NIGHTMARES, ANYONE? These curtains look ordinary at first glance. Who scrutinizes the design on hotel room curtains? But your eyes have registered the subtle depiction that your conscious mind has failed to process: insects are crawling up the drapes.

Bugs in hotels

Later, the insidious images creep into your cognizance. You’re sleeping—or trying to sleep—and from from the depths of your subconscious rise ugly apparitions of insects—giant insects—marching upwards. They’re frolicking among… what are those? Larvae? And the larvae begin to metamorphose, and the juveniles become adults, and the adults swell to the size of full grown boxers, all brown, marching, swarming up the curtains and on to…

In your drowsy agitation, something touches your skin—a corner of the pillow case, a lock of hair, the antenna of an oversized beetle. Your eyes fly open. Now every dark or bumpy thing in the room looks like a creepy-crawler: the handles on the windows, the drawer pulls, a hook on the wall, and—is that a shoe or…

Hallucinations in hotel rooms are as unwelcome as bugs in hotels. Why did this brand-new, otherwise fabulous villa in Florence choose an insect motif for its bedroom curtains?