We were up early this morning to take a coach trip to the Cinque Terre ("the 5 Lands"), a string of seaside villages which cling to the Italian Riviera coastline in the neighbouring region of Liguria. We had an apartment on the west side of the Santa Maria Novella railway station. The meeting point was in Piazza Adua on the east side, so it was pretty convenient.

Incidentally, do the trip if you have no other way of seeing the Cinque Terre, but it should always be plan B. You won't get there until well into the morning, and you'll be there at the same time as a lot, with a capital L, of tourists arrive. If you can stay in the Cinque Terre for a couple of days, that is a much better plan.

This is a Jeffrey Smart inspired urban abstract shot. (Which I had to do at least one of since Smart lived in Tuscany from 1965 to his death in 2013, a just over 3 years before this shot. Well, it's a semi-abstract anyway. The building shown here is in fact the aforementioned Santa Maria Novella station, with the lights over the parking area alongside it, and some clouds which were lit by the reddish light of dawn above.

Time marches on, and you would never be able to take this exact shot again. The curved steel shaft that we see in the foreground fed a power line to a set of traffic lights on the piazza. Google Maps shows that it was taken out some time between 2017 and 2018.