PANICALE, UMBRIA — The Rose Report comes to you direct from Umbria, by personal courier and email. Final chapter. I promise. Our garden in Panicale is totally flower dependent so I hope you will forgive me for being so involved with its flaura and fauna. It is our living room six months of the year. The street going by our garden is full of wonderful foot traffic and the roses on our pergola the full length of the street above our garden are our only privacy barrier. They and the wisteria are the roof over our head bathing us in their dappled shade all summer. As I have said earlier, I’ve slaved over these roses, manicured them at all seasons of the year. Remember the rose in The Little Prince? Mine get the same kid glove treatment. And they are just as pouty and bad as the ones in the book. I’ve never seen them in bloom! Everyone else has. But they hide from me. This year was the closest I have ever come. I left for the plane on a Thursday morning and before my plane could touch down in Boston, our friend Harry had emailed to say the roses opened a few hours after I left. Rascally roses strike again.

Midge was still in Italy after I left and she took some new blooms off the pergola and pressed them in a book for me and brought them back here with her. My roses have always been strictly academic anyway, but now they are just this much closer to being real. It was a treat to see them even if pressed. Smaller than I imagined. They are climbing roses we call Lady Banks. And Italians call “banksia”. What they lack in size they make up in color and quantity as you can see from Harry’s email photos. Yellow roses lead up to violet wisteria. White spirea covers the bush below the plum. Oh, to be there on a day in May, with a glass of local, red wine, watching the sun go down and gossiping with friends about the day’s adventures.

OK, all done. No more whining about roses. I love knowing that they are there and that their sunshine yellow blooms will be lighting up that corner Via del Filatoio the whole month of May.

LONDON, England— Daughter Wiley text messages me all the time, in Umbria and in Maine. The other day, after half a dozen back and forths she typed: “2much2text. Call me?&rdquo

She lives in London and goes to college there. Graduating soon! Anyway, she had lots of stored up tales to tell on that phone call and this one was one of my favorites. “You know babbo (dad) &rdquo she said, “is it me or is London crawling with Italians?” I sense she is right. I hear Italian on the streets of down town London constantly whenever we are there. And I know three mid twenties — early thirties people from our tiny Panicale alone, who live in London. Had to agree.

She said that waiting for her musician boy friend to finish a set, she had been hit on by Italians both the previous two nights of the weekend. She was wondering what the odds of that were and was kind of amused by the attention she was getting from the lost Italians of London. Especially by the one that waited till her girlfriend Cass got up to go to the “loo” and then plunked himself down beside her announcing “I am an Italian boy. Are you a Spanish girl?” In my mind, he is doing this with a Steve Martin “We are two Wild and Crazy Guys&rdquo kind of delivery.

But he lost interest when he found out she was merely An American Girl. Even one that speaks quite a bit of Italian and spends a lot of time there in Umbria. I guess she may have a bit of a Latin look, now that he mentions it. They quickly ran out of things to talk about. Her not being Spanish and all. So she was happy for him to finish wearing out his welcome and be on his way. It was late and time to say good night. So he did a cursory “Buona Notte” and she, without thinking, immediately responded with what we have always said around our house when someone tucks you in and says ” A domaini” or “Sogni d’oro” or “Buona notte”, which is “Ti voglio molto bene”. No thinking. Worse. No taking it back. There it was: “I love you Very much.” To a perfectly strange stranger you’re trying to get rid of. She’s a good actress and it was so out of left field that she could play it for broad comedy or irony. And he did keep going, but his wide eyed, fade away response was “Molto?”