"Surprise, then, is the grand characteristic of experience.

As most of you know, Charles Sanders Peirce stayed in Rome three times in his first European trip on the occasion of the American expedition to observe the solar eclipse in Sicily on the 22nd of December of 1870. There are two delightful letters of his first stay on October: one of the 14th of October to his mother and another of the 16th to his Aunt Lizzie describing with pleasure his touristic visit of the "City of the Soul", as he writes using the expression of Lord Byron2. We have —at least until now — no documents in relation with his second stay (around 1-8 of December) with his wife Zina and other members of the expedition in their trip to Sicily, but we have a detailed information of his third stay between the 1st and the 8th of January thanks to his diary of those days. Rome was suffering from the alluvione of the Tevere of the 28th of December registered in the walls of Piazza Navonna and in other several places. I will not to go now into the details of those days, but I want to bring your attention to a text of Peirce —of almost 40 years later—in which in order to explain how the sign works (and the role of collateral information in the process) uses the following example: Toward the end of a sultry afternoon three young gentlemen are still lounging together; one i