tour diary: italy, day 2.

Our hotel and the theater we were playing at were supposedly in "a bad neighborhood". We didn't really see any evidence of this other than the above street sign.

Meanwhile, in the hotel, I was flying solo b/c J-Kim had stayed at Barbara's the night before and we'd been too pulverized by food bloat after dinner to remember to make plans for this morning. I bounced/crawled out of bed and had a quick and standard Italian breakfast in the "breakfast room":

I took the tram into the center to take a gander at the Duomo, which I've always had a soft spot for because 1) it's fucking Gothic (literally), 2) it took 600 years to build (literally), and 3) inside there's a statue of a guy who's been flayed (literally) and is now wearing his skin draped over his shoulders like a fancy mink stole.

But I didn't go in this time because it was beautiful outside and there was a pretty awesome line. So I just kind of wandered, but with purpose, my purpose being trying to find that magical/mythical street/piazza that's like 3 blocks away from all of the soulcrushing tourism, full of only lunching Italians being Italian, and there's one remaining free table in the sun for me and an icy cold something in the fridge just waiting to be ordered in my bad Italian.

That didn't happen this time. Sometimes it does, but this time I just kept running into one yuck-magnet after another: first EXPO 2015, then something else gross, then I finally ended up at this expensive touristy market next to Castello Sforzesco:

At which point I could take it no longer and decided to have a sit-down whilst dabbing some wonderfully frigid Ichnusa on my sorrows.

This happened a couple more times (the Ichnusa part), then my leisure time was up and I trammed it back to the 'hood to meet J-Kim and the Barbara, who were hanging out in a park near the hotel drinking beer and gesticulating Italianately at each other.

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From the park we took a tram to the theater, or, if not directly to the venue, somewhere near the venue. As mentioned previously, on-board navigational information is not a specialty of Italian public transport. The tram we were on did not provide us with any information about what stops were coming up, or what stop we were stopping at, nor was there any real visible signage at the stops. Maybe we were in a bad neighborhood after all.

Eventually we found the place and it looked like this inside.

Above: sound check. Not pictured: the gig. It was an odd one, for many reasons including the fact that the beloved person who set up the gig for us is no longer allowed on the premises due to an ongoing semi-legal dispute. There was a also distinct absence of anything like normal bar conditions or bar patrons, etc. It was not our audience or our kind of room, and our playing never stopped reflecting/illustrating our extreme discomfort. Easily our least successful performance on the 2014 Reunion Tour.

Afterwards, we did what you do after an Italian gig and that is to fill out the SIAE form telling the national copyright enforcement agency what songs you played and who the composers were. Who knows what happens with this information.