Finestre, finestre, finestre.

Windows, windows, windows. Before Artificial Intelligence, before Wikipedia, before search engines, and before the internet entered my childhood home, we had a computer with Windows '95 operating system. The bulbous square screen framed by its grey plastic shell seemed a window into another world. There was information, software, and even games on CD-ROMS and 3.5in floppy disks, of which we slowly amassed a modest library. One of my favorite discs was Encarta, an interactive encyclopedia. Many a school report of mine was written using the Encarta disc and the information it contained. It was a window into knowledge. These were fascinating objects to me: objects that stored knowledge and communicated it onwards in perpetuity; portable objects that could transport that information to others. Windows not only into other worlds, but into our own world.

[Caption: A window in Whitechapel, London, UK.]

Windows are for both looking in and looking out. When one travels, one is seemingly always looking through windows: car windows, train windows, plane windows, house windows, apartment windows, store windows, restaurant windows, museum windows...

[Caption: A window in Edinburgh, Scotland.]

A word is a window: it is but a string of sounds that represents something else, and is given from one person to the next, much the same as a CD or floppy disc can be written upon with information, handed to someone else, loaded into their computer, and the information made readily available. Communication: the exchange of ideas. Words can last decades, centuries, millennia; like little time capsules waiting to be opened, their meaning(s) hiding behind a surface as translucent and thin as glass; and can be opened like windows.

[Caption: Two inscribed stones in Edinburgh, Scotland. Left: I AM YOUR ROCK. Right: "a listening ear".]

Letters and alphabets are windows. They are individual shapes representing individual sounds: pitch, rhythm, syllabic, vocalic, vowel, consonant. They can show what tools were used in order to create their shapes (the letters determine the tools): finger, stick, pencil, pen, quill, chisel, stylus... Or perhaps the tool determines the shapes of the letters...

[Caption: A window in Orkney, Scotland.]

Entire stories can be held within a single letter; entire histories: individual, communal, cultural.

[Caption: Left: Runes inscribed on a stone bed frame at the Neolithic Skara Brae site. Center: The site of Skara Brae, a habitation over 5,000 years old. Right: The Kirkwall airport, Orkney, Scotland.]

Who wrote them? What do they mean? When were they written? Where were they written? Why were they written? How were they written?

[Caption: Two windows in an abandoned Napoleonic fortress in Santoña, Cantabria, Spain.]

[Caption: Four windows in the tower of an abandoned chapel above the Monastery of Santo Toribio de Liébana, near Potes, Cantabria, Spain.]

[Caption: Close-up of the windowsill with what appear to be runes written with black marker.]

[Caption: A window in Laterina Pergine Valdarno, Tuscany, Italy.]

[Caption: Several windows in the Republic of San Marino, a micro-nation within Italy, between the regions of Emilia-Romagna and Le Marche.]

[Caption: Left: A window at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale delle Marche in Ancona, Le Marche, Italy. Right: A window at the Casa Montessori in Chiaravalle, Le Marche, Italy.]

While my childhood home no longer has a Windows '95 computer (we finally upgraded to Windows '98 and then eventually Windows 2000 about the time 2005 rolled around), and very few of us ever use CD-ROMS or floppy discs as the means of storing and exchanging information and knowledge, I am still searching for objects and words and letters that contain stories, that communicate stored data across time and space. After several weeks of traveling across oceans and lands by many means (planes, trains, automobiles, my own feet...and yes, bicycles too), I find myself in Molise again, my ancestral homeland, in the land of the Samnites, searching for their stories

[Caption: View from a window in the seaport of Termoli, Molise, Italy.]

Thank you for reading. Stay tuned for more.