{"id":334,"date":"2004-11-23T09:36:57","date_gmt":"2004-11-23T17:36:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/wordpress\/?p=334"},"modified":"2004-11-23T09:36:57","modified_gmt":"2004-11-23T17:36:57","slug":"abrosiana-at-the-dagninos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2004\/11\/23\/abrosiana-at-the-dagninos\/","title":{"rendered":"Abrosiana, at the Dagninos"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last day in Milano. I went to a library\/museum where some of Leonardo da Vinci’s manuscripts live, the Ambrosiana. There’s one amazing room that’s all marble and tile. This view was shot looking down into a stairwell, with a marble balustrade in foreground, and that's a mosaic on the curved staircase wall.<\/p>\n

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The tile patterns in this room happen to be designed like the figure that’s often drawn to represent a hypercube. See all the cubes in there, and how they keep popping up one way and then the other way? I was fully buggin’. In my novel Frek and the Elixir<\/a>, I actually made the inside of a UFO resemble a tiled Italian interior.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Then I went down to the countryside south of Milano to visit Arianna and Stefano Dagnino. They live next to a rice farm, with rice silos.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Their youngest child Morgana was at home with them; son Leonardo was at school. When Arianna was expecting him, a friend of hers who works at the Ambrosiana let her touch a da Vinci manuscript for good luck.<\/p>\n

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Stefano and Arianna are freelance journalists, and work at home, which means lots of time with the baby.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

They gave me a nice lunch, we went for a walk among the rice paddies, and now I’m about outta here, God and the airlines willing. Goodbye, Milano!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

P.S. Correction: “zucca” means “pumpkin.”<\/p>\n

ADDENDUM: The symbol of Milano is a Scrofa Semilanuta, which means Half-Wooly Sow — the “lanuta” part is the “wooly” — the animal was a special wild boar or Magic Pig, which brings us back to Frek and the Elixir<\/i> again. Sell it, Ru.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last day in Milano. I went to a library\/museum where some of Leonardo da Vinci’s manuscripts live, the Ambrosiana. There’s one amazing room that’s all marble and tile. This view was shot looking down into a stairwell, with a marble balustrade in foreground, and that's a mosaic on the curved staircase wall. The tile patterns […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}