Back in the office this Monday morning, and among the 676 e-mails that had collected in my mailbox over the three weeks of my absence, there was a note from Spokane science-fiction writer John Dalmas. I include part of it here because John’s work is always worth publicizing:

“(M)y website has been updated, and is back in place at (click here). Or simply ask Google for “John Dalmas”; that works just as well. It has a new home page, and excerpts from several additional novels (including two that have been sold but not yet published). Besides the new material, just about everything else has been polished, so it reads better and it’s more interesting. In my absolutely neutral way (of course), I’m convinced it’s good stuff. And of course it’s free.

John is one of Spokane’s treasures. We’re lucky to be able to count him as a local literary presence.

There were only about a dozen people in the Kolose j kinematografi to see “Charlievejevi Angelcki: S Polno Brzino´´ — or, as we know it in English, “Charlie´s Angels: Full Throttle.´´ That left lots of room in the 364-seat theater, whose giant screen, Dolby Sound system, raked floor and comfortable seats rival anything not only in Spokane but Seattle as well. In any event, no one was complaining.

Of course, if they were, we wouldn´t have understood them. The Kolose j kinematografi is located in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Less than 70 kilometers from Trieste, the Slovenian capital is filled with people who speak some Italian, German, probably Russian and any number of other languages. But they´re probably most comfortable with their native tongue. And while I do know a handful of Polish words and phrases, they likely sound about as much like Slovene as, say, Italian would to a native of Guadalajara. As in Mexico. Whatever, the Slovenes whom I have met don´t seem to understand any Polish when I pronounce it, though they´re nice enough not to laugh in my face. So far.

We left Trieste by 10 a.m. because we wanted to have plenty of time to walk around this old city, whose main tourists sites include a scenic center and a 1,000-year-old castle. We took one of those Disneyland-like train rides (similar to the one that snakes through Riverfront Park) up to the castle hill, and we even sat through a “virtual tour´´ of the city´s history, which was basically a second-rate 3D movie that was probably commissioned by the Ljubljana chamber of commerce. It glossed over a millenia of history faster than it takes Cameron Diaz to execute a flying high kick.

Which, of course, brings us back to “Charlievejevi Angelcki: S Polno Brzino.´´ It was weird, but sitting in that Slovene theater wasn´t all that different from being at home. We even had the same 16 minutes of previews for upcoming films: “Terminator 3´´ and “The Hulk´´ among them. There was one thing that I just couldn´t get out of my mind, even as I laughed at every wise crack by the great Bernie Mac. In a London daily newspaper a few days ago, my wife had read a gossipy item about the “Charlie´s Angels´´ premiere there. What the British columnist said was that the film´s subtitle, “Full Throttle,´´ is an American slang term for… well, masturbation.

I have to say, that´s certainly news to me. And I´ve even been to Guadalajara.

I’m in the process of reading ”The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini,” the memoir of the Florentine goldsmith/artist (1500-71) who was a contemporary of the great Italian artists Michelangelo, da Vinci and Rafaello. Cellini comes to mind because I just walked down a street named after him, which is how I got from the main Trieste train station to this Internet shop just off this port city’s grand piazza.

Trieste, which bridges Slovenia to the east and the Adriatic Sea to the south, is a big change from the mountain towns that we visited over the weekend. If you read any guide book, you’re likely to come across phrases such as “wonderful” and “great” and even the occasional “awesome” to describe the vistas offered in nearly every direction. Cellini, who was no stranger to self-promotion, would have understood the excited utterings of such guide-book authors: He used the same words, though possibly not awesome, to describe his own works. And even himself.

As far as his autobiogrphy goes, Cellini never visited the two towns that we stayed in: Bolzano on Friday and Saturday, Cortina on Sunday. Both are probably the least Italian towns that you can imagine. Of course, what with the shifting borders of the 20th century, the whole of Italy’s northernmost Alto Adige region boasts just as much Austrian heritage as it does Italian. In fact, virtually every hotel clerk, waiter and newspaper vendor asked us if we were from (choose one) Australia, Austria, Germany or England. We got used to replying, simply, “Canada.”

But the views: On the drive from Bolzano to Cortina, which is less than 70 kilometers, I spent more than three hours guiding our rented Fiat over more switchbacks than both legs of Maui’s famous road to Hana. And being the good place-droppers that we are, we compared everything we saw to (choose any and all) the Sierra Nevadas, the Cascades, the high prairies of western Montana and Wyoming’s Jackson Hole region. In contrast, heading back down to sea level today, I looked at the surrounding crop fields and said, “I-5, northbound to Portland.” My wife, Mary Pat, agreed.

She agreed, too, that this trip across the northern tier of Italy, through the mountains known around here as the Dolomiti, has been well worth the effort. Even for those of us who don’t hike. The majestic mountains peaks and alpine valleys, not to mention the Germanic feel of the obsessively clean village streets, would be hard for even Benvenuto Cellini to describe. He’d probably just say… wonderful.

My face has finally cleared up, which is information that I’m sure just absolutely makes your day. If you could have seen me just 24 hours ago, though, you’d understand how I feel. You might have stepped slowly back, certain that the black plague had finally come calling. Either that or you might have thought that you’d suddenly stepped into a George Romero movie.

Actually, the movie that most comes to mind is “The Singing Detective” (1986), Dennis Potter’s acerbic story about a misanthrope named Philip E. Marlow. As played by the great Michael Gambon, Marlow is a failed detective writer whose main achievement was a novel called “The Singing Detective.”

Playing out over multiple episodes on BBC, the Jon Amiel-directed miniseries (available in both DVD and VHS) bounces back and forth between Marlow’s real and imaginary life. The former sees him in the hospital suffering from an extremely painful case of psoraisis; the latter sees him working on a case that is only a veiled reflection of his real predicament.

The point of both Amiel’s version and the feature-length remake that Keith Gordon premiered at January’s Sundance Film Festival (starring Robert Downey Jr. as the title character) involves what Marlow, fighting all the way, learns about himself. Which, mainly, is that his outward illness is a reflection of the bile that he carries around inside.

So, OK, I can be an angry guy. But, hey, I’m in Italy. Sure, trips past have seen me respond to anxiety by developing a back problem and a painful case of sciatica. Just last year my jaw started hurting so bad that I could barely eat. The diagnosis: anxiety-produced TMJ. But the problems, especially the TMJ, usually lasted no longer than it took for me to wash down my first plate of pasta with a good chianti (forget the fava beans and, just for fun, name the movie).

This time, however, the redness began just days after I arrived (on the 20th). It got worse even though I applied pretty much every lotion a gaggle of Italian pharmacists could recommend. And then the peeling began, a process that climaxed yesterday with my looking like, well, Philip Marlow. No wonder the workers in the local supermarket were so happy to help me out while I was picking up supplies in the early evening; getting rid of me quickly was merely good business.

But now I’m all better. A good scrubbing removed all the dead skin, a dose of aloe vera-based lotion stopped most of the itching and No. 60 sun block is protecting me from further damage. I was even able to enjoy a day of walking through the Italian coast town of Vernazza (one of the Cinque Terre), watching both the topless sunbathers (well, THE topless sunbather) and the wind-whipped waves crashing on the rocks strewn along this part of the rugged Mediterannean coast.

And no one looked at me twice. I was so relieved that I very nearly started singing, though I thought better of it. This is Italy, after all, home of the world’s greatest opera tenors. Hearing me sing is likely to make any true Italian begin talking in tongue. Or walking like a zombie.

Book titles don’t always translate well from English to other languages. J.D. Salinger’s novel ”Catcher in the Rye,” for example, is called ”Il giovane Holden” in Italian — or ”Young Holden.” On the other hand, Ernest Hemingway’s ”For Whom the Bell Tolls” works out to be almost identical: ”Per chi suona la campana.”

In more local terms (local being Spokane, not the Italian Riviera where I am typing this), Ursula Hegi’s novel ”Stones From the River” is called pretty much that, ”Come pietre nei fiume” (which to me is more similar to ”Like Stones in the River,” but then I’m hardly a linguist).

For Sherman Alexie’s novel ”The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,” the Italians (according to a nice young woman in a Florentine bookstore) unaccountably dropped one of the pugilists to come up with ”Lone Ranger fa a pugni in Paradiso.”

Finally, Spokane’s own Jess Walter came up with a mouthful of a title for his first novel ”Over Tumbled Graves.” Walter, a former Spokesman-Review reporter, works hard to write literature and not just pulp fiction. But the Italians apparently don’t know that. If their translation of the novel doesn’t indicate how they feel — ”Il fiume dei cadaveri,” or ”River of Corpses” — then the word that is stamped on the cover certainly does: ”Thriller.”

At least they didn’t call it a ”Giovane thriller.” If they had, Chris Crutcher might have gotten jealous.

This is the land of Leonardo da Vinci — I’m speaking of Italy, of course — and the creator of the Mona Lisa (which is in Paris, not Florence) is in the headlines right now through his being the heart of Dan Brown’s best-selling novel “The da Vinci Code.” So I’m glad that I was able to finish the book before I arrived (last Friday).

Not, of course, that Brown is much of a stylist. His prose is wooden, his characters are about as deep as Pepsi Light is tasty and his sense of plotting has as much subtlety as Sammy Sosa’s ability at explanation (oh, right, it was a PRACTICE bat). But the novel does offer an intriguing and, for this modern age, an unusual look at religion. It particularly takes a fresh look at the sources of Christianity, the truth of which, charges Brown, has been hidden from generations of religious followers for reasons having nothing to do with life as Jesus himself saw it.

But if you decide pass on Brown’s book, here’s another summer-reading recommendation: You might try to pick up — as I did — a copy of James Ellroy’s novel “L.A. Confidential.” As a huge, sweeping, “Chinatown”-like study of 1950s Los Angeles, the book is much more than Curtis Hanson’s movie version, which stars Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce. It’s just the kind of beach book that most of us enjoy: readable, provocative and well-written.

Who knows? If da Vinci were alive today, maybe even he’d pick up a copy. In any event, he’d no doubt write his review in code.

I arrived in Italy on Friday, at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport, and immediately took off in a rented car north to the Chianti country. That’s where I’ve been since then, checking out the local vineyards during the late morning and early afternoon, lounging around the pool until the early evening, having two-and-a-half-hour dinners and then sharing bottles of Chianti Classico under the stars.

Today we drove into Florence (Firenze), which is where I am at the moment, in an Internet spot just a block or so from the Duomo. It’s hot here, enough to make August in Spokane feel like a dip in Lake Coeur d’Alene. So spending an hour or two in an air-conditioned Internet business doesn’t seem like too much of a waste of time.

I mean, ordinarily I would be on the prowl for art, which isn’t particularly hard to find in this city. The David, the Duomo, the Brancacci Chapel, the Ponte Vecchio, the Uffizi, the Boboli Gardens, Dante’s House. And that’s just the short list.

Tonight, though, we figure on going to a movie (surprise-surprise). Monday is the night that English-languages movies play, so we don’t want to miss the opportunity. After that we’ve got opera tickets. If I’m going to nap, it’ll likely be then.

Whatever, this is the first of my reports from Italy. There will be more. I’ll drop in whenever I can. Most likely when the heat gets to high to bear.