Bella Italia

 Penny and I have been away for ten days in Italy where moths have the lyrical name of Falena and the language also commendably includes a specific name for the very small number of micromoths whose larvae damage clothes. They are called Tarma. An older-fashioned phrase was in use when I was a boy and we hunted hawk moths around a café on the coast near Ancona, using a ladder kindly lent by the proprietor to reach the powerful street lamp bulbs which attracted our prey. In those days, they called them Farfalla notturna or 'butterfly of the night'.

This is a common practice in many languages but you need to be a bit careful. In Malay and Indonesian, for example, Kupukupu (butterfly) malam (of the night) also means a prostitute.

Our stay in Verona and Mantua was lovely but not insect-rich. My first picture shows a familiar species, the Hoary Footman, which Penny spotted on the stairwell wall of our Verona hotel. On the rough lawn of a nearby palazzo we then found Grizzled Skippers and a species of Blue in considerable numbers, but they were as jittery as most butterflies and I am afraid that my photos are not ace.

A different skipper, the Mallow one, awaited us at the delightful small, fortified village of Sabbioneta near Mantua (near, that is, once we had mastered the idiosyncrasies of the No.17 bus) where a trio of beautiful and very lively Painted Ladies almost lured me over the ramparts' edge.

Here's the actual rampart; the butterflies were spiralling around the bramble bushes which overhang the rather sever drop, looking deceptively like firm ground.

My efforts were rather outdone by my younger son's Instagram posts from Texas where he was on an architectural mission whose secondary benefits included some encounters with wonderful crickets/grasshoppers. Here below are a fabulously-coloured Plains Lubber, a Western Horse Lubber and a tarantula out for a scuttle in the sun.

Back in Italy, there was one more actual moth to see, a pretty little Vestal on a cobbled street in Mantua - a species which comes here in the UK in reasonable numbers in late Summer and early Autumn but only as an immigrant visitor, never setting up permanent home. Italy is very appropriate place for them; their smart colouring resembles the outfit of the Vestal Virgins who looked after the temples of ancient Rome.

Otherwise insects swarmed only on the wonderful and numerous Renaissance wall paintings, sometimes in half-human form as with the cherub below who has butterfly's wings.  Whether they would be strong enough to get his chubby little body aloft, who can tell?

And there was this, by a contemporary artist in an expensive shop. What if the lady's elaborate headdress suddenly took wing?

What else? A darting lizard, one of many in the lovely weather which blessed our entire stay, and a dragonfly with an eloquent list of alternative names: Violet Dropwing, Purple-blushed Darter,  Violet-marked Darter and Plum-coloured Dropwing.  The dropwing part comes from their habit of lowering their wings immediately after alighting, which a swarm of them duly did on the edge of one of the three lakes which form such a lovely backdrop to Mantua.

And so back home - to be greeted by our first Morning Glory flower.  They are exceptionally late this year and we're just hoping to get a decent display before an untimely frost of the type which prompted Shakespeare's metaphor on poor Juliet.