> When Americans analyze a small shop in a foreign country, time stops counting itself on clocks and pondering its own dull finiteness. Now it can pleasurably yawn into the holy hollowness of the 30-plus questions the tourists are asking. Now, everyone around the American family is swamped in the buttery goo of the present, stretched. The other people in the gelateria can’t name the feeling that wraps itself around them. The feeling that time is purring, that time is on the American family’s side.

This is absolute art.

> Their job of giving value and meaning to our city is so important to them; they don’t seem to realize we are not as excited as they are about their discovery of gianduia.

And this