The Italian word for "ticket" is "biglietto" and there are various kinds of biglietti for all sorts of purposes. 

When you buy bread at the bakery counter in the supermarket outside town, first you get a biglietto from the little machine and then when your biglietto number is called, you go to the counter and get your bread. When you go to the post office, you get a biglietto from a little machine and then when your biglietto number is called, you go to the counter and get told to fuck off because you can neither send nor receive the mail you want. It is very orderly.

When you get a coffee, sometimes you pay first and get a biglietto from the cashier that you then present to the barista, who makes you a coffee. Sometimes, however, you get the coffee first from the barista and pay later. There is no way to tell which method any particular place uses, but if you are desperate and deprived enough, you can figure it out eventually.

When you take the train from Pietrasanta, there are no actual humans who work in our miniscule and unimportant train station, so you buy your biglietto from a machine at the station. Then you are supposed to go to another machine out by the tracks and stick the end of your ticket in it to be "validated." On the train itself, sometimes a conductor comes through and checks everyone's ticket and sometimes they don't. When I went with Jonathan to Pisa two weeks ago to watch him give his presentation in his mock trail for International Law, I forgot to validate my ticket and the conductor did come through checking, but she didn't care about my lack of validation. "They never care about the validation," Jonathan said and it is true.

When you park your car on the street, there is usually a machine somewhere around fairly nearby where you buy a biglietto for a certain amount of time to leave on your dashboard. You have to estimate how long you are going to be parked and, given our leisurely pace of life, it is prudent to overestimate that. By a lot.

All the parking biglietto machines work a bit differently so that when you park someplace new, it is always a bit touch-and-go trying to figure out the new machine and get back to your car with your biglietto before the parking patrol comes by and gives you the other kind of parking ticket.

When you park at a big parking garage or an airport parking lot, you get a biglietto when you go in and then you have to remember to pay at a machine somewhere else before you try to leave in your car at the exit gate, where there are no human attendants, but only a little machine that takes your already paid biglietto and then, for some reason, gives it back to you -- a little souvenir of your stay. I wander around with all sorts of used biglietti in my coat pockets and the cup holder of the car, like confetti. I'm pretty much always ready for a parade.

Jonathan came back from his trip to the US on Friday. His plane was an hour late leaving Newark and we were worried that he would miss his connecting flight in Zuruch for Firenze.

"If I miss my connection to Firenze," he texted me, "I'm going to see if they will send me to Pisa instead." Pisa is much closer to home than Firenze is. He had tried to buy tickets to leave and return from Pisa when planning this trip, but there were no workable flights from there that fit his schedule.

But he made his connecting flight in the nick of time and I jumped immediately into the car to drive the hour and a half to Firenze to get him. I got there just as the flight from Zurich was supposed to be touching down. But the info board said the flight was going to be 20 minutes late. Then it changed to 40 minutes late. Then 60, which is quite a lot for a 90 minute flight that is already in the air, so I settled in to wait.

At last, Jonathan texted that they were on the ground, but not in Firenze. They were in Pisa.

They had been diverted because of fog. So since he was already in Pisa, we decided that he would take the train to Pietrasanta and I would drive back there as quickly as I could and pick him up at the train station there.

Only when I tried to pay my parking biglietto at the little machine, the machine didn't seem to want my money. I tried everything -- turning the biglietto upside down, putting it in backwards, entering my license plate number into the keypad, inserting my credit card anyway. Nothing worked. So I got in the car and tried exiting the parking lot with the unpaid biglietto, but the exit gate was unmoved.

So I had to do the Exit Gate Backup Of Shame and then I re-parked the car and wandered forlornly around the airport until I found a man working in some sort of office.

"Excuse me," I said, "but this ticket is not functioning." ("Mi scusi, ma questo biglietto non funziona.")

He took the ticket and looked at it for a minute.

"Signora," he said very solemnly, "this is a biglietto for the train to Pisa."

"Ah," I said. "Well, that would explain it then."

In my defense, I need a lot of biglietti and, although they are all different, they are not that different.

But Jonathan is at last back home now. He brought a suitcase full of New York bagels and his old viola from high school. We stopped at the supermarket and bought smoked salmon before heading back up the hill to lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea.

Saturday, we went to lunch at the pub. Alice was there with Celeste. At one point, singing broke out. Jonathan is very happy to be back home.