Orange you glad you live in Bologna?

This morning it is gray outside. That’s unusual. Most mornings the sky is shockingly blue. In the evenings, just before sunset, the light shifts so that a copper shaft (probably a vent for the gas appliances) on the building opposite our balcony shimmers against the orange of the building. I have taken to standing on the balcony and checking for the light shift at the end of ever day.
The copper is beautiful to me in the evening light in part because it seems to concentrate all the colors of the city in its surface just before dark hides them until the next day: the rich oranges, audacious roses, mustards, and mossy greens of the buildings constructed in the Renaissance or later and the not-quite-red, not-quite-brown bricks of the older medieval buildings.
Periodically I try to capture the colors with my camera but I fail. The pictures don’t show how alive the walls of the palazzi are, how thrilling a big green pine is against the wall of a more-cheerful-than ochre school, how well the pinks and yellows complement each other, how they seem to conceal all of the uglier things in plain view, the trash bins and cars and the endless supply of street signs.