AN ITALIAN BREAKFAST

The basic ingredients of an Italian breakfast are the same as in most western countries: starch, sugar and caffeine. The cornetto, above, is a slightly sweetened roll and is no different than toast and jam or a bowl of sweetened breakfast flakes when it comes to calories or nutritional value. An alternative to the cornetto is breakfast biscuits/cookies. Whole aisles are devoted to them in supermarkets. They differ from normal biscuits or cookies only in that they are less sweet.

This isn't what we have for breakfast. We have a sort of hair shirt Swiss muesli which I make with oat and wheat flakes, nuts and raisins.

There have been raging storms all night and all morning which means the weather has "broken" two days ahead of schedule. Ferragosto, the biggest holiday of the year is on the 15th, the traditional time for the rain to arrive. Shops, restaurants -- everything, in fact -- closes as those who can head for a last of the summer dash for the beach or the mountains. Those of us who stay behind can only mutter and mumble.

Yesterday's monster mushroom, which I left in place in case I needed to take some more shots of it, was gone when I went back to pick it, as were the others around it. So much for other people not pinching our mushrooms.