I guess when you spend a great deal of time in Italy, it loses its mystique. It's like when you stop yourself amidst the sightseeing and eating, and think, wait this is it. All of the glamour that surrounds the country stops being so mysterious and grandmothers with loose skins donning floral dresses, carrying plastic brown shopping bags in which onion spurts dangle from starts becoming a common sight.
But it's not sad, I don't think, because that's what traveling does; it peels back with its sharp, incisive metal tweezers another translucent layer of skin. Yet it also reveals a pink, undiscovered mass of questions directed at ourselves. I suppose travel changes you because it limits your supposed life and opens the world that could have been. Every time I see a new culture, I question the essence of my foundation. What if I was born here or there...just how different would I be?
My mother started the holiday with a memo pad, scribbled in jumpy cursive all the churches we must visit, not because we were religious, but because that's where Bernini and Caravaggio lived. The sculptures and paintings in real-life have this magical quality that the Baroque artists captured so exquisitely. The drama of the scene whispered down the quiet nave, and resonated inside the audience.
But I think another layer of Italy spoke more directly. It was after we had visited the town of Siena and were driving to this old farmhouse we were staying for the night. It was sunset on a cloudless May day, and passing the rolling hills of Tuscany with the window down and the wind in my hair, seeing the patches of green and yellow and the richly dense sky pencils, I felt this great calm blanket settle in. It was this moment of enlightenment when I started crying for this dimensional platform surpassed any marble or canvas I'd ever seen. The pastures radiated and the world was majestic. To be born here, I realized, is to be the same nature as the earth, and to die in this land is to be reawakened again.
I felt the same great sense when I was climbing Mt. Vesuvius. In that densely matte gray fog lies a white emptiness and an absolute silence. I heard my heart beat, and the breathe of my every exhale. Heaven and Hell were figurative for I was encapsulated in this great unknown. It wasn't so much frightening as it was an immensely meditative experience for when you cut the cord, you realize that the music mustn't always play. When you watch the world pass, alone, you receive the messages of the earth and of yourself.
