134. The Dogs

Maybe I’m hyper-alert to them, having lost our dear Rocky just a week or so ago. But dogs are everywhere here.

You see them in the restaurants; you see them in the shops.

They seem to routinely accompany their owners to work, stationing themselves so they can keep an eye on all the goings-on around them.

It seems no one gives it a second thought. I don’t know if you’d see them in church services or hospitals, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

I’m reading a memoir Dottoressa : An American Doctor in Rome by Susan Levenstein, written by a doctor who has practiced medicine in both the US and Italy. She notes how much more comfortable Italians are speaking openly of body parts and functions that American find taboo, or at least worthy of euphemisms. I’m pretty sure I’d never see a sign like this on an American street.