I've had the occasion to visit three major churches - San Clemente, San Domenico and the Duomo. San Domenico is quite far. To get there we have to cross a zone that feels like it has primarily been built for the historical occupation of the "tourist". I can't even afford to pee here because the required obolus is too high. The main reason for coming here is a morbid interest for the morbid interest of 14th century Sienese who found it a great idea to chop off the head of their favorite saint and bring it back home from Rome - Saint Catherine, doctor of the church, advisor to the pope, patron saint of Italy and Europe. The entrance door has a relief that plays with the concept of severed heads a bit too literally, the building is mostly empty but is hosting a group of people, captivated in veneration. Apparently, she had died in Rome where, after an illustrious career as an advisor and something like a foreign affairs executive for Gregory XI, they had intended to keep her remains. The Sienese wanted to get there now famous towns-woman back, who according to legend had lost her front teeth falling down the stairs leading from the cathedral to the baptistery (the staircase in question was built after her demise). With her head in in a bag, they tried to cross the city border, were stopped by border patrol, which upon opening the bag witnessed one last miracle as the head had transformed into rose petals. Catherine is one of four female doctors of the church along with Teresa di Avila, Therese de Lisieux and Hildegard von Bingen. Makes you really want to give your all! If I ever get famous I'd suggest to venerate my butt cheeks, as the head might go on talking... On the way back I'm hard pressed to find a washroom and notice the young coupes making out as if their lives depended on it, the drug dealers and the old geezers only in passing. But I am fine now writing so I'll take a moment for a detour. Love is a cultural concept. In some countries you barely see affection, not because people there are so ugly that everyone is ashamed of even having feelings of attraction but because it's bad taste to show it. I watched this Chinese podcast where a teacher from Shenzhen working in Spain described the best pupil in his class. "I couldn't believe it. The guy was really smart, one hand always raised to ask some question while the other never left his girlfriend's behind." Italians are like that too. The guys are like cleaner fish, all over the girl, while the dentists twiddle their thumbs at psychotherapy because no-one needs them anymore. The youth behind San Domenico all look like they elevated delinquency to a tik-tokable lifestyle aesthetic but I have to admit that those wide-flowing pants give everyone a great silhouettes. San Clemente lies on the other side of town. We went there on Sunday, passing the flea market below the palazzo pubblico. They're selling more or less the same things as everywhere else but there was this one stand with documents from the 1930s. In particular a bunch of *pagelle* - report cards for high school students. They were bound in a futuristic illustration of some spectacularly angular building. Futurism really was a state-level aesthetic, not just an art movement. It's the *Gernsback Continuum* all over again. The future has been a mission, an ideology for well over 100 years now and if anything, sci-fi is falling behind actual progress. Speculative writers are relying on tropes of an established genre now. My friend N called this the "Gibson Continuum". Autonomous agents, identity expressed by graph relations rather than innate static qualities and a global Noosphere have come a long way since Wiener and Teilhard de Chardin and made it into actual reality. After the digital fetish, what will we come up with next? From the market we descend into the green valley close to our hotel. There are community gardens, a pizzeria, a field for sheep in the middle of the city. Off season, it's very calm. Climbing back up on the other side we pass the university's physics and astronomy department, a mental health complex, the coroner's office. Not a soul in sight, everything is under construction, or rather destruction since the Renaissance by the looks of it. A 17th century pharmacy is abandoned and eerie to look at through it's yellow tinted glass door. The only person we encounter is a woman looking for the *guardia medicale*, after hours medical service. "Lei sa dov'e?" - "No siamo persi anche noi, pare la fine del mondo" - R.I.P. We finally emerge through blocked walking paths, closed universities, gardens like the scalps of a giant with male-pattern baldness to reach San Clemente in Valdemontone. Here they have the bodies of two local saints and interesting art work. The church is also quite empty though and I am a bit shaken. Going down into the valley felt like leaving the matrix. At the old pharmacy, the simulation ends and I glimpsed the raw wasteland of reality behind the comforting UI of common imagination. These moments are where you calibrate your attention! The duomo is among the most beautiful buildings I've ever seen. It's quite small but rich with art and engineering. This time it strikes me that we always talk about artists, periods, financiers. But buildings like these are built over centuries, planned, extended, cared for, enduring difficult times. The church should have been much bigger, judging by the impressive *faccione* to the east that is visible from the whole city, but the black death delayed the plans which were never taken up again. The floor was started in the 14th century and still added to during the 19th, with esoteric, religious, political messages. Artists and periods aside, how wonderful is it that there always seems to be a supply of materials, workers and time to realize pieces of culture that reach beyond any individual and serve no immediate utility? All of them together form what we think of as humanity, a database of algorithms to create the very limits of imagination and competence. Civilization doesn't just vanish, break, reset. It is constantly flowing, intelligible by future generations and built upon. Every masterwork is a relatable abstraction of the human struggle to live. That's why we can maintain and appreciate complex and fragile works of ingenuity while the mess that made them happen is long gone. That blows my mind. Right now we have LLM's who are able to rewrite something similar to every text ever composed, we abstracted 4000 years of existential angst into a chatbot. Next decade, we might have a drone brain knowing how to construct every structure ever conceived. I wager we do not conserve the reason for why these things came to exist in the first place this way. That somebody wanted to be admired, rich, dominant, sleep with the woman he was obsessed with. The jealousy, envy, arrogance, curiosity, compassion, love and all other possible states of mind that make us complicated and interesting. Sartre claimed that emotions are a bug, but they might be a defining feature. The duomo's interior is black and white, like the coat of arms of the city, supposedly because those were the colors of the horses of Remus' sons, Senius and Aschius. The floor must be the most impressive marble flooring every conceived. Alchemy, Tarot, the Bible and the history of Judaism are all represented. It is mostly covered up this time of year but what I see is enough to occupy my imagination. I've walked around the outside a couple of times. Once, at night, there were festivities at the nearby police station, three women were taking selfies in the nightly Christmas lighting all precious and fair. Another time at golden hour. In the middle arch of the faccione two lovers were kissing while looking down on the city below. I imagined their common shadow being projected on the cascade of roofs. What a great spot to build the memory of a first kiss. I want to imagine that it was the guy's idea and congratulate him admiratively. But let's be honest, it was probably was the girl who had planned this outing since the first time she started noticing his gentle eyes and how funny he is!