Good Morning!

Welcome to Tuesday’s Open Thread. I'm back from a week off where I took a trip to Italy using only my imagination and those home movies you keep inside your head. I guess you might say it was my version of a vacation. Of course, sometimes traveling is a lot more glamorous in the re-telling then it is in the original experience. But not always.

“Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.” - Truman Capote

Bella Venezia

The idea to sneak into the Cipriani was Massimo's. As long as we're not conspicuous, he told me, no one will ever know. Problem was, everywhere Massimo went he was conspicuous. Tall, dark, and Italian, he turned heads everywhere we'd go. A serious drawback if the idea was to go unnoticed.

It was the summer of 1986, I was twenty-five years old and madly in love with a boy who liked to play. With a spirit of adventure we romped through Italy like two people who had been let out of solitary confinement and were looking to make up for lost time. Rome, Naples, Sorrento, Siena, and Bologna, we had spent the last 2 weeks covering so much territory that when we arrived in Venice, our first impulse was to just chill for a day. So, what better place to do that than at a world famous luxury resort?

A stones throw from St. Mark's Square, Hotel Cipriani enjoys the distinction of being tucked away on the Island of Guidecca surrounded by gardens, tennis courts, an outdoor pool, three restaurants, and a local vineyard. With stunning views of Venice's shimmering islands, you have the singular advantage of experiencing Bella Venezia from a secluded distance, but also benefit from being close enough to all the sites. Which is where the private boat that traversed the lagoon to the hotel came in handy, as well as an Italian boyfriend who was pretty good at bullshitting his way through the series of hoops we had to jump through.

Lingering on a playground for the wealthy, the Cipriani had much to offer. Beginning with a lazy lunch by the water, we savored a freshly made dish of tagliatelle limone e vongole along with a glass of sparkling wine. Following our meal, for the purposes of digestion, a leisurely game of croquet was played where I learned that Massimo was ruthlessly competitive. Afterwards, a dip in their Olympic sized pool seemed like the thing to do. It was. Both in its refreshing and stimulating benefits. Giddy with our own cleverness, we ordered a bottle of bubbly following our swim, toasted to our amazing luck and then shamelessly sipped our champagne while reclining on a pair of lounge chairs with views across the lagoon. We nearly made it through the entire bottle when our amazing luck finally ran out. Fortunately we avoided a face to face embarrassment by giving the conceirge the number of a room we actually saw when we first arrived, but it meant that we had to sneak away before we finished the rest of the bottle.

Looking back, I marvel at the free spirit of my youth when life was full of possibilities. An easy thing to feel when you’re twenty-five years old. Had I imagined at the time that I would store that memory away and pull it out when no one is feeling like a free spirit these days, I'm not sure I would've comprehended the perspective. But when you're young, you don't think about pandemics, the fragility of life, or what an older you might wistfully reminisce about, and why.

Denouement in Venice ~ June 1998

Rob and I spent our last days in Italy at the Hotel Seguso. A small but charming hotel with balconies overlooking a quiet canal, and a price tag that wouldn't kill us; it was a rare find in Venice. The meals were included and the food was lovingly prepared by Mimmo, a young cook who enjoyed wearing Hawaiian shirts in the kitchen and swearing in English. The dining room was run by Signora Bruni, a tall angular woman with a permanent scowl fixed to her face, she treated us to the kind of hospitality usually reserved for plundering despots.

Venice in the mornings was my favorite time of day. The water glistened softly below, casting ribbons of light on the frescoed ceiling of the dining room where we sat gazing out the window towards the bell tower in San Marco. The sound of utentils on plates carried over the water so clearly, I could almost imagine what my neighbors from across the canal were eating for breakfast. Suddenly Signora Bruni burst through the kitchen doors and headed towards us at a menacing pace. Carrying a tray of hot milk and espresso, freshly baked rolls, and the creamiest butter I have ever eaten, she dispensed with the formalities of a greeting and simply banged the dishes down on the table before disappearing back into the kitchen without a word.

"Is it my imagination,” I wondered aloud. “Or has the velocity of her plate tossing actually increased since we've been here?"

“She's an old woman,” Rob said wearily. “And it's a difficult job running a dining room at any age."

I poured myself a cup of coffee and could feel the muscles clenching in my jaw. What had been the start of a promising day had curdled into resentment at the prospect of having to manage Rob’s tedious mood for the rest of the day.

"Hey, why don't we take a gondola ride tonight after dinner?” I suggested changing the subject.“It's our last night here, and I'm sure we could haggle a fair price".

No response.

"Rob?"

"Why don't we wait and see how we feel?” he said impatiently. “We've got a lot of things we want to see today".

There was a time when Rob and I enjoyed playing together. Early in our relationship, he once asked me to come to Paris for the weekend while he was there on business.

"Isn't that a little extravagant just for the weekend?"

"It wouldn't be if I traded in my first class ticket. Besides, I need you here, baby".

I went to Paris with the expectation of showing Rob my favorite pieces of artwork, but when I arrived, we barely left the room. And when we did it was to replenish ourselves at a little café near our hotel. Freshly showered and wearing smiles on our faces that wouldn’t go away, we sat at a candlelit table in the corner of the room trying not to notice the discreet but knowing glances from the other diners nearby. Softly nuzzling my cheek and reaching for my hand under the table, Rob whispered, “You're glowing.” Afterwards we would take cool walks along the Seine and then back to the hotel, where we would fall into bed full of wine and laughter. Now six years later, we hadn’t even bothered moving the beds together when we arrived in Venice.

“Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.” – Anna Akhmatova

Essere Italiani

Considering the only language the five of us had in common was a smattering of Italian, the trip we took to Milan in the spring of 1986 went surprisingly well. Collectively, we came from Belgium, Switzerland, Poland, the Czech Republic, and the U.S., and were all living in Italy for the summer to study Italian Art and Language. In any other circumstance, an unlikely group of fellow travelers. With our rudimentary Italian and guidebooks in five different languages, we used more of a fly by the seat of our pants approach to travel, arriving in Milan with no place to stay. Through sheer luck, and the eavesdropping skills of our Swiss classmate, we managed to find an affordable pensione near the fashion district of Milan.

Unlike a lot of the other pensiones I had seen in Italy, this one showed signs of having been decorated in the last decade with modern furnishings and artwork. This youthful feel extended to the communal sitting room where the guests gathered in the evening before going out to explore Milan's active nightlife. But it wasn't until the second day when we noticed something else different about our accommodations. It's clientele. Young American men and women in their early twenties who all seemed to know each other, were very thin, very tall, and very good looking. A realization the five of us communicated to each over lunch the following day with our respective French, Polish, German, Czechoslovakian and English to Italian dictionaries.

Returning to our pensione that evening, our curious and very blunt Czech classmate went up to the front desk and asked why all the guests were so tall and beautiful. Turns out, Pensione Corrente was a place where newly arrived fashion models stayed while establishing their work creds in Milan. Speaking no Italian and living together in one place, these young models became close friends and tended to keep to their own. Although it was a running joke among the five of us that we weren't sufficiently tall enough or beautiful enough to talk to them, by the second evening I saw an opening into one of their conversations when the topic of an Italian pop singer who was touring in Italy came up.

Let me interject here by saying that Antonello Venditti was an Italian icon who had tapped into the energy that was Italian youth, which is ironic since even in the 1980's he was much older than most of his fans. So, when I got a sense they didn't seem to appreciate the six comp tickets they were holding in their hands, I asked them if they were willing to sell them. Thirty minutes later, I haggled the deal of the century, no mean feat with the international house of languages I had to wade through, and procured six tickets to Antonello’s show the following evening!

Want to get a glimpse of how Italians let loose and have fun? Go to a concert. The energy was bouncing off the walls. Everyone knew the songs, and everyone was singing them, their hands in the air, bouncing along. Even though we didn't know the songs, we just started singing and bouncing along with everyone else. Fantastico!

For anyone who has studied abroad, they'll understand when I say that one of the first rites of passage in learning a new language is dreaming in that language. My first dream in Italian came a month after living in Italy. From the beginning of my stay in Florence, my olfactory senses recognized what I could only describe as a faintly earthy, smoky, and slightly sweet scent that filled the air near the Arno River, but my memory could not place where I had previously experienced it. In my dream, I was standing on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence taking in the sights and smells, when I turned around and asked someone where that familiar scent was coming from. Shaking their head and telling me they didn't know, I went up to another person who told me it was the lemon trees. But I knew that's not what I was smelling. What I was experiencing was bringing up a feeling so visceral, I secretly wondered if I had lived in Italy in another life. Years later when hiking with my Sister in the Santa Monica mountains where we used to picnic with my parents as children, the smell of Florence and the dream came back to me and the connection was finally made after all these years. It was the eucalyptus trees. So, while I was in Florence, I was connected to a little bit of home, and now that I'm home, I'll always be connected to a little bit of Florence.