Here is the scene I walk out into each morning
when I leave the apartment.
The church is Santa Croce
and the football-field sized piazza before it is
Piazza Santa Croce.
All day long tourists come here,
singly and in groups,
to see the church,
inside and out,
take photos,
and enjoy a seat in the sun.
In the evening
people on their way home from work
cross diagonally,
often now gabbing on a cell phone.
There are always dogs,
bikers, children, old men,
some couple kissing.
And always now too
groups of Asians touring,
mostly Chinese,
toting shopping bags,
impressive cameras,
and being led by a lady leader
holding a tall, wagging stem with a red plastic flag atop.
Some businesses have closed,
others have opened,
some are exactly the same
as they were when I first
started coming here for a month each year
eight years ago.
The blonde lady my age
still runs the newspaper kiosk across the way,
(I wonder how long that can last)
the restaurant downstairs endures, unchanged.
I have, over the years,
bought things in the tourist shops
that line the piazza,
mostly things that are packed away somewhere,
or have been given away,
most forgotten; things
that lost their imagined relevance once home.
There are always people from all over the world
selling things like Kleenex and shoelaces,
and, the moment the first raindrop falls, umbrellas.
Gypsy women in long velvet skirts aggressively beg coins,
young men simply trying to earn some money
lay out to sell the same reproduced prints
you see on sidewalks throughout the city.
They never seem successful
and my heart finds them sadly pathetic.
Sometimes a trio of musicians
comes to play,
as does occasionally
a little puppet show
which seems sinister somehow,
its repetative circus music evokes boredom and discord,
and the operators themselves seem unhappy,
often quarreling with one another.
The puppets are old, ragged and vulgar.
That whole scene seems out of place, and yet
is of the place,
Piazza Santa Croce being somewhere
where you can quietly catch a slice
of Italian life.