MY VIEW
It’s a struggle to retain authenticity of Italy
Updated: 08/28/08 6:55 AM
I lived in Florence a month before I could unlock my own apartment door. It’s a complicated sequence of twists and jolts requiring a delicate blend of persuasion and compliance, patience and brute force. First, one lures the ancient bolts forward (counting complaints with each rotation) and then strikes them against their own bases with a satisfying clang. There is no fixed number of turns. Instead, the wood grants one sigh of defeat amid a mounting succession of metallic clicks.
My first key snapped at the neck before I learned to hear that barely audible sigh of surrender. It took 20 minutes every day in a dark stairwell, praying under my breath and memorizing the key grooves with my fingertips.
It is hard to reconcile la dolce vita — my romanticized memory of life in Firenze — with those daily struggles to unlock an unfamiliar language and culture. Florence builds its future on the foundations
of its past and then periodically confuses the two. I watched a hotel rise from the ruins of a medieval tower and walked modern streets curved to accommodate the Roman amphitheater still forming its skeleton.
Plucked from its narrow alley, any one of the frescoed buildings on the way to market could be a national treasure in America and yet is only an old woman’s apartment, or a rosticceria or one of the thousands of cafes scooped out from another era. Somehow tradition and change co-exist, and although Il Duomo consumes its skyline, the glory of Florence’s past doesn’t overwhelm its present.
Time has romanticized my memory of Florence. Last spring, I studied in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. As a result, it’s increasingly difficult to recall those less-than-ideal experiences abroad. Mountain train rides, Michelangelo, castle wine tours and Tuscan sunrises color my memories of crass men, language barriers, missed trains and broken keys.
That’s hardly surprising. What does surprise me is my struggle to retain every hardship and disappointment I can glean from homesick journal entries. I find I prefer those “imperfect” photos of my adventures that didn’t make any photo albums. I didn’t just tour Florence, I lived there.
I remember how the streets of Florence look just before dawn, in the hours of the hopeless and homeless. Once, I spent them wandering — rolling my luggage behind me, lost, alone and with disturbing rumors of anti-American protests in Piazza Republica.
A few discarded prostitutes, devoid of expression, lean against buildings similarly devoid of expression. An Anarchist symbol bleeds down the wall of an unfamiliar street. Two Gypsy girls pretend to sleep; watching me from beneath fluttering eyelids. Men slump in crumbling doorways, leering. Ciao bella, bella, bella. An African vendor slips from a side street, shoulders his illegal wares, then pads beside me in threadbare sandals. A drunken woman squats in the street. Bella, bella, bella. Shards of glass, like broken teeth, grin from decapitated beer bottles.
That dawn found me shivering and praying on a park bench. It’s not a story I’ve often told, but it’s one I chose to remember and struggle to retain.
When I returned home, few people asked to hear about my trying Italian experiences. The abundant pleasant ones were much more popular. Amid all of my romanticized memories, I suppose a few hours of perfect failure are inexplicably valuable. They exist in fragments, remnants of both my daily struggles and of solitary incidents — a walk at twilight, a fever in Venice, another key snapped off at the neck.
