I eloped "with" Italy 30 years ago

How odd to conclude that among the loves of your life is an entire country, in addition to the real loved ones, like Leo.

I am, of course, talking about Italy, a country that for me is nothing less than a shaman, no safer than those Sirens who ensnared Odysseus, and more akin to a being that enthralls (enchants/bewitches) me than a landmass. Also: a twin who lives mainly in my mind but who nonetheless follows me wherever I go.

And it's been following me for a long time: 30 years ago this year, I left America to live in Italy.

Dates. Anniversaries. Milestones. The accumulation of years. I dwell on these notions a lot. But because I've been busy promoting This Darkness Will Never End, my first book-length translation, I haven't had a chance to reflect much on the fact that three decades ago this year, I left for Italy. 

Thus began my expat life -- the years, for better or for worse, against which all the subsequent years would be judged.

Thirty years ago, I eloped to -- and with -- Italy. And 'eloped' is the right word because the transaction lacked the solid planning of a wedding. I escaped with my paramour and let all the naysayers (who wisely said, 'You don't have a job...') be damned. All I knew was that, following my graduation from Wesleyan, I'd secured through a friend a summer "job" as a tutor to a bunch of rich Romans whose children attended an American school in Rome. And then I would go on to Pisa where I would be the guest of a doctor whose cousin worked in my department at Wesleyan.

After that, who knew? Not I, but I didn't care. I only knew one thing: my days of living in one language were over. Once I'd tasted bilingual life, it was the only one for me. As I mentioned in a previous post, once you've heard and understood Italians speaking their native language, I don't think you can go back to the English-only world. I couldn't. 

Before the year was out, I migrated to Florence, a city I'd circled warily. It's hard to believe this, but I was on Team Siena back then. I'd spent a semester in Siena as a student and found Florence dirty and chaotic whenever I visited.

But one Sunday, the doctor who was hosting me in Pisa had to work all day at her hospital in Florence and she invited me to come along. The city enchanted me! Perhaps because she dropped me off somewhere other than the dodgy train station or due to the quiet hum of a weekend but I can remember crossing one of the bridges that span the Arno and succumbing to the magic of Florence.

Lasciate ogne speranza: for me, at that point, I could abandon all "speranza" -- hope -- of ever falling out of love with Florence or Italy. Like the author of those famous words, I would spend the rest of my life thinking about enchanting, beguiling, occasionally wicked Florence.

As I've said before, if my life were a novel, I might call my departure for Italy the “inciting incident.” It followed that semester abroad where I'd resolved to truly immerse myself in the culture, and being fluent in Italian became an obsession—a lonely one, since I often forced myself to forfeit outings with other Americans so I could instead practice Italian. 

What's ironic: I’d struggled to learn the language in my freshman year of college, but once in Italy, nothing short of fluency would satisfy me. In an essay I wrote for The Millions, I noted that one of the first words I learned on the ground in Italy was the verb scherzare. "It means 'to joke' and is indispensable for following almost any conversation with Italians. During a trip I took to Sicily, a Palermo policeman warned me about strange men near the station by yanking on the skin below his eye with his finger, and uttering a single word, occhio, which simply means 'eye.' I was hooked," I wrote. Mastering Italian became a pursuit not unlike bedding men or getting drunk.

I had very little money when I lived in Italy, and no real career to speak of. In fact, when I returned to the States, I was at loose ends (since I hadn't been building a professional foundation, or so I thought). I can recall visiting the beach with my sister, who uttered an immortal line about my lack of a real job when I lived in Italy, which caused a bit of a stir between us at the time.

She wasn't wrong. But she may not have realized what Dad had intuited. Knowing not only that he was a world traveler but also that his library included books by many authors who made the most of their ex-pat years, I believe my father sent me off to Italy so that I could truly live, so that I could collect the kinds of experiences that fiction and other writing spring from.

Of course him being him (a contrarian), he had an unforgettable comment when I decided to return home from Italy: "It's all downhill from here." I was 25!

It took me many years to get over leaving Italy. Perhaps because I moved from a medieval tower in the center of Florence to an apartment in a car-infested Atlanta suburb. I can recall crying in the car in Atlanta whenever we listened to Italian music (and forget watching Italian movies -- total sob fest).

Eventually I forced myself to develop interests in other countries, such as Mexico, which we visited quite a few times. I even allowed myself to study Spanish, although it felt as though I were betraying my true love, Italian.

And then when I'd finally moved on, I allowed myself after many years to return to Italy, only to discover that I still wanted what I shouldn't want: to live in two places and two languages, which is to say, live in Italy and the US. The compromise? I live in two languages by translating Italian literature.

The experience of living in Italy was so rich, it's as though everything that came after paled. Luckily, I became a mother and that feeling dissipated because the experience of being a mother is much more powerful than adoring a culture or way of life.

But the experience of living there continues to shape my life today (and the mementos that have proliferated throughout my house. It dominates what I read, and it spurred me to translate, and it influences where I choose to vacation (and my dreams for retirement, which I recently concluded should begin with a year's wandering through Italy).

I continue to marvel over Italians and the Italian way of life. At one point during our travels last summer, I developed an obsession with the Roma-Viterbo train line, which is separate from Trenitalia. As I wrote here, it's not entirely odd: our apartment in Rome overlooked one of the stations on the line. And when I am in Italy, I am immersed in "my beat," which I define as the ordinary aspects of Italian life, the parts of Italian life that an average Italian contends with. I found it reminded me of the PATH trains that link lower Manhattan to New Jersey inasmuch as it's both local and separate. They are like an alt subway line, which is slightly odd. If you were a traveler to NYC, you could mistake them for the actual subway system, no?

And I continue to silently beg Italians to keep being Italian (especially as I note developments such as a Starbucks coffee location on Via del Corso in Florence. Ma dai! Non ci voleva).

So my dear Italy, I'm very happy we eloped all those years ago! I'll remain true to you until my dying day.

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