On Via San Lucifero, nestled among the prickly pears, there is a house with cracks in the plaster. The plaster is painted the color of the inside of an almond but mottled here and there with patches of blackish mold like rot. Against the house there is a vine of red...
there are two men in my assigned bathtub.One claims the middle seat.I like the middle he announces.It sounds sexual but isn’t. He’s an all-beige man, with bleached skin and bleached teeth, the color of an over-proofed virgin. No one listens to him or the hymns he is...
Photo: U.S. Navy photo by Wendy Hallmark, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons where, in the humid, I girl again, and hermit, a reluctant amphibian, run circles—relearning how to breathe this percentage. Of leg ache and preemptive grief. It rains alternate days while...
It’s a touted local attraction—Hobo Hot Springs—peeling paint, faded sign, the steps leading into the pool slimed in green. In the changing room, a woman from eight miles down the road strips off her XXL stretch pants and faded cotton panties without shame, as she...
Photo: Corrie Pappas My friend Alberto told me a ghost story once I’ll never forget. He works at the 12th-century Castello del Trebbio, outside of Florence. I wanted to find out more about the Pazzi family, who lived there in the 15th century. They were a banking...
Photo: Luis García, CC BY-SA 3.0 ES, via Wikimedia Commons The square in Lavapiés quarter is a true crossroad, a slippery one, as a matter of fact. It’s a plaza that slides down or up, always depending on your point of view. It’s neither flat nor...
