Walked the hour or so into the city center for Mass. Universe seemed to be falling over itself to tell me things, so like a Quaker sitting silent on a good day, tried to take in as much of it as I could. Peculiar place. The town square is perhaps the great Valhalla of elderly men playing dominoes, cards, and chess, complete with scattered evergreen trees from the migrating birds. Remarkable picture of humanity at peace in dozens of quiet conclaves.
The old Roman forum is partially unearthed, the pillars in surprisingly good shape. It's in the middle of things, surrounded by streets. A large sign across the street for the local chamber of commerce, several decades old, is dwarfed by an even larger sign for the call-center operation apparently occupying the building. On the other side, a small zoo with children screaming at the monkeys. Civilization eternally presents basically the same proposition to the same types of doubtful minds.
When I got here, I saw that given the location of the rooms, the best thing to do would be to sit at the kitchen table and work all day, and I have done that. Real inroads. But I had been hoping for ocean. It's a catastrophically developed place. The town center has charm, and there's a resort area further south, but in between, massive concrete buildings facing the artificial shore, and behind them, avenues lacking in basic sanitation, even for the region. Notably, the development money for the buildings appears not to come from either the public purse or the banks, per the local press. The dogs seem placid; the only times they were barking angrily around me, the subject of their ire seemed to be invisible (but moving). But I wasn't going to risk the run in the morning. Lunar colony mode. Compose in the lander, suit up for rare explorations, and clean off on return.
But this stretch of the Adriatic was the workers' summer retreat, under socialist rule, and that's continued to some extent. In season, there's a Mass in Polish in the city. There might be old ghosts here of the Slavic ancestry. They do come to mind on occasion. Et lux perpetua.