Mothers yielding Bibles, contemplating smearing the blood of lamb chops over her doorway.

Anything to keep her son alive another day.

— Antonia Perdu

In geometry, a cupola is a solid formed by joining two polygons, one (the base) with twice as many edges as the other, by an alternating band of isosceles triangles and rectangles.

Well … sod that.

In real life, a cupola is sheer poetry!

“Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?

#####That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.”
— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

David, and Other Assorted Treasures. ¹

I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.

— Og Mandino

Tomb of Flavia Iulia Helena Augusta, Empress of the first Christian Empire.

Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.

“Remember, man, that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.”

The Biga, Vatican Museum by Francesco Antonio Franzoni

Hope is being able to see that there is light, despite all of the darkness.

— Desmond Mpilo Tutu

P.S.
On a break, be back next week.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet, experience is an arch wherethro’

Gleams that untravll’d world whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

— Alfred Tennyson, Ulysses, 18–21.

Constantine, by Bernini
This is art!

A bell is no bell til you ring it
A song is no song til you sing it
And love in your heart wasn’t put there to stay
Love isn’t love til you give it away.
— Maria, in the Sound of Music

Along St. Peter’s Square

Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again.

— Luke, 6:38

The statue of Charity, in the portico of St. Peters

Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.

— Anne Frank

Have I told you lately, that I love you?

And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven …

It was the hour of four in the afternoon, and already in hillside homesteads the day was nearly done.

There was everywhere an air of that sweet, old-fashioned leisure which the world has nearly lost.

It lingered in the slant sunlight that threw shadows across the winding road…

— Florence Bone (1875–1971), The Morning of To‑Day, 1907

The Bridge of Angels (Ponte Sant’Angelo), leading to the Castel Sant’Angelo (Hadrian’s Castle)

It took me a half an hour to slowly traverse it :)
It was that beautiful.

Go thou to Rome,—at once the Paradise,

The grave, the city, and the wilderness;

And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise,

And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress

The bones of Desolation’s nakedness

Pass, till the spirit of the spot shall lead

Thy footsteps to a slope of green access

Where, like an infant’s smile, over the dead

A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread …

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais, 49.

Before I became old I tried to live well;

now that I am old, I shall try to die well;

but dying well means dying gladly.

— Seneca, Letter 61: On Meeting Death Cheerfully

“Trust that what brought you here

Will take you there.

The Infinite has no preferences.

It kisses both the darkness and

The light equally.”

— The Lost Writings of Wu Hsin

Abby, being the loving wife she is, got me this baby husky from a small curio shop in the Innsbruck Altstadt, as souvenir of my time there.