I was walking on the cobbled streets leading to the Piazza dei Cavalieri (The knight’s square) under a very early, winter-morning sun in Tuscan, Italy.
Only few people were to be seen at that time of the hour, though you felt that rustling-bustling that is usual to the morning business of a city that awakes from nowhere but then suddenly is there. Pisa is a university city, a tourist city with scholarly and medieval grandeur and its problems of everyday life.
It used to be part of a gentlemen’s classical upbringing to be exposed to classical renaissance flare, magnificent architecture, know its valour, appreciate its mythical beauty, master in philology and to conquer the arts - to stand with a white canvas under the Italian sun was sublime for the gentry. So we know.
— in Pisa, Italy. December, 2012