(This, my final Italy piece, was written last Wednesday in the tiny Umbrian town where I was visiting my friend Ruth Gruber. Posting from there was impossible, though, so here it is now.)

It's a very strange thing to move out of a hotel room you've been living in for two weeks.

Monday was our last class in Assisi. Monday night we all toured the studios to see what the artists had been doing, and the writing students read excerpts from the pieces they'd been working on. We had a fabulous dinner and we hung around together until late, reluctant to break bonds some of us hadn't even noticed forming. A lot of wine, espresso, and gelato was consumed in the service of keeping the group intact; but in the end, because some people were leaving for the airport at 5:30 in the morning, there were rounds of huge goodbyes and people drifted away to bed.

The next morning I took my regular early walk. I heard the single-note bell that rings at seven; the changing patterns from San Pietro at seven-fifteen; and, right after that, from a close-by monastery, the funny little melody made from two notes repeated in two just-barely different rhythms. The town was quiet as I walked through it, the streets almost deserted in the crisp air. When I left I was chilly, but three uphill cobblestone blocks later I was fine. Low sun cast long, sharp shadows. I passed through the square as the shopkeepers began rattling up their gates, putting out chairs at the gelato joints and firing up the espresso machines. I took some final photos, found, even after three walks a day for two weeks, some streets I didn't know, photographed them, and headed back to the hotel.

My friend Ruth was coming at noon to take me to her place for a few days, so my plan was to pack, then go down to the breakfast room to hang around with whomever was left. I travel a lot, and I'm a very methodical hotel-room packer. I cleared all my stuff from each space -- desk, closet, bedside table, bathroom -- and eventually had everything laid out on the bed. I folded and organized, moved the desk and chair back to where they'd been, threw away all the papers that had accumulated that I didn't need. When everything was packed I zipped the suircase, closed the computer bag, and rolled them to the door. I leaned out the window for awhile; the air was clear in town, slightly hazy as it stretched across the fields.

I looked back as I opened the door to leave. Except for the unmade bed, this room I’d been living in for two weeks, had such a variety of emotions in, come and gone from a dozen times a day, looked now, felt now exactly as it had when I'd first seen it. It was as if I'd never been there at all. Or not exactly that: what's truer of hotel rooms is a sense of acknowledgement that you were there, but it's your job, not the room's, to have recorded anything that needed to be remembered. It's the room's job to be a blank slate, ready for the next person. Any trace of my experiences would start the next inhabitant off wrong, so a hotel room refuses to have echoes.

I headed down to see who was still around for a cappuccino.