It's been more than a month since I departed for Italy. And I guess with the jet-lag and meandering in tow, this post has long since been delayed.
My parents love to say the word Italy with a particular zest, stretching out its syllables like the way a harmonica attempts to play slurs or the way gritty caramel feels against your tongue. Their interpretation of the country, in my opinion, is a bit of a paradox. Italy is rude and rushed, its city streets lack a clear dividing line and cars mingle haphazardly in a broth of congestion and diesel fumes. Yet Italy is smooth and slow in the tangents off of major intersections, and encrusted in the aged, gleaming cobblestones lie cafe nooks, gems offering coffee in its most archaic form.
My notion of Italy was abstract. Unlike my parents, who had invested months learning to decipher some unspoken code of the authentic Italian lifestyle, I was at school, with a head swimming with facts and figures and eyes targeting future exams rather than future travels. Did I have wanderlust? I guess so, and even more so after the mad rush of May. But even then the idea of Italy was an ambiguous geometric shape. I wasn't sure when my flight left or how many days I was going to stay. My only desire was to discover a most perfect setting, and immerse in the emotions of seeing absolute symmetry. I wanted to be in awe and I yearned to have my breathe drawn away by a serene encounter with God.
I thought I would find it in a majestic cathedral or a quiet chapel. I thought I would surely find it in the Vatican, which with the setting of the afternoon sun, welcomed magnificent prisms of golden light. The marble interior exhaled slivers and pockets of cool air while pilgrims shuffled quietly along the nave and rested in creaky wooden benches.
But there was a lack there. And unlike my predictions, I was to discover enlightenment in very unexpected places.
