I was fifteen when I spent that year in Italy. Fifteen, when you’re all elbows and hormones and terrible decisions, when everything imprints on you like wet concrete. And Italy didn’t just imprint. It branded me.
We lived in a villa in Fiesole. Fiesole, where the hills roll up from Florence and you can see the whole damn city spread out below you like God’s own postcard. The villa had once belonged to Mussolini’s mistress. Now it was filled with Stanford undergraduates, which is either poetic justice or cosmic irony, I’m still not sure which. The ghosts of fascist romance replaced by American kids trying to figure out how to order coffee without embarrassing themselves.
I was supposed to be going to the International School of Florence. “Supposed to” being the operative phrase. Some days I’d show up. Most days I’d just roam. Down the hill into Florence, getting lost in streets that had been there longer than my country had existed. Watching old men play cards in piazzas. Learning that a proper lunch could take three hours and nobody thought you were lazy. They thought you were civilized.
I didn’t understand what I was seeing then. The way people moved through the world like they had a right to be there, like pleasure wasn’t something you had to apologize for or schedule between therapy appointments.
Now I’m back, and I see this guy. This glorious bastard in a Speedo, on a moped, weaving through traffic like he’s conducting a symphony. Not a care visible on his sun-bronzed face. And I think: could I ever be that free?
Because that’s what that year gave me. This permanent ache, this knowledge that there’s another way to be human. That you can just… be.
I learned it at fifteen, in a dead dictator’s mistress’s villa, while cutting school to watch Italians live. I’ve been chasing it ever since.
Italy, all the same, had spoiled a great many people; he was even fatuous enough to believe at times that he himself might have been a better man if he had spent less of his life there.