Florence by Night

Robert took me to a friend's house for dinner, on a bicycle. In the rain. Over cobbled streets. On bicycles with no lights, without helmets. Bouncing along over the cobbles, precariously perched on my bicycle, I noticed that there were lots of other people on bicyles without lights or helmets. The streets are narrow in much of the city and the cars have to wait behind the bicycles as they wobble along. In fact cars are barely tollerated in Florence. The whole centre of the city is traffic free, which means - full of pedestrians, who wander about all over the street, completely oblivious of the bicycles trying to get past them. Robert weaves in and out of the pedestrians expertly, while I have to keep stopping to avoid crashing into someone.