Life in motion
Three quick sketches from a morning in Penne
Welcome to Lost Diaries. The following is part of a series called Sketches, featuring fleeting exercises in curiosity and observation from places far and wide. This time they come to you from the town of Penne in Abruzzo, Italy. For deeper reads, you might prefer my Travel Journal.
A woman in black, dangling a handbag as she labours up a narrow cobbled street, passes the open door of a small shop offering shoe repairs.
“Buongiorno Giuseppe,” she calls routinely to the man inside, half-obscured behind his wares.
“Ah, buongiorno Adelina!” he replies, as her silent footsteps continue.
A tall man with casually sculpted hair and smart jeans is walking purposefully, eyes front. He won’t rush, but he has somewhere to be. His route passes the majestic baroque facade of the Chiesa dell’Annunziata, its two stories of impeccable brick columns towering above, and as he does so, his right hand makes the sign of the cross from his brow to his chest. His pace is uninterrupted; today his altar lies ahead of him.
I pause on a street corner to send a message and am briefly lost in my phone until my dark-coloured sweater begins to receive a sprinkling of fine white hairs. Looking up, I notice a flap flap flap coming from a sun-drenched alley. Just out of sight, from a first-floor window, someone is beating out a rug.
Time to keep walking.
