Michael doesn't play fair

This is now our silly joke, because Michael has used (among other ciphers) the playfair cipher, with Christmas Joy as the key word.

So, here's a summary of what we have so far:

The first page includes a simple cryptogram that reads:
"Merry Christmas Eleanor, Florence, Ashley, Jeremy, and James! I hope you enjoy a little Christmas puzzle.  It is only a little one this year.  Love, Daddy."

If you use green text to read as a dot, red as a dash, and blue as a space between letters, the morse of the same paragraph reads "codes within codes within codes, oh my!"

There is also a picture of a Christmas tree, which (from a later clue) is apparently just for fun.

The second page is a crazy paragraph which, when converted into Morse, reads "I love you kids seven trillion three hundred eighty million one hundred ninety-two thousand five hundred forty-three."  We're sure we'll need the number later, but as yet have no clue what to do with it. It has some letters in plain text and some in bold.  We don't know what to make of that yet, but we're continuing to mull it over.

From a later clue, we understand that we're supposed to read every fourth word of the crazy paragraph. When so read, the resulting statement goes as follows: "There is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding and that which is lost by not trying."

Lower down we have a simple cryptogram under a picture of Fonte Cesia.  When solved it reads "This is Fonte Cesia.  Another thing named for Caesar is this cipher because Caesar like[d] to use it.  For some reason Caesar thought it would protect his messages.  I think you smart children would have read his messages without decoding them."

When the Morse is interpreted, it reads, "Caesar was not the only famous person who used a cipher."

Under the Scrabble board picture is an anagrammatic sentence which reads "Some spaces on the Scrabble board are more important than others." If you use the letters which show up on colored squares, you obtain Christmas.  Using the thinly veiled clue above (including "play fair"), you use the Playfair cipher and Christmas [Joy] as the key word.  Michael had to help us since he had omitted Joy from the clue.

The Morse from this page is "FMH loves codes."

Ashley used the pictures to find another scrap of paper in the Roman wall in town...it's a good thing the pigeons hadn't made off with it!  It included the ciphers that were translated using Playfair to "The Christmas tree picture is just for holiday cheer.  If you want a hint try reading every fourth word." (This referred to the crazy paragraph, cited above).  It also included the key for the bifid cipher.

The crazy number pairs are a hexadecimal code.  We were trying all sorts of things when Michael finally smirked and said, "You don't think I made that code up, do you?"  Aha!  I googled a hexadecimal to ascii converter and came up with, "The width of the rectangle is the same as the number of lamps." Given that this was below a picture of a lamp located in the giardinetti, off ran the kids to count lamps.  Eleven.  The Morse on this set of clues reads, "U should learn the bifid cipher."

Eleanor was the elected bifid decipherer, and using her key and the code below the picture of the Fonte Scarnabecco, she came up with "The rectangle has as many columns [Michael corrected to "rows" verbally] as this fonte has arches." Off they went to count arches.  They came up with 11 or 8, depending on whether interior arches were counted.

The next page (below the picture of one of the prettiest doors in Todi, my favorite!) has a slew of 5-letter words (distinct from the four-letter words to which we have been reduced).  We have not yet solved the cipher, but the Morse reads, "You great kids will do it."  We have also not yet figured out the significance of the letters in bold vs. those in plain text.

So -- not solved yet.  But they've (we've!) been at it for 11 hours and it's bedtime.  Of course, we did stop for dinner....

Love,

Alexandra