Before sunset, Jonathan and I often walk down to the edge of town. There's a low stone wall there where the hillside drops away in a steep cliff and we can see Pietrasanta like a little toy village down below us and then out past it to the sea. From there, we can see the piers at Viareggio and at Marina di Pietrasanta sticking out into the water. Depending on the weather, we can also see the islands of Elba, Corsica, Gorgona, and Capraia. The sea can be as many shades of blue and green and gray as there are, depending on its mood, and can sparkle or froth or be burnished like iridescent metal. Sometimes, by a weird optical illusion, the clouds seem much closer to us than the plain of the coast down below and it feels like we are hanging in the air. We have abandoned all hope of ever photographing the varied loveliness of the sunsets.

In the summertime, we can see the ferris wheel on the beach at Viareggio, just where two hundred years ago, Lord Byron, Trelawney, and Leigh Hunt cremated the drowned body of Percy Bysshe Shelley, without even waiting for his wife Mary to get there. The legend says that his heart didn't burn and they gave it to Mary in a box. I imagine it was small comfort.