On a passenger train, the living things passing by can strike you with a poignancy like nothing else. A child on a bike, that geranium on a window sill, green hills in April cloud shadows. Their brief appearances, and disappearance, smack of mortality. You see them, then you don’t. You’re a traveler on the way, and all you see goes by so fast, like life. Several good poems have been written about that, from a train window.

The electric wires at the end of the station in Prato make a tiny sound like a willow branch whipping the air. The high-speed train arrives, silent and clean. On the way to Lucca, we see acres and acres of nurseries. Italians care about their landscaped flowers and trees, and this is where they grow them at industrial scale.

We’ve left one suitcase stored in Bologna. The other one takes up my leg room in the train seat next to Libby so I find a seat by myself. During a small-town stop, I look at a patch of grass that has gone a little wild, unpossessed. It hits me as quite beautiful. Italians have a thing about the beautiful, and I am catching it. This untended square of grass has its own beauty. It is a revelation. Living things, glimpsed from a train window, can reclaim their integrity and be only what they are, cleaned of the human language and other abstractions we throw over everything. We are so myopic, unless on a long walk or on a train.

In Lucca, we walk the famous park-like medieval wall. Its ancient brickwork fortifications, the thick emplacements for cannons, were enjoyed from the start by the privileged class as a safe walkway, but soon it was democratically open to all. Today, it seems a most humane passage for people on foot and on bikes, strolling, talking, jogging. Spears beaten to plowshares.

Europeans are sick of wars. The newspapers say they have no patience with this American war in Iran. They care about the war in Ukraine, for that’s their defense against the aggression of Putin’s Russia, lest it threaten Europe. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, no liberal, has cut the gasoline tax to soften the blow of the rising cost of oil. And she has told Israel that Italy will leave its defense-contract relationship over Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza and Lebanon.

On the former defensive wall around Lucca, we stop to admire the green carpeting of grass and wildflowers. The clover and salvia are in bloom, and so is a beautiful yellow flower we can’t identify.