re: #228 Wendell Zurkowitz (slave to the waffle light)

Remember the part in Catch-22 about the Italian civilians coming out of their houses to watch the allied planes overhead and getting blown to bits?

Our town in the Veneto had a couple plaques and monuments with wording like “To the memory of the victims of the air raid of 28 May 1944”. It was a little unsettling to realize they were referring to 15th Air Force raids.

The cathedral, especially its south wall, was pockmarked with a palimpsest of impact spalls. The tourguides read them like a text: “That one—the Austrians in 1849. The larger, Germans, coming and going. The little one there, Napoleon.”