A few miles north of the dust site, I too shuffle, camera at the ready, with my own child, who is eating cheeseburgers in a small piazza over which looms the Pantheon. He is the only child with Down syndrome in the piazza, a piccolo bambino con disabili. It was the Classical period of banks. Perhaps there will eventually be a fascist restoration of this Classical period, too. Because it is June, the peninsula is choked with people like me who speak no more than forty words of the language.
Entire cities swarm with visitors filing past fine works of art and fine stores of jewelry.
In smaller cities and coastal towns, the primary language appears to be German. The Germans adopt a sullen, desultory manner, no doubt feeling that this stretch of land should rightfully be theirs, that they need some decent lebensraum and a few warm-water ports, und so weiter. It's not the tourists who bother me, today, but the tourists who complain about the tourists. This includes me, both as tourist and tourist-complainant, but still. Bloody fucking tourists.