One of the things that I noticed about Assisi is that the stores are really well concealed. If they're closed, then there's really no indication that they ARE stores aside from some credit card stickers in the windows. The ground floor of this building is in fact a store. How do I know? Because aside from the aforementioned stickers, looking at it on Google Street View over the course of several years shows it having been open from time to time. It's difficult to tell exactly what they sell there, in part because of the lack of signage. It looks like at various times it has sold clothes, accessories, possibly ceramics. Unfortunately when Google did the 2022 Street View scan, the place may have been closed. There didn't seem to be anything inside, but that may have been an optical illusion.

While the ground floor is a retail location, the floors above that clearly are not. As we will see more clearly in a zoomed in version of this shot which is coming up next in this gallery, there is laundry airing on the windowsill, wrapped around a teddy bear which appears to be watching me closely.

So why is this my favourite? Because it's a piece of life as it is lived by people in an ancient town on what is for me, unfortunately, the other side of the world most of the time. It's ordinary, almost mundane, but it's real. Too often tourists treat Italy like it's some kind of Medieval World Tourist Park, which just happens to have really good food. But it's not. It pulses with real people who have real lives, real aspirations, but also real day-to-day tasks that they have to get through. There will be homes throughout the world where the linen needs to be aired along with the teddy bear. The main difference is that you won't often find it happening in stone buildings like these in a hilltop village like this. These things are particular to this time, and this place. It's a scene which is both very generic, and very specific. And there is something about that which appeals to me a great deal.