My account of saturday's demonstration included reference to a spat with my downstairs neighbour that has since escalated to trench psy-ops exchanges. Behind this unpleasantness however lies a small universe of pleasant everyday social presences: the old lady from a couple of doors down who walks the dog late at night and occasionally comes upon me sitting on the footpath, collecting my mail. Her hound is an enormous beast, demure with flashing emerald eyes, he strains the leash and would terrify but for a strangely friendly countenance.

Nearby, a small bookshop run by an intriguing Milanesa stays open late at night, and although she proclaims fealty to a strange species of anarcho-individualism, her eyes take on a dangerous gleam also when talking of seances and magic. Once a biochemical researcher, she abandoned the university afetr the university patented one of here discoveries (inventions?) and sold it to a commercial operator for a song. A collector of oddities she has shown me books with their pages cut out that she recovered from the liquidation sale of a mIlanese anarchist-junkie and cryptograms found in old artbooks to whose deciphering she now turns her not inconsiderable scientific talents.

Last night, perched on the step outside the shop and collecting mail, I was approached by an old man, a classic specimen wearing a finely cut but not extravagant suit, a snug-fitting smart hat and carrying a cane. "Alweays connected these days, eh?" Giangiacomo turned out to be his name, and we were uniwitting neighbours as he teaches and lives in the Dominican University nearby. After trading a few book stories, revealing our mutual blibliophilia, he recounted how he had come across an incunabula bu Jakob when last in Genoa (his patria), and snapped the bargain up. He had known Ivan Illich and elabvorated his own view that the salient problem of the modern world was the colonisation of consciousness. This enticing morsel promised other late night forays, and conveying his business card, he was gone.

From the sacred to the sublime, a recent alcoholic evening culminated in us presenting ourselves on a purely neighborly basis to the erotic mistresses of the mysterious and seductive Piazza delle Zingari (Gipsy Square) long a redoubt of the sexual arts, home of the case chiuse - bordellos - which were a commonplace until the 1980s and the zombie-like return of morality that concluded in their suppression. some evaded the clampdown however and our quarter, Monti, sitting discretely between the Ministry of the Interior and the Fori Imperiali hangs on to its past. So at 4.00 am when i have no one else to bother there is always Marie-Therese who rather likes a bit of a chat in her ante-chamber, and if you behave yourself you can examine her mezzanine bedroom, behind whose frosted windows she displays her silhouette when unoccupied.