Bellissima. Bellissima.

Although we only had one day in Perugia, Mariaelisa Lebroni helped my family feel like natives and royalty all at once when we went to visit her there. Mariaelisa is the woodblock artist behind the Xilocart line of books and prints we sell at Castle in the Air. She makes her creations out of her magical studio in Perugia, the capital of Italy's Umbria region and a city known for its artists.

Between feeding us so much delicious home-cooked food and introducing us to her family, Mariaelisa showed us her studio, where she's got the product of forty years of printing arranged among shelves, tables, and crates. She surprised and delighted me when, after showing us the blocks she used to print her own set of tarot cards, Mariaelisa handed me one of her few remaining copies of the deck!

She drove us all on a high-speed tour through the streets of the town, ending up outside the Church of San Pietro. The church was already closed, but Mariaelisa talked our way in. We were the only ones inside the nave, and when we looked up at the ceiling and took in the gorgeous inlaid wood ceiling, none of us summed it up like Mariaelisa: "Bellissima. Bellissima."

The Freethinkers' Pictorial Text-Book

One of our flea-market gnomes came into the shop a few days ago with an incredible find -- an 1898 edition of The Freethinkers' Pictorial Text-Book. Freethought is a philosophy that rejects authority and dogma -- most notably that of organized religion -- in favor of conclusions reached by rationality and science.

We love this collection of prints and explanatory texts not because we believe the Church should go the way of the dinosaur, but because it is a 110-year-old artifact calling for separation of Church and State using artwork and terms that still read so thoroughly modern. The line drawings bring to mind the work of 1960s cartoonist Robert Crumb, and the arguments are just as fresh as any you'd find on today's op-ed pages.

A botanical note: The symbol of the Freethought movement is the pansy, whose name is a derivation of the French word pensée, or "thought." Pansies are thought to resemble the human face, and in the summertime they nod their heads forward as if they were thinking deep thoughts!