This young woman was but one of numerous Florentine street artists, whose medium is chalk on pavement, and who appear each evening. They work from small images, skillfully enlarging them in a section of pavement that they have marked off, their donations cups or hats nearby. They work alone, and in silence, seemingly oblivious to the hordes of passersby and onlookers. By morning, what took them hours to create is gone, devoured by the daily street cleaning machines, the hand and the eye overpowered, as it were, by the impersonal and mechanical. I looked for her again on subsequent evenings, and although there were other street artists out, I never again saw her. Maybe she disappeared along with her art, an embodiment of the ephemeral.

Of course, this not at all what this image is about.