside.”


Really, we just stopped for a pee-break and thought this looked like an interesting sign. We were at Snack Bar Giusy (near Passo Pordio) skiing the Sellaronda. We didn’t expect to get a history lesson out of it. Perfect for Travelmarx.

This sign is a little time capsule of Italian public‑hygiene regulation, social class performance, and Fascist‑era dating conventions, all wrapped in a politely stern voice.

The sign addresses “I Sigg. Clienti” — “Gentlemen customers” — and asks them to urinate inside the establishment rather than in the street, “to avoid dirtying the public road.” Then it ends with “Anno 1929 (VII° E.F.)”, meaning year 1929, year 7 of the Fascist Era (Era Fascista), which was the official dating system used by Mussolini’s regime. What!? Didn't know that.

Urban sanitation in the early 20th century was uneven. Bars, cafés, and osterie often had to remind patrons not to relieve themselves outside. This sign is part of that everyday infrastructure of discipline.

The “VII° E.F.” signals the sign (or at least the original) was produced after 1926, when the regime mandated Fascist dating. It reflects the regime’s obsession with order, cleanliness, and public discipline. Even mundane signage became part of the ideological landscape.

What’s curious here is this that this sign is likely some kind of reproduction. Why was it put here? What are the owners trying to signal? Humor or something else?



PREZZI IN ALLESTIMENTO
“Prices under set-up”

Shops use this kind of signage when the display is ready but the price tags aren’t finalized or haven’t been placed yet. It’s a kind of moment in retail when the shelf is complete, but the economic meaning hasn’t been attached.

The sign is nearby some prostate medicine, so I was fixated on the sign being relevant to only that product. However, the pharmacist explained that the sign really applies to all prices marked (non drug-items) as a way to sort of cover the fact that not all prices are show for all products and/or the prices aren’t updated. Kind of a cover-your-ass thing.

MOSTRA IN DISALLESTIMENTO, ESPOZIONE IN RIALLESTIMENTO
“Exhibition being taken down, display being re-installed".

I guess you can say this gallery space is not fully closed nor fully open, but in transition. It’s a polite way of saying don’t expect too much of us at the moment. This reminds us of the famous “open” until we’re not state of places. Often we see a sign that says a place is open, the hours are right, but the place is closed.




Diamoci del tu
“Let’s be informal (between us)”

Dare del tu - “to address somebody informally” and Dare del lei - “to address somebody formally”. This ad for the new (and very much improved) Bernareggi museum is very simple and effective. Come on in and let’s get to know each other



SAN BENEDETTO – COLLAGENE + ZINCO + ACIDO IALURONICO
“San Benedetto – collagen, zinc, hyaluronic acid"

A ritualized wellness product: a small, daily gesture that makes people feel they’re caring for their skin from the inside. More specious products selling the narrative of inside-outside beauty. Collagen consumed is broken down into amino acids. It doesn’t stay as intact collagen molecules that magically patch your skin.

Zinc could be useful if your diet is low in this mineral, but this is rare, and you’d being buying a supplement instead of overpriced water.

Now to hyaluronic acid, this typical skincare additive is useful for holding water in the skin. However, ingesting it doesn’t act like a topical moisturizer.

At the end of the San Benedetto commercials, the model/actor turns to the camera and says “San Benedetto, my secret”. The only secret is how they get away with marketing this stuff.


 

Carote al selenio; Selenella – La carota
“Selenium carrots”

Here we go again. This time, it’s selenium in carrots.

Selenium is a trace mineral essential for human health. In general, in a country like Italy, selenium deficiency isn’t an issue in normal diets at least you wouldn’t think it is until you start reading packaging.

The selenium in these carrots comes from soil management, not genetic modification. Producers add selenium to the soil or select naturally selenium‑rich areas. The most visible brand is Selenella, a consortium of Italian growers that promotes potatoes, onions, and carrots as fonte di selenio (source of selenium). This marketing niche has been around since 2011.

The taste? We haven’t done a blind taste test but we’ve not heard that selenium-enriched carrots taste any different. We are so done with “functional foods”.

CEROTTI PER HERPES LABIALE
"Cold sore patches"

Sounds so much nicer in English. If this poor girl shown on the packaging had just had drank more Skin Care water and eaten more selenium-enriched carrots, then she would not have ended up in this situation.

GATTO CICCIONE E COCCOLOSO DI 7 ANNI CERCA CASA. CRESCIUTO IN APPARTAMENTO. PIGRO E MANSUETO.
“Fat, cuddly 7-year-old cat looking for a home. Raised in an apartment. Lazy and meek.”


What drew our eye to this ad was the word mansueto, as we never had seen it used before.

What a mammone! Even the cats in Italy jeez. I got news for the current owners; it’s all an act.

On Naming, Not Persuasion

A letter to not send.

We wrote the following letter with no intention of sending it. It was a way to name something we were carrying and to put anger somewhere that wouldn’t leak out sideways.

We wrote it to clarify what had changed for us, not to change anyone else. Sometimes naming the damage is the only agency left.

We are sharing because we suspect we are not the only ones who have had these thoughts lately.

This letter is not meant to persuade you. It is meant to name what your choice has done to me.

Your vote changed how safe I feel in the world and how safe I feel with you. What you call politics entered my life as a personal loss.

The deepest wound is not disagreement, but your refusal to reflect or take responsibility for the harm your choice caused. I carry the consequences while you deny their existence.

I no longer trust that we share basic values of decency and truth. That loss has narrowed what we can share and who I can be with you.

This is the truth I need to acknowledge, even if you never do.

The Personal Atlas of Known and Unknown Lands

  
Left: The two globes in the Sala Tassiana of the Biblioteca Civica Angelo Mai in Bergamo.
Center: Coronelli's two globes.
Right: Terraqueous Globe detail of Japan.

If you walk into the Sala Tassiana of the Biblioteca Civica Angelo Mai in Bergamo, the first thing that catches your eyes are the intricate ceiling frescoes. After that your eyes will naturally be drawn to two enormous globes positioned on the southwest side of the room overlooking Piazza Vecchia. The globes are by Vincenzo Maria Coronelli (1650 - 1718), a Venetian friar, cosmographer of the Serenissima, and enthusiastic compiler of the world as it was understood in 1688.

Each globe is so large you have to walk around it, let's say orbit it, several times to take it all in. One globe is for the heavens (globo celeste) and one for the earth (globo terracqueo). Each globe has a circumference of 3 meters and 33 centimeters and is made of 50 sheets of paper, printed as segments that adhered to the spherical surface and watercoloured.

The terrestrial globe, in particular, is a kind of time capsule of global knowledge. Australia drifts at the bottom like a partially remembered dream — its outline incomplete, its proportions speculative. North America is traced confidently along the coasts, but the interior is a vast narrative improvisation: mountain ranges guessed at, rivers wandering like afterthoughts. Coronelli’s coastlines are often sharp and surprisingly accurate; the continents’ insides are where imagination filled in for evidence.

Standing before the globe, you can't help but fell the tug of its contradictions, the authority of its ink paired with the tentativeness of its knowledge. A world rendered boldly, yet only partially known.

Thinking about cartography and old (half-wrong) globes, I realized I’ve been carrying around a map of my own that has just undergone its own quiet redrawing.

Terra Incognita and Other Honest Admissions

Old maps leave blank spaces where knowledge fails. Terra incognita or the famous "unknown land." People often imagine all medieval maps saying “Here be dragons,” but only one globe actually used the phrase. The Latin version hic sunt dracones appears on the Hunt–Lenox Globe, a tiny copper sphere from the early 1500s, and its presence says more about us than about geography. Still, the myth persists because it captures something true: when humans face the unknown, we fill it with monsters.

Cartographers, ever resourceful, handled their ignorance with style. If they didn’t know what was inland, they placed a camel caravan or a decorative wind god in the region. The message was simple: We don’t know what’s here, but we’d like you to admire the artistry anyway. And sometimes the flourish was enough. Hic sunt dracones was less a warning about danger than a placeholder for everything cartographers couldn’t yet explain — a polite way of saying, “Your guess is as good as ours.”

I’ve been thinking about these blank spaces, how every map is as notable for what it includes as for what it admits it cannot.

And how, quietly, the same is true for the maps we inherit in life.

We’re often told these inherited maps are authoritative with their fixed borders, fixed routes, and fixed loyalties. They come bundled with warnings about venturing too far outside them. But like old globes, the authority doesn’t always match the accuracy.

On Personal Maps and the Places That Go Blank

Each of us begins with a kind of inherited map: family on one shore, childhood landmarks on another, a river or two connecting everything. It isn’t a map we draw ourselves. It’s issued to us, like a passport full of destinations we didn’t choose but learned to navigate.

Lately, two parts of my inherited map have slipped into blankness.

Not dramatically. No earthquakes, no torn parchment. Just… absence. One region faded through time and paperwork. Another through silence and distance. Two old territories that once felt central but now feel as if the cartographer simply put down the pen and moved on.

I’ve been surprised by how strange but right this feels.

Sometimes seeing the final outline of an old map complete with its omissions, its boundaries, its blank spaces is strangely clarifying. A territory I once assumed I belonged to turns out not to include me after all. Its borders close, not with malice, but with finality.

And like the medieval mapmakers, I’m left to decide what to put in the newly empty space: a dragon? A sea creature? A polite label that simply reads terra incognita?

Or nothing at all.

The Portolan Problem

Portolan charts were practical medieval sailing maps that showed coastlines with astonishing accuracy. Harbors were carefully sketched, headlands crisply rendered, wind roses scattered across the seas like compass confetti.

But the interiors? Blank. Portolan charts didn’t depict inland geography at all, not because the mapmakers lacked imagination, but because sailors simply didn’t need that information. Their job was straightforward: help you avoid running your boat into things.

This is oddly relatable in my own personal cartography. I know the coastlines of things, the visible contours of family stories, the major events, the places where people intersected with my life. But the interior terrain? The motivations, histories, silences? The land routes that might explain how these regions evolved?

Never mapped. Maybe never mappable.

Seeing the final shape of an inherited relationship sometimes feels like standing at the edge of a portolan chart: coastline crystal clear, interior completely unknown. And that’s just the nature of the document.

   

Left: Vincenzo Maria Coronelli's Globo terracqueo.

Center left: Terraqueous Globe - portrait of the author, dedications to the Republic of Venice and to the Doge Andrea Morosini.

Center right: Terraqueous Globe - showing the California Problem - California as an Island.

Right: Vincenzo Maria Coronelli's Globo celeste.

Aging, the Slow Redrawing of Continents

If family drafts the first edition of our personal atlas, aging is the relentless editor who arrives later with new measurements, a sharper pencil, and no patience for outdated geography.

I’ve noticed how aging quietly redraws my internal map in ways I didn’t authorize: 

• Hills I once sprinted up now have contour lines I’m obliged to respect. 
• New territories appear, which I never noticed before, while old ones recede.
• Bodily limits creep in like rising sea levels, reshaping the coastline. It’s not loss exactly. More like the natural erosion of certainty.

Aging teaches you that maps are temporary. Bodies change, habits change, desires change. The bright red “you are here” dot keeps sliding when you’re not looking.

And yet the movement brings its own kind of curiosity: What new shore is this? When did this path appear? Who added this mountain?

It's the same impulse that kept old cartographers revising their work — not despair, but discovery.

On Living with Blank Spaces

What is interesting about old maps is how their creators handled uncertainty. They didn’t erase the world when they guessed wrong. They didn’t tear up the parchment because a coastline had to be redrawn.

They just corrected it. Layer by layer, year by year.

A map was never a pronouncement. It was a working draft.

I take some comfort in that. The blank spaces on my own map — the ones left by two relationships that no longer hold coordinates — don’t need to be filled in. They don’t need dragons or speculation or a desperate search for forgotten detail.

They can remain terra incognita.

What matters more is the rest of the map, the life unfolding around me minute by minute, person by person, hill by hill. The routes I return to again and again. The territories of curiosity I didn’t know existed until recently.

As with old maps, the ongoing task isn’t to restore what’s missing. It’s to keep drawing.

The Beauty of Being Wrong

Perhaps we love old maps because they’re wrong. The distortions, the extravagant guesses, the charming errors reveal the world in transition. They show how much we’ve learned and how much we once didn’t know.

Maybe personal maps are the same.

The edges blur, the borders shift, some regions dissolve. New ones appear out of nowhere, like volcanic islands rising overnight. The dragons turn out to be shadows. The silence becomes a kind of border. The blank spaces stop asking to be filled.

Sometimes a map becomes more accurate not by adding detail, but by letting certain regions fade.

When I look back at the maps I’ve drawn at different moments in my life, what I appreciate most is not their accuracy but their evolution. Each one captured what was known at the time with the contours I could see clearly then. And each one changed as new information arrived and old assumptions fell away. In retrospect, the revisions matter more than the originals. The places where the coastline was guessed at. The parts where I ran out of ink. The occasional sea monster, added for charm.

Because a map, after all, is only interesting when it’s still in progress.

Ivy: A Scarf for the Trees

Scarves for humans, ivy for trees.

We’ve written about ivy before. In fact, we thought we were done with it. Ivy, after all, seems like one of those topics you either notice once and move on from, or never notice at all. Back in 2020, we wrote in this post asking whether ivy in Italy was a problem or simply part of the scenery. We concluded that felt reasonable at the time: Italians don’t really notice it.

And then, recently, we found ourselves thinking about ivy all over again.

This time it happened on a road trip home. Hours in the car have a way of loosening your grip on useful thought. You start noticing edges. Repetition. Patterns. Things that were there all along but you never really noticed before or perhaps notice on a gray day and you have a slight fever. As we drove south, descending out of the Dolomites, the landscape began to subtly change.

In places like Alta Badia and Val Gardena, everything feels carefully composed. Forests are forests. Meadows are meadows. Trees stand on their own, clearly defined, not competing for attention. There is a sense that nature here has been edited, gently but firmly. If something grows where it shouldn’t, it probably doesn’t stay long and we are good with that.

And then, somewhere along the drive, that clarity dissolves.

There isn’t a sign announcing it. No border marker. But suddenly ivy appears. Not the decorative ivy trained along a wall or framing a window. This is ivy with ambition. Ivy climbing trees along the roadside, wrapping trunks so completely that the tree’s trunk becomes grossly oversized. Ivy spilling over embankments, creeping up poles, threading itself into everything vertical.

By the time we reached Lombardy, the effect was undeniable. Kilometer after kilometer of trees with trunks wearing thick green coats. Once you noticed it, it was impossible not to see it everywhere. 

This wasn’t just a few neglected corners. It felt systemic. Almost intentional, though clearly not planned. (Of course, spaces along roadside are unloved, unowned spaces that tend to be the ones we see the most in a car, but still a lot of ivy is a lot of ivy.)

And that’s where our earlier conclusion about ivy started to feel incomplete.

Saying that Italians “don’t notice” ivy isn’t quite right. They notice plenty. They notice cracks in walls, paving stones missing in front of their house, crooked shutters, if I lost a half a kilo, or that our lights weren't on for two days. They just don’t always experience these things as problems. (Ok, for the last two they may poke fun of me for the weight gain or want to know where the hell were we?) Ivy, we realized, may fall into the don't-care category. It isn’t invisible. It’s simply not alarming.

Sitting in the car, watching tree after tree slide by, it occurred to us that ivy might actually read as something positive. Not wild or dangerous, but comforting. Familiar. And then the metaphor came to us: ivy as a scarf.

A scarf doesn’t fix you. It doesn’t correct a flaw or make you more efficient. It adds warmth and softens lines. It suggests care rather than control. Stay with with us here....ivy does something similar to a tree. It wraps it. It makes the tree look older, more lived-in, less exposed. 

And of course, Italians do like their scarves. Both in the fashion-blog sense, and in the practical, affectionate and warming way. A scarf is something you throw on without much thought, something that signals comfort more than polish. Ivy feels like that. It’s not there to impress. It’s there because it’s allowed to be.

The contrast with the Dolomites becomes sharper in this light. In curated landscapes, ivy feels out of place. It introduces ambiguity. Where does the tree end and the plant begin? Is the tree healthy? Is something being neglected? Will the ivy grow faster than the tree can escape it? Argh! Who will win? Those questions disrupt the clean narrative of “nature as spectacle.”

But along everyday roads, in the working countryside, nature seems less like a performance and more like a negotiation. Ivy stays until it truly causes trouble. It isn’t aggressively removed just because it complicates the view. It’s tolerated, even welcomed, as part of how things coexist.

This tolerance feels very Italian. It echoes other things we’ve noticed over the years. Indirect signs that state rules without pointing fingers. Buildings that age visibly rather than being endlessly refreshed. Situations that remain unresolved but somehow functional. There’s a comfort with overlap and ambiguity, with things sharing space without being fully disentangled.

Ivy embodies that sensibility perfectly. It refuses sharp boundaries. It blurs categories. It makes it harder to say, “This is exactly what this thing is.” And maybe that’s why it doesn’t register as a problem.

From a strictly ecological standpoint, one could argue about trees being “strangled,” about competition for light and nutrients. But the roadside ivy we kept seeing didn’t feel like an emergency waiting to happen. It felt like something that had been there a long time, growing at a pace no one felt compelled to interrupt.

Which brings us back to noticing.

Living in Italy long enough changes what you see. Ivy becomes a kind of visual marker. A signal that you’ve left the brochure version of the country and entered the lived-in one. You start to associate it with certain provinces, certain rhythms, certain kinds of neglect that aren’t really neglect at all.

Once you see ivy this way, it starts showing up everywhere. And not just on trees. You notice it in attitudes, in language, in how problems are allowed to exist without immediate correction. Some things, Italy seems to suggest, don’t need fixing. They need living with.

So yes, maybe Italians don’t notice ivy in the way an outsider might. Or maybe they notice it and simply read it differently. Not as a warning sign, but as atmosphere. Not as disorder, but as comfort. A scarf for the trees, pulled on without much fuss, doing its quiet work of softening the landscape as it passes by.

Sometimes we really wonder if ivy really is the superglue that holds Italy together.

A Field Guide to Italian Hotel Noises

Notes from a Noise‑Sensitive Traveler in the Dolomites


 

Left: The Gasthaus Sonzalaut (fictional) has lots of sounds in store for you! Right: Two hollow bricks (laterizi forati) broadcasting noise.

There is a particular kind of promise you hear at hotel check‑in across Italy, a promise delivered with the serene confidence of someone who has never once been woken by a midnight flush. "Tranquillità assoluta," they say, sliding the keycard across the counter. "Very quiet. No parties. No traffic. You'll sleep wonderfully."

And you want to believe them. You really do. Especially after a long day of alpine switchbacks, legs humming, lungs full of pine‑scented air, and the kind of wholesome exhaustion that should lead directly to deep, restorative sleep.

But then you enter the room, admire the carved wood trim, the tasteful textiles, the view of the Dolomites glowing pink in the evening light and you forget, briefly, that Italian buildings have a secret. A structural paradox. A national acoustic personality.

These buildings look like fortresses, but they sound like megaphones.

This guide is for those of us who hear everything — the noise‑adverse, the sensitive, the ones who can identify a toilet flush by floor and approximate pipe diameter. It is a taxonomy of the creatures that inhabit the interior soundscape of even the nicest Italian hotels, especially those built with the ubiquitous laterizi forati — hollow clay bricks prized for thermal efficiency and seismic friendliness, but acoustically about as private as a confession shouted into a rain gutter.

A recent stay in Arabba, Italy for a ski vacation confirmed our field notes and pushed us to publish to other noise naturalists. We stayed in room 202.

Let's begin.

1. The Alpine Flush (Toiletus alpinis)

Signature call: A sudden, cascading roar that begins faintly and ends intimately.

The Alpine Flush is the first species you will encounter, often within minutes of settling into your room. It travels vertically through the building's plumbing shafts, which are typically lined with hollow bricks that behave like resonant chambers. The result is a sound that begins three floors above you and ends as if someone has emptied a bucket directly into your pillow.

For the noise‑sensitive listener, the Alpine Flush is a reminder that your sleep is not your own. It belongs to the collective. It belongs to the group hours.

2. The Stairwell Stomper (Homo escalante)

Signature call: A rhythmic thudding, punctuated by boot squeaks and occasional sighs of exertion.

Concrete stairwells in Italian hotels are built with admirable structural integrity and absolutely no acoustic dampening. They function as vertical amphitheaters, broadcasting every footstep with the clarity of a percussion solo.

The Stomper is most active in the early morning, often around 6:45, when the first wave of hikers or skiers descends for breakfast. Sensitive listeners will note the Doppler effect as the sound approaches, peaks, and recedes — a sonic topography as predictable as sunrise.

3. The Cupboard Slammer (Armadius impetuosi)

Signature call: A sharp, resonant WHAM that reverberates through shared walls.

Cupboards in Italian hotels are often built into the wall — a charming design choice that unfortunately turns them into acoustic transmitters. When your neighbor closes their wardrobe, the sound travels through the laterizi forati with the enthusiasm of a cymbal crash.

For the noise‑adverse, the Cupboard Slammer is a test of the nervous system. You may find yourself bracing for the next impact, like a seismologist anticipating aftershocks. So relaxing, right?

4. The Corridor Conversationalist (Vocalis corridori)

Signature call: Whispered dialogue that somehow registers at full volume.

Corridors in Alpine hotels are often echo‑friendly. The Conversationalist moves slowly, narrating their life in what they believe is a whisper. Sensitive listeners know better. These whispers bounce, multiply, and slip under your door like curious spirits.

This species is particularly dangerous because it often appears during the sacred window between 10 PM and 11 PM — the hour when the building's internal noise is supposed to be winding down. Their presence signals that group hours have not yet begun.

5. The Chair Drag (Scrapius mobilis)

Signature call: A prolonged scraping howl, reminiscent of a distressed sea creature.

Tile floors and other hard surfaces (easy to clean!) are a staple of Italian hospitality, especially in the mountains. Felt pads are not. The result is a sound that begins next to, above you, or below you and travels through the concrete structure with surprising fidelity.

For the noise‑sensitive traveler, the Chair Drag is a reminder that every moment of your stay is a sonic event about to happen. You will hear every repositioned chair, every enthusiastic scoot, every child who decides to push their seat back with the full force of their body weight.

6. The Group Hours Phenomenon (Circadian communalis)

Signature call: Blessed silence, but only when everyone else has surrendered to sleep.

This is the most mysterious and powerful force in the Italian hotel ecosystem. It is not a creature but a collective behavior. When the last cupboard slams, the final flush echoes, and the final corridor whisper fades, the building enters a state of temporary peace. Maybe, just maybe between 11 pm and 6 am if you are lucky.

Sensitive listeners experience this as a kind of truce — a fragile, communal agreement that lasts until the first early riser breaks it with a decisive stomp.

7. The Rifugio Chorus (Snorus communalis)

Signature call: A polyphonic blend of snoring, zippering, rustling, and headlamp clicks.

In a rifugio (very high in the mountains as in you had to walk there), noise is expected. It is part of the social contract. You sleep in a room with twenty strangers, and you accept that you will hear every breath, every rustle, every midnight bathroom trip.

For the noise‑sensitive traveler, the irony is sharp: the rifugio, with all its communal chaos, feels more honest than the luxury hotel. At least it doesn't pretend.

8. The Heavy‑Footed Wanderer (Pedestris plumbeus)

Signature call: A slow, ponderous thudding that suggests the presence of ankle weights, lead‑lined slippers, or a personal gravitational field.

Certainly the most anger, scorn and lost hours are dedicated to this: a creature with particular kind of footstep that defies physics. You hear it from your room — a rhythmic, seismic thump that seems impossible for a human body to produce. You imagine a linebacker. A mountaineer wearing crampons indoors. A person who has replaced their tibias with rebar.

But no. It is always a perfectly ordinary guest, walking with the density of a neutron star.

The Heavy‑Footed Wanderer is most active during the liminal hours: the moment you lie down, the moment you begin to drift, the moment you think, finally, the building is quiet. That is when the thudding begins. Back and forth. Back and forth. A migration pattern known only to them.

Sensitive listeners experience this as a kind of existential riddle. How many times must one cross a hotel room in a single evening? Is it good for their bones? Are they pacing? Practicing? Searching for something? Or is this simply their natural gait? A personal geology expressed through movement?

The tragedy is that the building amplifies every step. Concrete slabs transmit impact noise with the enthusiasm of a drumhead. Each footfall becomes a small tectonic event, a reminder that you are living inside someone else's choreography.

For the noise‑adverse traveler, the Heavy‑Footed Wanderer could be be perceived as oblivious but certainly not as malicious. They are simply unaware that their footsteps are being broadcast live into your consciousness. But awareness does not soften the impact. You lie there, counting the steps, mapping the room, imagining the path they are tracing. You create a private cartography of someone else's restlessness.

9. The Architectural Paradox (Structura paradossa)

Signature call: Silence outside, cacophony inside.

Italian hotels, especially in the Alps, are built with materials that prioritize warmth, speed of construction, and seismic safety. Chief among them are (likely) laterizi forati, hollow clay bricks prized for their thermal insulation and structural flexibility. But acoustically, they behave like perforated drums. Concrete frames amplify impact noise, and the brick cavities carry sound with startling clarity.

The word laterizi comes from Latin latericius, meaning "made of bricks," and forati means "perforated." These bricks are everywhere in Italy, from Milanese apartment blocks to alpine lodgings. They're warm, practical, and structurally sound. But for the noise-sensitive traveler, they're a paradox: a wall that keeps out the cold but lets in the neighbor's midnight pacing.

We've noticed that Italians are sensitive to cold, so perhaps warmth matters more than silence in construction? Or a whole generation of Italians have grown up with these as "normal" sounds of a hotel?

For the noise‑adverse traveler, this paradox becomes a kind of existential riddle: How can a building look so solid and sound so porous?

A laterizio forato - happily passing along sound.

Closing Notes for the Sensitive Listener

If you are noise‑adverse, traveling in Italy requires a certain philosophical flexibility. You learn to accept that silence is not a given but a communal achievement. You learn that "quiet" means "no external noise," not "no internal noise." You learn that the architecture is warm, charming, and deeply human but that humanity is loud.

But you also learn to laugh about it. To observe the acoustic fauna with the curiosity of a naturalist and the resignation of someone who knows they will be awake at 6:45 when the first boots hit the stairs. And in the end, perhaps that is the true Travelmarx lesson: Noise is part of the story, and the sensitive listener hears the whole thing.

And yes, don't forget your best noise-cancelling headphones.

We've written about noise on and off in the years – I guess you can say we are noise cranks – and this won't be the last time we are writing on noise. Some past posts:

• The Noise on the Walls: Urban Static
• You Know It When You Hear It
• Noise and Nuisance; Bronzino to Babbage
• Schopenhauer, On Noise

Travelmarx Winter 2025 Playlist – Black Sheep Boy

A composite image of 36 albums used in this playlist.

“I’m the family’s unowned boy”...We like that phrase from Okkervil River song "Back Sheep Boy" and decided on that for the secondary title for this season’s playlist. Being a “black sheep” is a badge of honor. A badge that means independence, creativity, or in the least, the courage to defy expectations. We don’t need our wool dyed so black is fine. The playlist is here on Spotify.

Beirut – album “Gallipoli”, track “Corfu”
Nev Cottee – album “Broken Flowers”, track “Open Eyes”
Okkervil River – album “Black Sheep Boy", track “Black Sheep Boy”
Hannah Miette, Rozi Plain – album “Hanna Miette”, track “Let Me Know”
Habe – album “Far From Everywhere”, track “Not Anywhere”
Grayson Hamm – single “Whiskey River”

Jonathan Jeremiah – album “We Come Alive”, track “How Can I Shake You Out of My Mind?”
John Stammers – album “Waiting Around”, track “Waiting Around”
Fink – album “Sort of a Revolution”, track “Walkin’ in the Sun”
The Saxophones – album “No Time of Poetry”, track “Wayward Men – feat. Indigo Street”
FC Atlaska – album “Rhythms from the Schelde Valley”, track “Two Moons Away”
Later. - album “The Daydream (EP)”, track “All the Time”

Toro y Moi – album “What For?”, track “Lilly”
Steve Gunn – album “Daylight Daylight”, track “A Walk”
MEZERG – album “Extended Play”, track “Sitting on a Log”
Clara Rockmore – album “Music In and On the Air”, track “The Swan”
Luce – album “Blue Star Soft Eyes”, track “Shadows and Shells”
Pharaoh – album “The Heat Warps”, track “Pharoah”

Alan Sparhawk, Trampled by Turtles – album “Alan Sparhawk with Trampled by Turtles”, track “Get Still”
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith – album “Gush”, track “Gush”
Velvet Meadow – album “Saturday Morning Meadowlies”, track “The Velvet Showdown”
Flavor Crystals – album “The Shive of the Flavor Crystals”, track “Antenna House”
Aunt Cynthia’s Cabin – album “Misty Woman”, track “Misty Woman”
Bahamas – album “Pink Strat”, track “Whole, Wide, World”

Marty O’Reilly & The Old Soul Orchestra – album “Pray for Rain”, track “Cinnamon Tree”
Ask Carol – album “AC II: Desert Sky”, track “Cold July”
Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp – album “We’re OK. But We’re Lost Anyway”, track “Blabber”
Monde UFO – album “7171”, track “Lowered Shelf”
Saya Gray – single “ANNIE, PICK A FLOWER..(MY HOUSE)”
Chinless Wonder – album “Moon Phaser”, track “Ynda”

Alex Maas – album “Luca”, track “Shines Like the Sun (Madeline’s Melody)”
CCFX – album “CCFX”, track “The One to Wait”
Jerkclub – album “Night Fishing On a Calm Lake”, track “Night Fishing On a Calm Lake”
Vinnie Who – single “Blue Blue Sky”, track “Velvet Sleep”
Kyle Scott Wilson – album “Journey to the Center of the Egress’ dream”, track “Traveling High”
NIGHTIES – single “saying hi”

Transplants, Time, and the Stranger Within

When we first wrote about living abroad, we described the experience as a kind of transplanting: uprooting from familiar soil and learning to grow in a new cultural ground. We also noted similarities between transplanting and aging. Both migration and aging confront us with the loss of taken-for-granted fluency. In a new country, even ordering coffee or catching a joke requires conscious effort. With aging, the body and social roles we once inhabited without thought begin to demand renegotiation.

Alfred Schutz, in his essay The Stranger, discusses how outsiders must explicitly learn what insiders assume. Later theorists of sociocultural models (TSCM) describe this as the accumulation of cultural “recipes” — scripts for how to act, speak, and belong. Massie and Staude, in their phenomenology of ageing, show that growing old is also an accumulation: of biological rhythms, personal narratives, and historical time. Both processes force us to confront our own strangeness in the world. We wrote Transplants: Notes on Aging and Living Abroad before discovering these references and were delighted to find our observations mapped onto a much larger conversation.

Living abroad, we find ourselves caught between languages and identities, neither fully at home nor fully foreign. Aging, too, places us in a liminal space: still ourselves, but transformed, negotiating continuity and change. To be a transplant is to be a stranger; to age is to become a stranger to oneself. In both cases, the task is not to erase difference but to learn how to live meaningfully within that strangeness.

Learning to Laugh Again

One of the first signs of being a stranger abroad is missing the punchline. Humor depends on shared references, rhythms, and cultural cues. In Italy, we’ve often found ourselves smiling politely while others laugh, only later realizing the joke hinged on a pun or gesture we hadn’t yet absorbed. Schutz would say that insiders rely on “recipes,” while the stranger must consciously accumulate them. Each missed joke becomes a tiny research project, a reminder that belonging requires deliberate learning.

Aging works in a similar way. Massie and Staude describe aging as the intertwining of biological, narrative, and historical time. Just as the migrant must relearn cultural cues, the aging person must relearn bodily ones. A staircase once climbed without thought now requires calculation. A word once recalled instantly now hovers just out of reach. The fluency of youth — cultural or physical — gives way to slower, more deliberate accumulation.

Visibility and Invisibility

Living abroad, our accent marks us as visible. Even when we blend in with clothing or gestures, a single phrase betrays us. At the same time, there are moments of invisibility: when locals dismiss us as not quite part of the conversation, or when our cultural references simply don’t register. Schutz’s stranger is caught in this paradox, both hyper-visible and overlooked.

Aging carries a similar paradox. Wrinkles, slower movement, and retirement make one visible as “old,” yet at the same time older people are rendered invisible in social life. Massie and Staude call this a form of “social death,” where retirement or frailty shifts identity from agent to dependent. In both migration and aging, visibility and invisibility are intertwined experiences of being marked as other.

Negotiating Identity

In our earlier blog we wrote of being “neither fish nor fowl,” caught between American and Italian identities. Aging, too, produces hybrid identities. We remain ourselves, but transformed. Looking at an old photograph, we see someone who is both us and not us. We are looking at stranger we once were. Schutz’s phenomenology of the stranger and Massie and Staude’s analysis of aging converge here: identity is not a fixed essence but a negotiation across time and culture.

The Strange Shape of Time

Living abroad has made us aware of all sorts of unfamiliar rhythms — how people speak, joke, gesture, or structure conversations. But aging brings its own unexpected rhythm, one that doesn’t have much to do with culture and everything to do with time itself.

We came across a study from Yorkshire (Degnen) that stayed with us. The older adults in it didn’t tell stories in neat, chronological order. Their conversations wandered comfortably between decades, past and present sitting side by side as if they had always belonged together. Details that younger listeners might dismiss as “irrelevant” carried their own meaning — a kind of shorthand built from a lifetime of associations. And sometimes the pace of these stories drifted free of what others expected, unfolding in their own logic.

It struck us because it felt familiar. Living abroad has its own version of nonlinear time — moments when the past intrudes unexpectedly, when old habits collide with new contexts, when identity refuses to stay in sequence. Aging just makes this temporal looseness more visible. Perhaps both experiences reveal that time is less of a straight line and more of a shape we grow into. We are invited to embrace nonlinearity.

When Time Stops

We were thinking about this recently as we finished Book Three of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume. Its protagonist, Tara, becomes a stranger not because she relocates, but because time itself stops for her. She wakes each day into the same date while the world continues around her in ways she can sense but not join. Tara must relearn the “recipes” of this new condition — how to navigate relationships, routines, memory, and meaning when chronology refuses to cooperate.

Reading her while thinking about migration and aging, we realized that strangeness is not only spatial or bodily. It can also be temporal: a sudden shift in the rules by which life proceeds. Tara’s halted time echoed something we were already feeling — that belonging, at any age, is partly the work of adapting to a world that will not stay still, or in her case, will not move forward.

Toward a Philosophy of Transplants

To live abroad is to transplant oneself into new soil. To age is to discover that the soil itself shifts beneath us. Both experiences demand humility, patience, and creativity. They remind us that cultural or bodily fluency is never permanent. We are always accumulating, relearning, renegotiating. Migration and aging, then, are variations on a theme: becoming a stranger and learning how to inhabit that strangeness.

Living Meaningfully Within Strangeness

To migrate is to discover that the familiar world has become foreign. To age is to discover that the familiar self has become foreign. In both cases, we are transplants — uprooted from the soil of fluency and asked to grow again in uncertain ground. Schutz’s stranger reminds us that belonging requires conscious accumulation of models. Massie and Staude remind us that aging reshapes time itself, expanding the past and narrowing the future. Our own experience abroad reminds us that these processes are not failures but invitations: to relearn, to renegotiate, to live deliberately.

A line from that Yorkshire study keeps echoing for us: older adults aren’t “lost in the past” at all — the past simply moves more freely through their stories, another thread in the weave of lived experience. What can look nonlinear or “irrelevant” from the outside is often just a different way of stitching moments together. That image stays with us. It suggests that strangeness, whether cultural or temporal, isn’t a deficit but another kind of knowing, a rhythm shaped by the layers a person has lived through.

Perhaps this is the gift hidden in strangeness. Migration and aging strip away the illusion of permanence. They reveal identity as a rhythm of continuity and change. To be a transplant is to accept that roots can grow in new soil. To age is to accept that roots deepen even as branches bend. In both, the task is not to recover lost fluency but to cultivate meaning in the midst of difference.

The Noise on the Walls: Urban Static

64 images of graffiti and murals captured by 

Travelmarx over the years.

Walking around Bergamo, we often pass the same walls over and over: stone, stucco, concrete, each carrying the palimpsest of tags, scrawls, throw-ups, and the occasional ambitious mural. Most of it we don’t like. Some of it is clever. Much of it feels like a form of urban abrasion. But whether we admire it, tolerate it, or quietly curse it, we can’t not see it.

Graffiti is visual noise. It fills the eye the way unwanted sound fills the ear—insistent, uninvited, and undeniably present. And like noise, graffiti has a way of revealing a city’s and a culture's restlessness.

Noise is a theme we’ve returned to before, in posts as different as our musing on Schopenhauer’s irritation with clatter (Schopenhauer, On Noise), our exploration of disruption across centuries (Noise and Nuisance; Bronzino to Babbage), and a more personal reflection on how sound becomes a kind of knowing (You Know It When You Hear It). Graffiti simply completes the metaphor. If noise is the soundtrack of a city that refuses to be orderly, graffiti is the handwriting of that refusal.

The Clean Surface Myth

Cities like the idea of cleanliness—clean streets, clean façades, clean narratives about who belongs and who gets to speak. You see this in the small brigade of city workers who occasionally repaint a tagged wall. The smooth, monochrome patch lasts days, maybe hours, until someone adds their mark. The next repaint will come when it comes. Meanwhile, the cycle—paint, tag, paint, tag—becomes its own quiet commentary.

Public space isn’t neutral, no matter how clean it looks. Corporate logos, government messages, shop signage, and advertising already occupy most of what we see. Graffiti just breaks the illusion that these sanctioned voices are the natural state of things. It interrupts, inserts, and insists.

The Easy Explanation We Don’t Fully Buy

There’s a standard explanation for graffiti: it’s the voice of the marginalized, the unsanctioned speech of those without access to the official channels. And yes, sometimes that is true. But walking around Bergamo, this neat narrative never quite matches what’s on the walls.

Most of what we see doesn’t feel like political expression or a plea to be acknowledged. It feels more like a motorbike revving under your window at midnight—an assertion of presence, not a manifesto.

And anyway, if feeling unheard automatically produced graffiti, wouldn’t we all be out tagging? We’re not. When we feel frustrated or overlooked—or simply full of opinions—we take the official routes: voting, emailing the comune, participating in neighborhood committees, or writing blog posts that attempt (sometimes unsuccessfully) to make sense of it all. These are our sanctioned modes of expression. Slow, structured, polite.

No one is spray-painting È vietato ignorare questo blog post on a retaining wall.

So maybe the graffiti–oppression narrative is too tidy. Perhaps graffiti isn’t always a voice from the margins, but a voice that simply refuses to wait. Graffiti collapses time: it speaks now. Civic channels take their time: they speak eventually, after stamps and signatures and agenda items.

The discomfort we feel may not be moral at all—it may be temporal. Graffiti is impatient; we are happy to be patient.

Disorder as Ritual

Graffiti fits neatly into the anthropological idea of ritual inversion—those moments when rules are gleefully broken to reveal how fragile the rules really are. Carnival does this with masks and parody; graffiti does it with paint.

The mess is not a side effect. It is the gesture.

A tagged wall today may be a neat monochrome surface tomorrow, and then a clean canvas again by the end of the week. The city is always smoothing things over; writers are always filling them back up. Impermanence becomes the rhythm.

Texture Over Cleanliness

One idea we keep circling back to is how differently we respond to images of people on walls. We realize we’re more susceptible to graffiti that depicts human forms, especially faces—whether part of a formal mural or something more spontaneous, a piece of graffiti that has drifted into mural territory. The line between the two is often blurry anyway.

So before we get too far, it’s worth admitting that not all wall markings land the same way. Murals—commissioned or not—tend to feel intentional, composed, legible. Faces, in particular, can stop us in our tracks: eyes gazing down, features rendered with surprising tenderness or defiance. These images show up in our photos far more often than scribbles or territorial tagging. They evoke something: recognition, curiosity, maybe even connection.

But are they really different? Or are we just more comfortable with certain forms of visual interruption than others?

Even the most beautiful mural is still an intervention on a wall that wasn’t blank by accident. It claims space just as tagging does. The difference may lie less in the act than in our willingness to decode the result. A portrait offers us an entry point—a face is a language we understand instinctively—while a tag demands fluency in a code we don’t speak.

Perhaps murals and graffiti are not opposing categories but points on the same continuum of urban expression, one simply easier for us to welcome. Beauty can be a softening agent. It can make us forget that the gesture underneath—the insistence on being seen—belongs to the same family as the scribbles we tend to dismiss.

One of the quiet surprises of travel is realizing how much a city’s character comes from the things you didn’t go there to see. London’s layers, Lisbon’s flourishes, and Reykjavík’s bursts of color and whimsy all become part of a place’s mental map.

When we visited Reykjavík years ago, the street art was impossible to ignore—clever, bold, often beautiful, and woven into the city’s fabric. It didn’t feel like vandalism or rebellion; it felt like the city making itself visible in its own energetic way. Not unlike noise, which you never plan for but remember anyway.

Clean walls can make a place feel eerily blank, as if life had been pressed flat. Graffiti—even when messy—adds texture. Yes, some texture is good, right?

What Graffiti May Actually Be Saying

Walking past tagged walls the other day on our way to the hospital, we wondered: what exactly is the message here? Are we meant to decode it? Is there anything to decode? Maybe the message is simply the mark itself—a claim, a moment of visibility, a quick refusal to be quiet.

Or maybe the message is aimed at other writers, not at us at all. The city becomes, in effect, someone else’s chat thread—one we’re reading without fully understanding the references.

Closing Reflection

Graffiti isn’t easy to like, and it’s probably not meant to be. It unsettles the visual field the way noise unsettles silence. But both remind us that cities are not curated exhibits; they are lived-in, contested, slightly unruly things.

Some people speak through walls; we speak through notes, photos, and posts. All of it is a kind of noise—some sprayed, some typed—each insisting on being noticed in its own way.

Maybe what troubles us most is not that graffiti is there, but that we’re not always sure what it’s asking us to notice. And maybe that uncertainty is part of what makes a city feel alive.