Via Jannelli

Near one of the ancient gates in the walls of Cortona, Italy, there is a living fragment of a much earlier era.  A row of medieval houses survive on Via Jannelli. Rough cut timbers braced on the stone walls of the lower levels prop up the overhanging brick upper levels. Over the past nine hundred years, those bricks have sagged and curved themselves into more comfortable and idiosyncratic stances. I stood in the hollow of the street and tried to imagine the shoes that have worn themselves out trudging up and down, the lives that came and went, the chamber pots' contents that were flung from those upper stories. Well, some things are better to imagine rather than to experience.