Good Friday woke refreshed. X led us downstairs to church where service was of lessons and responses. Understood about 85% of the written text, though could not have spoken a word if called on to do so. Read aloud quite creditably too, I thought. Distancing/strangeness of this kind of relation to language gave a welcome sense of mystery, it seemed to me. Then back upstairs to finish making buns, v successfully. Walked in garden with S, X and T - relics of cultivation in times past are mint, fennel, even artichokes naturalized in the grass. Poppies and spring flowers. Walked with S and L up to a villa where Ros Pesman (History) had once stayed, with gardens and woods ideal for children, though of present occupants' twin children, girl is too shy, boy too disturbed to make much use of it all. Olive trees typically consist of shoots from an old stock cut off at ground level - apparently they are v subject to rot or disease. Later we saw some with holes and old, apparently dead trunks supporting live shoots. In afternoon, setting out for a longer walk, waylaid by nonnas intent on finding new place for S and X when their current tenure runs out in June. A younger woman took us to inspect a place, but she couldn't find it, went back, set out again with nonna leaning on S's arm who led us through a heavy door into a once grand villa with internal garden court - turned out not suitable - then another house with an embroidered padded heart like a kettle-holder hanging over the doorway saying 'E nato Arturo'. No luck there either, but later saw Arturo himself about 2 weeks old. Then by ourselves (sans nonna) up a dirt road to a grand estate - Villa Strozzi - with splendid avenue of umbrella pines. Everywhere stucco walls in ochre washes, cream, mustard, sometimes tan, shallow hipped roofs, window shutters. External doors are heavy, walls often topped with spikes, broken glass. Security seems a cultural imperative. Later S made a dish of barba di frati, a water-meadow kind of vegetable like a fleshier chive, and a potato gratin.
Long talk about narrative - S sees its essence as recursion in 4 modes: presenting, representing, becoming and using, with relative correspondences to fantasy, signifier of the barred other, desire and drive. Seemed to me these are homologous with subject, modifier, verb and object, or rather with their corresponding functions. Much useful talk. Slept soundly but woke early to convince myself that these terms could form a mutually equipollent tetrad.