Street Art revisited and a Weather Report from Piazza Beccaria

On Sunday, March 6, we described some interesting urban art that we had seen around Florence. Today a friend showed us an article from The Florentine, a bi-weekly newspaper in English for the English-speaking and English-reading community in Florence. The Florentine is a very good newspaper that we enjoy reading while we’re here and at least as much from time to time when we are at home.

The article in The Florentine describes an artist named Chet Abraham who is responsible for the altered traffic signs we described. He has some other projects, a workshop that we will visit soon, and a 400 Euro fine from the local authorities.

As we set these words down, we are thinking about you, the people who may be reading this. Some of you may not admire Chet’s work but some of you may enjoy his artistic sensibility. We know who you are ... or at least we think we know who you are.

Weather report   The first week of March was cool and damp and we were jet lagged so the combination was tolerable. The second week of March brought in weather from a place that a local person called “RUU see yah” (that is, Russia.) The nights were cold, into the 30s, and the days were cool, dry, and sometimes windy but the skies were blue, blue, blue. It was a pleasant change from the weather at home.

The photo summarizes the weather here; it shows a magnolia in a piazza near our apartment. Every year we’ve arrived and this magnolia has greeted us with the beautiful display that these trees put on in the spring.

We think that the weather here is about 6 or 7 weeks ahead of the weather at home. This gives us the opportunity to enjoy the coming of spring here and then go home and watch spring arrive again.