In Venice, all the Gondoliers wear striped shirts, a funny way of alluding to their status as bandits on the go. They loiter on bridges thieving tourists, offering up the drug of pure romanticism for upwards of eighty euros: a ride down the Grand Canal, the liquid Lover’s Lane. And oh, how disappointed I was at the time that they didn’t have the occasion to pick my pocket! How nice it is, I thought, to sometimes succumb to clichés, even if costly.
The city is as one would imagine: a haven of art and gold-encrusted basilicas and palaces. A city, which in spite of its splendor, is nevertheless sinking, is perpetually flooded. Without effort, the place conjures up prototypically Italian images: people air out their laundry above the open waters and nearly all the churches cling tightly to their claim of possessing the relics of long-ago slain martyrs, two traits which are insoluble elements to be found in all the regions of the country.
I can catalogue all the tourist hot spots my friends and I paid visits to, and approximate the number of shops we toured, lingering to examine the Venetian glass and masks as though we were absorbing artifacts in a museum. I won’t ever forget that I visited St. Mark’s Basilica and admired all the mosaics or that I fed pigeons in the main piazza while listening to dueling musicians on opposite ends of the square. But what I hope will remain written in my memory is instead what may perhaps seem mundane, what events and interactions that made me feel not like a travel-guide gospel following, fleeting tourist, but instead connected, rooted when I was train hopping and wheeling around a suitcase for four months’ on end – the encounters that left me believing I was a fundamental part of something that didn’t and never would actually belong to me: a country foreign from my own – Italy.
While we were in Italy, my boyfriend, James, developed a ticking obsession with uncovering the dialects of the land, learning the variances of the language that were being forgotten and thereby, in his own way, learning to preserve them in their state as they once existed. His main form of self-education derived from the sought-out source of so many inquiries, curiosities, and knowledge: books. So when the rest of us were waiting in line at the tourist office to get our hands on a map of the warren canals and walkways, or looking through the myriad of postcards by the front desk, it didn’t surprise me that he was the one instead asking a local resident where he might track down “un libro nel dialetto veneziano:” a book in the Venetian dialect. The lady at the office gave us the name and locale of a place called “Libreria Fillipi,” which was his best bet for finding something obscure, even rare, like a dialect book; most of Italy has allowed its idiosyncratic linguistic sectors to be muffled by the universal, modern sounds of standardized Italian. Together, we used our unskilled map reading abilities, which were only worsened by the rather undetailed free map of the city, and more time than I can even recall to track down this peerless bookstore in efforts retrieve the souvenir James so coveted. I’m sure I yelled at him for wasting over an hour just so we could go in “yet another damned bookstore” that didn’t even cater to our native language, and that my friends rolled their eyes and criticized his inability to ever lead us in the right direction. Now of course, I am thankful for our bookstore stop-ins, because it left me thumbing through the items on the shelves, and my desire to become more fluent in Italian led me to buy some for myself, so that, when back in America, I would have the tools for maintaining my grasp on the language, perhaps even fine-tuning and improving it so that when I hopefully one day return to Italy, whether for work or for volunteer, I would be equipped to communicate and subsist there on my own.
When we finally stumbled upon the bookstore, however, in spite of his initial persistence on finding the shop, James hesitantly peered through the open doorway and said, “I’m scared. I’m not going in,” and I immediately pushed past him, mumbling, “Oh, we’re going in” and walked over the threshold, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to resist following me. This is one thing that I learned about myself while traveling: that being confronted with a language and customs foreign to my own, even after spending four years of high school studying Italian tongue and culture, is undoubtedly intimidating, and yet was able to force me out of shyness like a clam being broken out of its shell. To be extreme, it invoked in me a sort of fight or flight reaction, only about very petty problems: do I go in that shop in efforts of retrieving a book for my beloved boy even if we can only shakily tell the owner what it is we’re looking for, or do I leave, thereby leaving everyone in my party crabby because we would have spent away precious moments futilely, and risk never understanding the nuances of Venetian? Or, of more personal interest to me, because in spite of my proclaims of traveling to Europe to absorb cultures unknown to myself, I’d be a flat-out perjurer if I said I didn’t also go with the intention and hope of procuring some of Italy’s world-famous goods: can I muster up the courage to go into that boutique and ask for a size thirty-nine, which may or may not be my shoe size in Italian standards, in those perfect, knee-high, cavalry-style leather boots, or do I walk by the store front and risk not getting my hands on some classic leather wares? Obviously, both scenarios present dire situations.
But all frivolities aside, I learned how exhausting it is to try to communicate with a limited scope of a language, and that oftentimes, immersing myself in an uncomfortable situation is entirely necessary, not just so I can add yet another pair of boots to my ever-growing collection, or aid my boyfriend with his equally obsessive, yet more deeply valuable stockpile, but so that I can firstly realize that I am capable of handling situations – like communicating in another language and interacting with strangers in an unfamiliar landscape – which I never previously understood the difficulties of, and secondly, through this, understand that even though I’m not quite unconquerable in terms of facing anything, I can nevertheless manage unaccustomed affairs. That’s not to say that I previously had no awareness of my own ability to confront new circumstances or that I had never before been doused in the cold waters of alien situations, but that there’s something about traveling unaccompanied by adults to someplace other than Ocean City, planning entire weekend getaways alone, buying train tickets and learning how to maneuver that sort of public transportation alone, using maps and broken Italian to pinpoint destinations, and fumbling to be respectful and to learn more about another culture that is at once liberating and of course, that makes you uncover aspects of yourself that you never realized were buried somewhere at the center of your core.
Like this crux of the self, inside Libreria Fillipi, which we eventually made our way into, was the very essence, the very heart of what has always enchanted me about books: their history and age and physical composition. It was the retirement home of old hardbacks, published on-site vessels of printing press illustrations, Venetian words, and the smell of flattened wood. Sitting amongst the fortress of shelves was a man older, I’m sure, and yet as well preserved as the pre-historic fossils we later saw in the Museum of Natural History. We browsed, hardly able to bring ourselves to handle the books, because they seemed so ancient, so fragile, so unique, like artifacts from another time. The man in the shop assisted us in finding a treasure in the Venetian dialect, which James proceeded to buy, unable to resist the opportunity as was usual with him. When he finished making the transaction – he purchased a lovely anthology of folktales from the area with amazing illustrations made by metal plates on an old-fashioned letterpress – we asked the best place to buy,“Cibo che è buono ma economico,” (food that is good but economical,) and he explained to us some very complicated directions involving more turns than we knew we would be able to remember, and we figured we’d smile and say “mille grazie” and leave the store ready to go ourselves into the nearest place with cheap eats, since there was no point in trying to remember how to get to the recommended restaurant. But when we could only half-heartedly repeat the directions back to him, he decided to get up from his chair behind the counter, leave shop, and walk us himself to what he thought was most suitable: a small self-service sort of place with multitudinous amounts of pastas, stews, and seafood. He led us down bridges and around turns and was stopped along the way by an older woman who kept remarking that he was spending all his time with us young flowers – i giovani fiori – instead of her. And we were indeed blossoming, growing in ways I’m sure we never previously imagined, opening up our petals to receive the refreshing sunlight of a land other than our own. Of course, even with my previous years of Italian and James’ continuous studying, my friends and I were unable to adequately express our gratitude for this entirely unforeseen favor being paid to us, in part because the language was a barrier and in part because we were in sheer shock that someone would up and abandon work for a brief time in order to escort us to our dinner table across town. We feasted on the high of interaction, of kindness, digesting while conscious that transmitting messages and sharing with others was possible in spite of the problem of not sharing the same vernacular.
…
I came to Italy expecting all the mystique of the Grand Tour, completed by so many writers before me – anticipating the awe that ancient art and churches older than the heavens would inspire in me. I expected to always make notes in my journal, my creative impulse sparked by the stark differences between Italy and America, and the utter historical nature of everything before me. And of course, I expected to come back a worldly and all around aware woman, fluent in the romance language established in one of the supposed romance-breeding countries of the world. While I did manage to lasso a tighter grip on the language and have certainly changed from my experiences abroad, the alterations are not as towering and great as I had originally thought they would be, and in fact are more subtle shifts than even changes at all. In fact, in spite of my initial eagerness to gaze at all the art of Italy, after a couple solid months of stepping silently into cathedrals and admiring countless paintings in museum exhibits, I began to guiltily lose my desire to continue investigating the works of the skilled artisans of yore.
But then I came across the words of one of my favorite writers, Mark Twain, who likewise wanted to chronicle his times in the honored and ancient country of Italy in his Innocents Abroad, and ultimately came to realize that perhaps what is not important about traveling is making a checklist of all the revered places and art to be seen, but instead, the broader experience of globe-trotting, which of course encompasses the smaller aspects, like encountering new people and holding with them conversations that turn up smiles, or make your brain bend in a new way, or that are just pleasant interactions to be had. Twain says, “I used to worship the mighty genius of Michael Angelo — that man who was great in poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture — great in every thing he undertook. But I do not want Michael Angelo for breakfast — for luncheon — for dinner — for tea — for supper — for between meals. I like a change, occasionally” (Twain Chapter XXVII). Admittedly, one of my favorite visual experiences in Italy was viewing Michelangelo’s Davide in its nearly fourteen-foot glory, but the sentiment of the statement holds true for me. It’s not that Twain didn’t like Italy – in fact, it can be argued that his admiration for the country was deep considering he returned to live there with his family for many years – but that viewing its art continuously doesn’t exactly fulfill much internally; it’s more of a mandate for traveling to Italy than something that personally hits home. What I ultimately craved during my time away from home were relationships, connections, not pictures of myself in front of all the important monuments of Europe or postcards reproducing all the famous art of the region.
What I came to realize was that yes, Italians and Americans behave differently on the exterior: we downed our wine the way they took morning shots of expresso, instead of slowly sipping; there were bidets in all of our apartments in Italy, which collected lint and to us, made a good receptacle for dirty mop water; our dinners were leisurely two or three hour affairs, eating up the better part of our evenings, rather than quick, on-the-go, get-down-to-business meals; we dodged automobiles and mopeds racing down cobblestone alleys faster than most cars drive here on I-95. In short, we experienced all the stereotypes of the Italian-American dichotomy. But on the car ride home from the airport after so many hours on a plane, when my dad asked, “So what are the Italians like?” my best response was simply, “The same as us.” And it’s true, but I didn’t necessarily expect to come back thinking that, even as obvious as it may seem now. It goes back to that root question posed in so many of my classes, whether they be English or Anthropology or Philosophy or another subject entirely: “What does it mean to be human?” And perhaps a part of the experience of sentience is that it is never done in complete solitude, for there are always others around us, who, whether or not enduring the same conditions as us, are nevertheless undergoing conditions, undergoing something, which in itself can be a state that everyone shares, something that binds us together and is just one trait of the very broad and abstract characteristic that seems to be so often brought up in class, in literature, in life: universal humanness.
