Italia!

I’ve had so much trouble writing about Italy.

You write what you want to read, and I think I don’t like most abroad writing. Off the top of my head, I can think of only two “abroad”-type pieces that I really enjoyed (Goodbye to All That by Joan Didion, and A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid), and even stuff from writers I adore provoke instinctual eyerolls on the first read. Jennifer Egan went to China as a twenty something… and it changed her? Amazing. You’re saying Europe is like America, but with subtle little differences? Wow, you watch Pulp Fiction recently?

And yet, I still want to write about my time in Florence. Not because it was particularly transformative or difficult to adapt to, but because it was the first time in a while I can remember feeling calm. Since high school, I’ve always felt anxious, like someone was lightly choking me. When I first touched down in that tiny airport in Florence, I was fending off burnout, hoping that my roommate wouldn’t be a psychopath and that my host mom cooked good food and that my allergies and tendency for bad first impressions wouldn’t tank my quarter just as it was starting. Living in Italy didn’t make that feeling go away, but it made it feel more distant, like a tap on the shoulder versus a thump on the head.

I’d gotten so used to the white noise on campus, always another meeting to attend or a problem set to finish, and I didn’t know how to fill the vacuum that first week. Gone was that constant need for efficiency that only gets amplified in the Valley, that nagging feeling that made me read emails while furiously scarfing down a salad so I’d be on time for a lecture—during which I would keep reading emails. In Florence, I would walk aimlessly through the streets, stopping to read funny scrawls of graffiti or play with shibas. My favorite thing to do was grab a beer and then head to a ledge overlooking the Arno to people-watch, legs dangling as I watched the city hum beneath me. It was funny how from that height the red rooftops looked just like the buildings that lined the Quad back on campus. To me, Florence was also a bubble, largely insulated from the problems plaguing the rest of the country, but it felt so much less suffocating than school, like if someone remembered to poke some holes from the inside.

There was such a warmth in Florence, though not in the weather, as every Florentine we talked to said it was the worst spring in fifty years. I felt it in my homestay, in every home-cooked feast, in every wink my host mom would give me as she poured me a little more wine after I said basta. My host family was so kind: Steef, Richard and I were the first non-vegetarians they’d had in six years of hosting, so Mama Grazia relished the opportunity to give us the full breadth of Italian cooking. I miss how we’d share a glance and she’d knowingly put more food on my plate, how she’d roast Richard for never eating his vegetables, how Steef and I would languish on the couch in food comas while the family dog napped in between us. They taught us swear words, came to our talent show, took us to political rallies, recommended us nightclubs; there was no sense of transactionality in the way they treated us. We lived 40 minutes away from the center, so we didn’t come home as often as some of the other people in our cohort, but it was always such a joy to scamper up the stairs to see Grazia, Gigi, Claudia, and our dog Molly sitting at a table with a bottle of wine and a big pot of pasta.

The comfort of my homestay was so important as an anchor for me during the quarter, but more than anything I miss the dynamism of the people I met in Florence. On any given day, I could be writing corny poetry about the dreamy bartender at Nove7 with Katie, or dominating the rest of the cohort in card games with Dylan, or climbing lightning-charred trees with Ella, laughing while the rest of our group couldn’t find us. Someone was always down for a new garden, a new gelateria, a new museum. I loved our group so much; the collective Big Idiot energy, the eclectic mix of talents and interests and personalities, the fact that we had 3 (THREE!!!) Virginians. I miss laughing and crying with everyone through Avengers: Endgame on opening night, swimming in the ocean in Sicily, all the late night rallies to our favorite dirt-cheap bar, the wine and cheese nights Steef and I would hold at our apartment. I miss the last night the most; drinking wine and eating cookies and imitating all the famous statues planted throughout in the central plaza of the cities, reading out our honey-roasts that we’d written for each other over ten weeks of adventures, roaming throughout the city until at last we sat on the steps of Santa Croce while we filled the night with laughs, sad songs, and embraces as we slowly headed out one by one to start the long trek home.

In France I watched the swarm in front of the Mona Lisa, as people pushed to the front, hoping to get a picture. As I sat on the ground by one of the walls in this massive room dedicated solely that little painting, I tried to imagine a time when to most people the Mona Lisa was just a portrait of a woman; a friend patting Da Vinci on the back and saying “Bravo, Leo!”, maybe Vasari scribbling notes or a young Raphael twiddling his thumbs thinking about which ideas to pilfer for his later works. I felt underwhelmed, and I wanted to reconstruct in my head an atmosphere where the adoration for the masterpiece was a little more intimate, a little less commodified.

It wasn’t really a surprise that my shoulders sunk when I first followed the crowd into that little room in the Louvre. After all, Big Moments, the ones where you know how you’re supposed to feel because that’s what everyone’s told you, rarely make me feel the way they should. When I opened my admissions letter, there were no tears or howls or leaps; it felt like someone had told me that it had started raining in California. Big Moments are usually years in the making, the result of efficient, meticulous planning, where the inspiration for the moment was so long ago that in the moment the gratification feels hollow, manufactured, commodified. I think as more aspects of my life give way towards ruthless efficiency, towards some Big Moment down the line, I’m happiest in those brief, passing moments of inefficiency, those whimsical blocks of time that exist in isolation, more like fireflies than string lights.

Florence wasn’t about Big Moments; I remember cleaning oysters with Steef while sitting in a piazza in Sicily, squeezing lemon into the shells before slurping them down and tossing them into a paper sack as old Italian men laughed with approval. I remember the long bus rides through the countryside as Ermelinda would tell yet another story about something our cohort couldn’t do this year, unfortunately, as we played word games and combed through each other’s life stories. I remember laughing so hard with Richard and Steef when we couldn’t answer a simple question from our host mom after three rounds of Google translate, as she sarcastically clapped “Bravo, Ahn-DROO!” in my face. I remember throwing ass in packed clubs and taking the long walk home through the yellow-lit streets in a daze, staring at the flags left up from a festival two months ago rippling in the night.

Florence was such a wonderful, strange time; I will likely never again be so young, unburdened, and aimless, so far away from all the things that keep me up at night. I write this only an hour after updating my resume, one of the last steps before so many of the hypotheticals I’ve played with over the past three years slowly become real. Did studying abroad change me? Probably not! I think I’m largely the same person that I was before, but those ten weeks reminded me that it’s the little moments that keep me going and really give me the energy to reach the Big Moments. Florence gave me something to strive for, a reason to work hard to make time for those small, bright moments, untouched by the absurdly dumb world we live in.

THOUGHTS

This was so fucking hard to write. I think the problem is I wanted to desperately not to be basic, and I think I avoided some of the tropes (but not all of them :( i just wanted to talk pretty about my friends and what we did). At dinner a couple of days ago Ding and I just kind of randomly both said “I wish I was back in Europe” and I gave some lazy answers why but I think I really struggled to put a finger on why I enjoyed the time so much. Overall though I think I’m pretty happy with what I wrote? Lot less stream of consciousness-y than what I usually blog, which is more of what I’ve been going for with the last two.

I’ve been reading Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, which is easily one of the best books I’ve read in a while; it’s nine essays on topics covering religion, athleisure, religion, ecstasy, reality TV, all kind of focusing on the ways we delude ourselves in today’s culture. Her prose is fucking brilliant, like you’re talking with your smartest, funniest friend. It’s incredible how she’ll dissect the rise of Sweetgreen and why a certain type of person is attracted to it and what it says about work culture today and in the next paragraph she’ll tell a raucous story about a suburban mom who can’t stop queefing next to her. Highest of recommendations!