It’s 6:00 in the morning in Urbino, Italy. That’s midnight in Greenville, North Carolina, and precisely 21 hours after I arrived, dragging my computer, luggage, and violin twelve flights down and two flights up to my dorm room at the University of Urbino.

Since I had a few hours before class started and hadn’t really slept or eaten in a day or so, naturally I decided to scout out the area for a place to practice my violin. As nice as my dorm neighbors seemed, I wasn’t sure how well our relationship would last if it started with early-morning post-travel scales, and the walls of the dorm room, despite a thick coating of graffiti, did not look terribly sound-proof. So I climbed back up the stairs to ground level and over to the building where we were having classes.

After poking around the laundry room (locked) and the doors leading off from the main staircase (also locked), I found the doors to a balcony courtyard wide open. The hall wrapped around it, which I figured would give at least some sound insulation, and it looked like the only other rooms nearby were vacant. So I went outside and unpacked my fiddle, resurrected it at length from its rather baroque travel-induced tuning, and began to play.

My playing was hardly equal to the spectacular view of from the balcony, but the feeling of early morning Bach, al fresco, in an ancient Italian hill town, nearly made up for my lack of recent sleep. The amphitheater-style arrangement made for lovely acoustics, which were noticed but apparently not appreciated by a gentleman who soon appeared on the balcony above. In a mixture of Italian, English, and hand gestures, he made it clear that people were trying to sleep.

“Mi dispiace,” I said, and packed up my violin. It was 6:30 in the morning in Urbino, Italy. Plenty of time to find a place to eat, and maybe even get some sleep before classes.