One day, not too long ago, I was on a video call with a woman I was interviewing for a story. We’d finished discussing the article topic and had moved onto the relaxed chitchat portion of the call. I mentioned that I live in Italy and she told me that I must read a book called Under the Tuscan Sun. I scribbled the name down, mostly to be polite, but about a week later, in the sparse English section at my local bookstore, I saw a copy peaking out at me. So, of course, I had to take it home.
The book follows an American woman and her husband, who decide to buy a house in Tuscany. She begins by describing the beauty of the Tuscan countryside… and continues to do so for 300 pages.
Despite not having much of a plot, it’s truly one of the most well-written books I’ve ever read. I can only aspire to write with a fraction of the elegance that Frances Mayes does with every single sentence. That being said, I can only read it a few pages of a time. Because, well —
It’s the lines like, “We were happening on places that made pure green olive oil, discovering sweet country Romanesque churches in villages, meandering the back roads of vineyards, and stopping to taste the softest Brunello and the blackest Vino Nobile,” that with every adjective, I can feel Ernest Hemingway turning in his grave. (Not that I really care about Hemingway, because I don’t.)
Actually, I appreciate the sensation of having sugary-sweet literary syrup poured all over my frontal lobe from time to time. It’s not her waxy-waney prose that bother me. It’s the genre. You know the one I’m talking about: the romantic tale of an ever-so-brave American woman who follows her “wanderlust” out of some toxic relationship and derives a myriad of profound insights about some new, exotic culture — and herself — along the way.
To be fair, there was a time when this genre wasn’t so overdone. I think Mayes was one of the first of her kind to write in that style and a lot of admirers have emulated it, e.g. Eat Pray Love and more recently, Eat, Pray #FML. (No, I didn’t not make that up. That’s a real book that I recently saw an Instagram ad for.)
At some point, I realized I get secondhand embarrassment from reading books like is because they remind me of my own writing. And here I am … standing directly in the cast of my own judgemental gaze!
Actually, I have been wanting to write more about my time here in Italy, but I’ve struggled to get anything down because there’s not an original word that I can think of to describe my experience. It’s all been written before, and written better than I ever could.
That being said, I also realized that I can’t let my own judgemental brain stop me from doing what I do: write. So, here’s a long overdo blogpost about how I feel in Italy, which comes one year after moving here.
How I got here
My story starts in mid-July of 2019. I was coming up on the end of a three-month backpacking trip through India and Turkey and had spent the last few weeks in Greece. Up until that point, I had been following a haphazardly planned itinerary that stopped in mid-July, so the last couple of weeks of my time abroad were open-ended. Now, I was trying to decide what I should do with my last days living as a vagabond with no life responsibilities.
I had it in my head that I should decompress from my hedonistic Mediterranean haze by heading north to sip bitter coffee in the hipster cafes that I imagined lined the streets in Zurich and Berlin. But during my last night in Megalopolis, a gaggle of tipsy Italian archeologists on a dig in the tiny Greek town alerted me to the fact that I would be an idiot if didn’t visit their home country. And it dawned on me that they were right. How could I leave Europe without visiting Italy? It was a major oversight.
So, I shaved a few days off my time in Switzerland to make a stop in Naples – a city I knew literally nothing about, other than what the Italians had told me: that it was the birthplace of pizza, and apparently, the home of everything good about Italy. I observed that there may have been a hint of bias in their recommendation, but I went with it, anyway. Florence and Rome would have to wait for some other time.
“Don’t be afraid of the city’s reputation,” one of them told me. I nodded along, but I wasn’t aware of one. After a Google search, I learned that Naples is infamously the home of the region’s mafia, the Gomorrah, and is generally regarded as a pickpocket’s paradise. But the corrupt little delinquent inside me was slightly excited by this, so I haphazardly arranged some last-minute accommodations.
Wanting to save a little money, I tried my luck with the couchsurfing app, which lets you stay for free in locals’ homes. Unfortunately, the host I stayed with turned out to be creep, which I didn’t expect from the young, quiet medical student.
Nothing scandalous happened, but this guy very well could have been the Italian Dexter and I wasn’t going to take my chances, so I had to sneak out of his apartment early in the morning (the sneaking of which was unsuccessful, with my giant clunky backpack, which made for a rather awkward goodbye.)
Luckily, the hostel that I showed up at that early morning was run by a warm, old Italian man named Giovanni who treated all the scroungy backpackers that wandered into the comfort of his shelter like his own kids – lecturing us on our laziness for hiding up inside the hostel during the day and serving us all pasta in the evening.
I was grateful that he didn’t mind that I showed up without notice. His place felt like a haven, tucked on the top floor of an ancient building above the wildness of the central historic district of Naples. When I showed up, sweaty and bewildered, he sat me down unfolded a giant map, circling all of the dozens of churches and museums that I had to visit and warning me about the pickpockets and shady characters to watch out for. By the time he was done, I’d forgotten that stressful morning and was energized to explore.
In the three days that I stayed, I hit many of the sights that Giovanni suggested, met the guy of my dreams, and made a promise to myself that I had to come back. And two months later, I did. Now, after a year of living here, I want to share my experience living in Southern Italy.
Like almost every single person in the entire world, I’ve always had a major soft spot for Italian culture. Or, as Mayes would put it, “Italy always has had a magnetic north pull on my psyche.” See what I mean? She’s eye-rollingly good.
Their music, their carb-tastic cuisine, their sexy old movies, the pure whimsy of their language, their gesticulating hand motions – there is so much to love. But before you visit a place, you wonder (or at least I do) how much of your associations with a culture are real and how much are made up of stereotypes and romanticized marketing that you’ve undoubtedly internalized. And often when you visit a place – especially a very popular tourist destination – you do sadly find that it is has been bastardized into a parody of itself by the tourist industry, from dorks like me wandering through with their fanny packs and polaroid cameras.
That’s probably another reason I didn’t write Italy into my original trip itinerary. It’s not that I didn’t want to come, just that I didn’t want to be disappointed.
But when I arrived, I was full Frances Mayes blown away by how magical this place genuinely is. As an American, you just can’t help but turn into that slack-jawed, glossy-eyed, photo-happy tourist.
It’s too beautiful — Naples, the city beneath glorious Mt. Vesuvius, which gazes ominously over the expansive maze of cobblestone alleyways that are lined with musicians, giant murals of iconic figures painted in exquisite detail, ancient little eateries serving age-old recipes, and ornate churches, as commonplace as Starbucks’s are in Seattle.
My home, the drizzly, green Pacific Northwest has its own kind of magic, but the Mediterranean is some other kind of Garden of Eden. Riding on the back of a scooter along the Amalfi Coast during the summer, whizzing by the faded terracotta rooftops, and dilapidated castles, and stone walls crawling with cacti, and lemon trees with branches bowing down from growing bounties of the orb-like fruit, and the dazzling blue sea below you. It is truly a fantasy come to reality.
I still haven’t gotten used to being here – nor can I stop talking up about it. I pity my boyfriend Pasquale, who must be tired of hearing me try to muster the words to describe how strange and exciting it is, for instance, to live in a building that is older than the state where I was born. To him, the fact that the walls in our staircase crumble every time you brush against them is an annoyance. But I don’t care. When I walk down the street and see grand buildings with ornate detail that have endured for hundreds of years, sometimes I still just have to swoon.
See what I mean? There’s just not a way to write about this without inducing nausea.
But it’s not just the ample lemons and the crumbling concrete that I’m in love with. It’s the people. The character of the South is a mirror of its beautiful yet chaotic surroundings. Italians have so many wonderful qualities. They are loyal and traditional, yet still open-minded, inclusive and welcoming. They are easy-going and almost universally hilarious. And when you’re around them, it’s like those qualities are naturally drawn out of you.
For some reason, here in Italy, Americans aren’t treated like the obnoxious imperialists that we really are (unlike other European countries, where you’re better off to just lie and say you’re from Canada to avoid the “Do you like Trump?” conversation.)
There is a true kinship between the American and Italian cultures that was immediately tangible to me when I arrived. Pasquale’s theory is that this is because Americans share the same level of “audibility” as Italians – a trait that isn’t universally appreciated, in my experience. But it’s also because so many Italians have family in the states, and because they are so loyal and family-oriented, they feel a strong connection.
These are some of the things I love about Italy, and there is so much more. But it’s not a fantasy. Especially because staying here through COVID-19 has meant that I haven’t been able to return home yet. Now, I’ve missed a year’s worth of holidays and loved one’s birthdays.
And I miss other things about home besides my people. Not to sound like a Johnny Cash song, but I miss hopping in my car and hitting the open road, singing to the radio by myself. Europe is so condensed and populated, most people navigate using public transportation. I didn’t fully appreciate the privilege before, of zipping from here to there whenever I pleased.
I also miss feeling the comfort to go anywhere and do anything without a looming anxiety about it. It comes with the territory of living abroad: when you don’t speak the language comfortably, you’re anxious about doing everything. Going to the grocery store, ordering a pastry, trying out a new gym — it’s all much more difficult and you’re constantly making an ass out of yourself.
But the biggest downside of the language barrier? It’s more difficult to make friends. And if you’re an awkward turtle like me, that’s hard enough as is.
So yes, there are downsides. It’s not always a delightful, Italian fantasy. I wish I could go home to visit without having to quarantine for a month. I wish I was learning the language faster. I wish my friends were here with me. I wish I could get in my car and go get chicken and waffles at a shady old diner! (Italians aren’t really “brunch” people.)
In the end, the good and the bad even each other out. Living abroad is not a fantasy; it’s challenging me in ways that I would never push myself to at home. At times, it can feel like a pressure cooker. But after doing some reflecting where I was a year ago and where I am now, all I can say is how grateful I am that I met those drunk Neapolitans and let them persuade me to come here. If I hadn’t, who knows where I’d be?