On the Dante Trail trail: Week 1 - After The Beans

Bor-ring. Not so much as a Golden Corral in sight.

There hasn't been much to follow since our initial Station of the Belly, mostly some Fodor's type stuff re-branded with Rod's feelings to make it come alive for folks who have difficulty reading Fodor's. The lack of posting suggests Rod's holed up some place after the Buca Mario feeding working things out, so to speak. Interesting fact: according to Google, in Italian Buca Mario means "Buca Mario".

Some highlights of this following for our Dante Trail trail followers:

I knew this before I came to Florence, of course,

It’s that kind of place.

Casella and I are so grateful to Bill Stephany for his generosity this morning. His passion for Dante, and for Florence, were such a gift to us. I said to him, “Bill, my wife asked me the other day at what point one becomes saturated with Dante, and can’t take any more. What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never known it to happen to anyone.”

I think this concluding quote gives us much to think about, don't you?

All was not lost, however - there was another selfie! For those keeping score at home, the complete visual record of the Dante Trail to date contains:

Selfies: 2

Pictures of things Rod ate: 1

A picture of a river and some bridges: 1

Both the second selfie and the picture of a river and some bridges were captioned "Bill Stephany, my Virgil today", which has an implicit importance so profound I think I'll jump to another paragraph to fully unpack it for our Dante Trail trail followers:

See, by referring to the third man in the Dante rendezvous as Virgil, Rod is telling us we should think of him on his Dante Trail as Dante himself. However you want to slice it, that's pretty heavy, dude.

But the real question is: will it make the Rod-as-Walker Percy jealous?