Alfredo sits in one of the narrow laneways that extend from his humble hotel, he sleeps in a deckchair, his beer gradually gets warmer, his grey chest hair billows forth from the area which would normally be covered by a shirt.

Alfredo is a wise man, modern wise, not Michelangelo wise. Knowing that family is a good source of free and reasonably reliable, but more importantly free labour played his part in the production of child. His son, now approximately 30 years old… maybe more.. maybe less, is regularly seen around Lucca steering one of the various forms of hotel “Le Torre” branded means of transportation betwixt the various areas of lodging they manage.

Number 1 son is often seen accompanied by a rather tall, dark, slim attractive woman, very similar to the many Italian tall, dark etc etc women in the area, similar except for the fact that she happens to be Venezuelan.

Today, once again partaking in the now traditional afternoon activity of doing nothing in Piazza Carmine with alfredo and the missuz, we were joined by number 1 son, his girlfriend and her sister (I can wait while you go get a whiteboard but there aren’t any new characters in this tale so if you have your heard around the players so far you are sweet)

The sister carried a large black briefcase, Lawyer style with a large flap across the top. She sat down in the once vacant seat that now contained her ass and opened her case. I half expected to be served with some kind of summons, but to my pleasure-laden disappointment she performed the relatively less dangerous act of removing several small glass plates, a small table and several small pots.

She arranged the small pieces of glass on appropriately small stands, even with my pointless eyesight I could see familiar images, the Ponte Vecchio, Rialto bridge, etc etc. She took our a few brushes and began applying paint to an otherwise bare piece of glass.

I leant forward took a closer look, i picked up one which depicted a fairly anonymous row of houses along a tight slightly curving street leant back and examined it for a few minutes.

“why do you like that” she asked in reasonable English, made even more reasonable by the fact that she was a doll.
“I like it because it doesn’t exist” I replied.
She smiled and waved her brush over the table.
“None of them are real… out of all of them that one” she said pointing her brush towards my hands, “is the only that exists, it is the street that I lived on in Firenze when i was learning how to do this.”She continued giving me a brief description of the various businesses, local oddities and details that she had captured.

“Do you sell many of these ones?” I asked, she shook her head not looking aware from her work.
“I’ve never sold, that’s the first one I finished it and I had it with me for 2 years”
“It doesn’t sell because it’s not the image people want to construct in their minds” I added brilliantly.
“All of these are fantasy, they are … highlights, …like the postcards”

Exactly I thought, text book tourists will buy trinkets the same way they take photographs with the sole intention of reconstructing the photos they saw in the brochure their travel agent gave their secretary several thousand dollars ago.

But even though the brochures contain images that look like photos, they may as well have been painted onto glass by my Venezuelan friend’s bejeweled fingers. They have been reconstructed, touched up, improved, they are fantasy. The road signs, telephone and electricity cables, traffic lights, overflowing bins, beggars have been extracted, dragged and dropped out of existence.

The conversation moved between English, Italian and hand gestures as we struggled to find a common level of communication.

“Why don’t you paint what you see?” A strange question I thought considering what we could see was a narrow service avenue behind a row of houses lined with cars, vans, packing crates and Alfredo rather enthusiastically playing with his dog. She chuckled and pointed at the frame in my hands.
“I did, … nobody buy it” I examined the image and passed it back to her,
“well even this is the highlights, you have left out a whole lot of stuff,… Paint this but include the bus stop, the zebra crossing, the communal bin, traffic lights, tourists and people will buy it”
“Christoforo people don’t want to see these things, they don’t want to remember that”
“I do, I can see the beauty in a scene like that… I can’t be the only one.”
“Maybe you are” she laughed triumphantly “is that what you write about… you write about rubbish bins?”
“…yes…”
“you think the bus stops and television antennas are more beautiful than the Duomo?”
“Maybe… or a girl on a bike talking on a phone, or an old lady looking into her empty mailbox, or a tourist trying to find the right bus,.. yes they can be”. I recoiled from my rant. Much to my surprise she failed to immediately leap into my arms and ask me to show her love like it’s never been shown to her before.
“Hmm… then maybe Christoforo … you are the only one”