Italy Archives | In Lieu of Postcards

Rome, Even When It Rains

I just finished a devastating novel called Last Summer in the City. It was published in 1973, the first novel by a screenwriter named Gianfranco Calligarich, and it is the Catcher in the Rye-style tale of Leo Gazzara, a journalist adrift in Rome on the eve of his 30th birthday. When I started reading it, we had just arrived in Arezzo, Tuscany after three whirlwind days in Rome, and Calligarich’s descriptions, animated by my experience, leapt out from the page. Though this was my fifth visit to Rome, my time there is usually brief. But even I’m aware of the city’s reputation as a knotty, frantic place: plagued by loud traffic, besieged by the worst kind of tourists, famously garbage-strewn. Last Summer in the City‘s protagonist, a Rome transplant from the north, seems to feel Rome as both a cresting wave and a whirlpool: capable of lifting you to euphoric heights or sucking you down, drowning you.

Last Summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich

He writes, “Rome by her very nature has a particular intoxication that wipes out memory. She’s not so much a city as a wild beast hidden in some secret part of you. There can be no half measures with her, either she’s the love of your life or you have to leave her, because that’s what the tender beast demands, to be loved” (9).

He continues to explain that if you love Rome, it opens itself up to you:

“You’ll have summer evenings glittering with lights, vibrant spring mornings, café tablecloths ruffled by the wind like girls’ skirts, keen winters, and endless autumns, when she’ll seem vulnerable, sick, weary, swollen with shredded leaves that are silent underfoot. You’ll have dazzling white steps, noisy fountains, ruined temples, and the nocturnal silence of the dispossessed, until time loses all meaning, apart from the banal aim of keeping the clock hands turning. In this way you too, waiting day after day, will become part of her. You too will nourish the city.” (9-10).

This rumination concludes on a slightly less hopeful note: “Until one sunny day, sniffing the wind from the sea and looking up at the sky, you’ll realize there’s nothing left to wait for” (10).

Calligarich’s story is one of deep alienation and sadness, though the point of the novel is not that our protagonist is destroyed by Rome — instead, Leo sees in the city’s own vices and volatility a reflection of his own. His inclination is to get away, but he ultimately realizes that no city is more suitable as the backdrop to his self-destruction.

*View from our hotel of the Baths of Diocletian, Rome.*

Once I finished this haunting novel, I couldn’t help but think a bit more deeply about the Rome I had just experienced. Does Rome really encourage the darkness and despair that Leo thinks it does? Is it the type of city one must fall in love with or leave? Are all the world’s major tourist destinations this enrapturing and also cruel? Similar things have been said, after all, about New York and Paris (just for two examples). When in Rome this summer, even before my thinking was infected by Calligarich’s bitter prose, I had been trying to wrap my mind around the average Roman tourist’s intentions and impressions. Why visitors flock to this city is obviously, but what do they hope to find, to feel, once they get there?

Faces of Rome

I’ve been every kind of tourist in Rome, and it seems to show a different face each time I visit. I’ve rolled in as a clueless undergraduate backpacker in 2004, thrilled by the ease of wandering through the Forum (no ticket required in those days) and dutifully visiting the Colosseum and Vatican. In 2011, my longest stay yet, I enjoyed a quasi-insider’s view from a friend’s apartment up a hill north of Piazza del Popolo, dining with hipsters in Pigneto and drinking clandestine champagne at the foot of a monument on the Isola Tiberina. I’ve stayed, in 2018, mere blocks from the heavy tourist district and strenuously avoided it, passing a two-day idyll in the Doria Pamphilj and Barberini Galleries and walking the Jewish Ghetto at night. And in 2021 I braved the tourist areas again with a study abroad program, for the first time in the smartphone era, only to find them delightfully half-deserted in a post-pandemic hangover. I suppose Leo Gazzara would say I loved Rome, for each time I had to leave it I felt disappointment rather than relief.

This summer, however, again accompanying a student group, I found myself carried along by circumstances beyond my control, thrust again into the heart of summer tourist Rome and somewhat stunned by the ferocity of its crowds. It was this year, exposed to the ugliness of overtourism, that for the first time I felt perhaps an inkling of relief upon leaving. I thought I had loved Rome, but which Rome? If I only love Rome with its most hellish tourists redacted, does that even count? What follows are some reflects on my most memorable moments in Rome – with still much more enchantment than misery.

Trevi Fountain Terror

First up: the Trevi Fountain. It is, perhaps, the biggest obstacle standing between me and an embrace of the eternal city. Completed in 1762 and thus fairly new by Roman standards, the fountain was popularized with tourists in the 20th century when it was featured in a series of films set in Italy, including the middling 1954 Clifton Webb feature Three Coins in a Fountain, which introduced the idea of—you guessed it— throwing coins in the fountain. (Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, the classier film to prominently feature the fountain, encouraged the now-illegal practice of jumping in à la Anita Eckberg.) For some reason, people enjoy throwing money in fountains, even better if a movie has imbued this action with a sense of superstition. At least it is less harmful than attaching locks to beautiful old bridges.

*I wasn’t in the frame of mind to photograph the Trevi, but witness the crowds around the Pantheon and you get the idea.*

And so despite being one of Rome’s more minor attractions, the Trevi is a tourist magnet on par with the Colosseum, (and it’s particularly popular now that people are not allowed to sit on the Spanish Steps). Tourists clamor to get a seat near the fountain’s cloudy blue waters, and others simply gather around to take photos, throw coins and then ultimately stand, some jostling strollers of crying children, to stare into the heart of tourism for tourism’s sake. It is here, on my second day in town, that I started to wonder what tourism was really all about. I looked around at the tense, sweaty faces, the iPhones held aloft, the dripping, overpriced gelato cones and the beleaguered families settled at tables outside cynical tourist cafes with congealing pizzas in the windows, and I wondered if anyone was having any fun. But maybe “fun” is not what tourists, trained by Disney to adopt a theme park mentality of ride-hopping, are really looking for.

To wit: Too many minutes near the Trevi Fountain is detrimental to a love of Rome or even a love of humanity. Too many minutes near the Trevi Fountain, and nothing makes sense any more.

Piazza Navona Splendor

*Beneath the blue skies and ivory awnings of Piazza Navona*

But then! Once one extricates oneself from the Trevi Fountain, hurries past the snaking line to get into the Pantheon, ignores the husbands with sour faces ignoring their wives and the bossy Americans trying to return cheap puro lino clothing, one can break free into beautiful Piazza Navona. Piazza Navona, which never did anything to anyone (except overcharge them gratuitously for cocktails and coffee). Piazza Navona, where the history is casual and the feeling of the sun on your shoulders is priceless.

Piazza Navona has fountains, but seeing as no one ever made a movie about them, people don’t clamor to see them. These fountains are coinless, and one of them—La Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi—is a baroque masterpiece by Bernini. The piazza is big enough to absorb the impact of crowds and retain its sunny sense of calm, a silent smirk barely visible behind its cream-colored awnings. The cafes are host to tourists but don’t pander to them, and there’s always an empty chair in a sun-dappled setting for those who can accept a 10 euro cover charge.

In some of Last Summer in the City‘s more hopeful passages, Leo Gazzara makes the journey to Piazza Navona to meet his doomed, drunken friend Graziano:

“‘I’ll wait for you here,’ he said, ‘it’s a real beauty.’
The beauty was Piazza Navona, and when I got there I had the usual stupid idea that the sky was more beautiful there than over the rest of the city. I spotted Graziano immediately. He had on one of his legendary white shirts and was sitting in a small armchair at Domiziano’s, his pale face turned to the sun, his eyes shielded by a pair of dark glasses. He’d let his beard grow and both his hands were occupied, one holding a glass of beer and the other a glass of scotch” (66).

When he’s feeling down, Leo Gazzara often seeks refuge in Piazza Navona, and once you’ve been there, you can see why. During my visit to Rome, after I escaped the Trevi Fountain, I too sought refuge in Piazza Navona, where I sat on a bench and waited for my husband and our friends to emerge from the Pantheon. Piano, piano, as the Italians say, the sun came out. And we settled down in a cafe and everything was suddenly coated in a soft, hopeful light.

Peaceful Palazzi

The Doria Pamphilj Gallery

Which brings me to my favorite place in Rome, to date, for seeking refuge: the Doria Pamphilj Gallery. The Doria Pamphilj is a private art collection housed in a 17th-century palace that sits mere blocks from the Trevi Fountain and Pantheon and a short walk from the Roman Forum. Given its location and its high quality collection, featuring major works by Caravaggio, Titian and Velazquez, among others, I was shocked when I first visited on a sunny morning in 2018 to find the place nearly deserted. Wandering its incredibly still, grand hallways lined with painting and sculpture, adorned with chandeliers and lit by tall windows and gilded mirrors, I felt a sense of awe over this tranquility in the heart of such mayhem — an awe on par with any I had experienced over Rome’s more attention-getting landmarks.

Of course, this is not to say that the Doria Pamphilj is neglected. Each time I’ve visited (now three times in total, including last week), I am in the company of a small handful of art lovers. But the gallery’s great strength is that despite being in a palace, is it not clearly visible from the street. To enter, one must locate a small sign that leads up a long corridor to the ticket office. After that, you proceed through the garage where the heir to the Pamphilj fortune keeps his sports car, and then scan yourself in through unmanned turnstiles. It’s kind of like waking up alone at a rich person’s estate and being granted access to wander through while they’re out shooting clay pigeons or yachting (or whatever it is people who own a palace might be doing). It’s one of Rome’s many under-appreciated treasures.

The Barberini Gallery

Rome’s neighboring Barberini Gallery offers another opportunity to see excellent art in a palace atmosphere, but no doubt due to its splashy signage and grand presence on a major thoroughfare, it lacks the Doria Pamphilj’s degree of quietude. It is also somewhat aggressively overstaffed, with ticket-scanners popping up repeatedly during one’s journey through the labyrinthine palace grounds, inordinately concerned that one might be sneaking in (though it seems unlikely anyone ever has or would, especially considering the modest price of tickets). But nevertheless, the Barberini offers a similarly enchanting atmosphere to the Pamphilj; once while wandering through I witnessed a string quartet practicing in a gallery, preparing for some event, and this time I was happy to discover a room in which lounge chairs were lined up in front of a grand display of tapestries, inviting guests to sit awhile and study them, as though looking up at the night sky.

These two galleries call to me each time I’m in Rome, and they illustrate the fact that this city is simply brimming with arts and culture, so much so that despite its massive amounts of tourists, there are still plenty of incredible places you can discover, peacefully.

The Rain and Revelations

To conclude this lengthy post, perhaps my tolerance of Rome’s weather is an ultimate sign of enduring love. In the past I’ve staggered up hills in record-breaking heat, seeking refuge in the Borghese Gardens and learning to embrace the sticky-skin feeling of July and August. This year’s visit, alternately, was hampered by periodic downpours. These have the desired effect of scattering the tourist hordes, but cut short the kind of exploratory walking I enjoy.

*Ponte Sant’Angelo leading to the castle*

Naturally, Roman weather plays an outsized role in Calligarich’s novel, which begins on our protagonist’s bleak, waterlogged birthday. He observes the rain’s impact on the city:

“Torrents of rain hammered down on the decapitated statues of the Forum, the collapsed columns, the palaces in the paved squares, the desolate afternoon arenas, the ornate churches, and, absurdly, the overflowing fountains. For a while I waited in a doorway, splashed by rain and cursed at by passerby — other castaways seeking salvation, like me, in the dark, cavelike entrance — then, taking advantage of a break in the weather, I ran, hugging the walls, until I reached a small movie theater nearby” (18).

I had to smile when reading this, as it was almost exactly what we experienced during our Roman visit. Buoyed by our time in Piazza Navona, our group ambled out on foot to the shores of the Tiber, winding our way to the Castel Sant’Angelo with its magnificent bridge. (It is on this bridge that, fresh off the plane in 2011, my husband, friend and I bought beers and joined a number of young revelers in drinking and taking in the sunset.) Realizing that the afternoon was waning (we had a group dinner with the students later that evening), we followed the river back up just as the first drops of water began to fall. Far from our hotel, we decided to wait in a taxi line until, after a few moments, we realized that no one was coming or going. Taxi plans abruptly abandoned, we embarked upon our 30-plus minute walk back. The downpour that quickly ensued was much like Calligarich describes, and seemed to bring the city to a standstill.

Like Leo Gazzara, our group sought refuge in the doorway of a particularly down-and-out looking cafe, and I was pleased to find that Romans, unlike Americans, don’t particularly care if you loiter in their place of business and don’t buy anything (at least when it’s raining, and all bets are off). The proprietress was a dramatic and charming woman who jumped at each loud crack of thunder and joked in Italian and English with her international clientele. After about five minutes of the rain continuing full throttle, we gave in to the charms of this strange tourist dive and settled in to a booth on a raised platform at the back. We ordered some of the world’s cheapest wine and shook out our raincoats as our hostess infected everyone with good humor; I began to hope the rainstorm wouldn’t end, so attached was I becoming to this quirky little place and this warm company.

Conclusions

The more I visit Rome, the more I start to understand how challenging it is, and also how multifaceted. Rome is not a theme park, despite tourists treating it as such; it is not, as Calligarich’s novel emphasizes, the Happiest Place on Earth. It has a garbage problem and a drunken tourist problem and traffic problems and a lack of taxicabs; but it remains, even to the most casual visitor, an absolute wonderland of history, art, culture. It’s a place at once peaceful and chaotic, solemn and gregarious, and it’s hard, really hard, not to love it.

Penitent Magdalene by Caravaggio, Doria Pamphilj Gallery

A casual tourist can’t really know a place, and our memories our selective: upon each visit to a city, there are parts we choose to remember and those we choose to forget. I choose not to dwell on the obnoxious, unhappy tourists I encountered, the long lines and the sad pizzas and the glowing smartphones. I choose instead to remember the knockout skies of Piazza Navona; the still, gold-flecked hallways of the Doria Pamphili; Caravaggio’s Penitent Magdalene bowed with hair flowing; the rain ricocheting off centuries-old statues; the greasy cafe with the sticky floors and the warmth that carried us off into the night.

Traveling Italy…on the Edge of a Pandemic

I haven’t written for this blog since 2019. And there’s no mystery as to why—a global pandemic has a way of both bringing us all together and keeping us all apart. I’ve been one of the lucky ones in a number of ways, healthy and vaccinated and ready to travel beginning in June. For the past month, I’ve been traveling in Italy, a country just emerging from the throes of the pandemic, where my husband is teaching a study abroad program that we somehow managed to eke out despite restrictions.

And yet I sit here in front of my laptop, looking out the widow onto a cluster of medieval buildings, and I try to think of what to write. How to explain what it feels like to travel at time when I’ve just been reminded exactly what a privilege it is? At a time when hallmarks of climate change are cropping up everywhere, and the damage done by travel is present in each 100+-degree day, in the tall grass turned brown and crispy, in the omnipresent No Grandi Navi (no cruise ships) graffiti on alley walls in Venice? At a time when we’re just been knocked flat and grounded by a pandemic more widespread and serious than anyone living had ever seen?

Like most people, I’ve spent the past year sticking closer to home than ever—working at my little desk overlooking the backyard bird feeder, puttering around in the front yard, watching TV with my husband and listening to records and cooking and spending most nights in the same 1100 square feet of house. There were no restaurants, bars, films or concerts. There were limited gatherings with friends, outside even in the cold, wrapped up in layers and six feet apart. And there were walks—most evenings, I took to walking a two-mile loop around my neighborhood, a routine that now leads me to be recognized around town, like some local eccentric: Haven’t I seen you walking?

How to explain what it feels like to travel now, so far from home, when it seemed like we’d never leave again?

The Pantheon in Rome, Italy with post-pandemic crowds, summer 2021 — The Pantheon in Rome, with a smaller-than-usual crowd outside.

A Little Surprised to Be Face to Face with a World So Alive

This unwieldy heading is one of my favorite lyrics from my favorite song by the band Television, and while in context it’s about drugs and friendship, it also applies nicely to the experience of emerging from one’s COVID cocoon and into a world that feels like new. Everywhere, my home city included, things feel brighter, more exciting, vibrating with months of pent-up emotion and energy, ready to be released (for better or worse, considering the Delta variant).

The great thing about Italy is that to me, as a repeat visitor, it always feels this way—that whole la dolce vita thing, with the nightly passeggiata (evening stroll through the town to see and be seen), the gathering in piazzas for aperitivo (happy hour), the people in storefronts chatting at all times of day, reveling in their community even while tourists like us arrive to gawk at it. What I’ve hoped, as people have continued to get vaccinated and the U.S. has “opened back up,” is that we can become a little bit more like Italy, with more outdoor dining and events, more emphasis on community and the social aspects of daily life. (It remains to be seen whether late capitalism will allow it.)

This Italy study abroad trip was a new experience for us: while we’ve led programs before, this summer’s was the most comprehensive, with an action-packed first week-and-a-half hitting Rome, Pompeii, Sorrento/Capri, and Venice, before settling in to our university’s home base of Arezzo, situated in the hills of Tuscany near Florence. With a 0-60 start, our trip was exhilarating if a bit destabilizing after all those months at home, but as I write this, we’ve settled into a lovely, languid pace as we ride out the final days in Arezzo.

So has the pandemic changed Italy, at least in the eyes of a tourist? I’m happy to report that it hasn’t—not in the important ways. It still maintains that sense of public life, of community, of slow, relaxed living that is somehow also loud and boisterous. Due to lingering travel restrictions, the number of worldwide tourists is mercifully fewer, but that fact is only noticeable at the big attractions—Venice’s Rialto Bridge, Rome’s Vatican City and Forum, Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. Italians and European tourists have more than filled any kind of void with palatable energy, brimming over from packed outdoor cafes and public parks. It’s the same Italy, but I’m not the same in it—after a year and a half of pandemic, I’m a little bewildered, and perhaps more observant and grateful.

A canal in a quieter Venice, Italy post-pandemic, 2021 — A canal in a quieter Venice post-pandemic, 2021

Post-Pandemic Travel Pressure

I was thinking recently about how the experience of travel changes when you become responsible for yourself. On our study abroad trip, much of what the students do is planned out and pre-arranged, and they spend many days on guided tours and in the classroom, learning about what they’re seeing. In some ways, this is an incredible opportunity to really learn about the art and culture they’re soaking up, but they are missing a bit of what it means to travel as an adult—when the responsibility of communicating and navigating and connecting rests entirely on you.

I think back now to when I first fell in love with traveling, as a teenager going places with my parents, and how enjoyable it was to just go along with whatever they had planned. As the wife of an instructor on a study abroad program, I could do that again. But it doesn’t hold the same appeal it used to, especially as the pandemic and climate change have made leisure travel feel endangered. Now I’ve got a voice inside, telling me to seize the opportunity, to get all I can out of this, to appreciate it while I can. It’s a bit aggressive, this voice, and so much of this trip has been a mental balance for me—I take the voice’s point, but I also want to indulge in some of that slow living I mentioned. Floating along is not mere laziness; it also invites spontaneity.

Lively Piazza Grande in Arezzo, Italy, 2021

Seizing the Day in Italy

For better or worse, then, I’ve approached this summer’s travel with a rather serious mentality. We’ve all been anxious the past year, thinking about things like isolation and connection and community more than ever, and I’ve brought this baggage with me to Italy. I want to connect this time, I thought to myself, pouring over my pitiful Mango language lessons prior to departure. I’ve tried to be less shy and self-conscious, to use my minimal Italian and hold my own on the streets, to not become dejected when the inevitable confusion ensues. The thing about really making an effort as a traveler, though, is that it can be harder. If you take responsibility for yourself, it’s more frustrating, with benefits that are not often recognizable until much later (perhaps the next time you travel, when you will find yourself feeling more comfortable for reasons you can’t put your finger on).

But this time around, I have tried to revel in small the small moments of confidence and ease—for example, when my broken Italian has been rewarded head-nods of understanding, even the occasional beaming Certo! Or the time I bonded with the bartender in a tiny cocktail lounge in Rome by complimenting the music he was playing, an overture that was met with great enthusiasm. Or when I attended an Italian indie rock concert with local friends and felt like a real part of life in Arezzo (even when an uptight superfan “shushed” me, the loud American, between songs).

One thing that has always felt especially frustrating to me is grocery shopping in a foreign country; grocery stores all seem very much alike, and yet there are hidden rules that will embarrass you if you’re not careful. The Italian supermarket Conad has struck fear into my heart since the day two years ago when I was castigated for standing in a closing checkout line (a light was blinking, apparently). But this year I encountered a kinder, gentler Conad—and not just because I’d already learned the rules. It was there in the supermarket, putting on my plastic gloves to weigh the produce, that I realized the pandemic itself has actually had, in a small way, a positive impact on how we relate to each other in public life.

The streets of Sorrento, Italy, just reopening after the pandemic, 2021

COVID Confusion: The Great Equalizer

This realization came following challenges in Sorrento, which had just reopened the week before we visited. Everyone was hungry for business while also taking precautions to the extreme. I decided to do some shopping one afternoon before a group dinner with our students, and with my mask secured over my face, I thought I knew how to approach the situation. But upon entering a linen shop, a saleswoman began following me around as though I might shoplift, pulling out clothes and showing them to me until I left hastily in confusion. What had I done wrong? I wondered. Were they that desperate for business, or did I look like I was about to make off with an overpriced tunic?

The answer didn’t occur to me until we had our hotel breakfast the next morning. The breakfast was on a buffet table, but instead of helping ourselves as we had in the past, we were required to line up and tell the beleaguered young employees each thing we wanted heaped onto our plates. The system was strange and slow, but illuminating: I realized with embarrassment that what I had seen as an overzealous saleswoman was actually someone, confused as I was, trying to follow a tangled web of COVID protocols. We could not touch buffet food and we could not touch merchandise. As I thought about it more, I realized it was sad—those shop owners so excited to finally reopen, only to be told they could not allow customers to browse.

Confusing? Hell yes. But these experiences made me realize that travel in pandemic, in some ways, has made daily interactions LESS scary. Before, you see, I thought I was the only one who didn’t know the rules—that is how we tourists typically operate, concerned about looking like a fool with one false move. But now, with increasing complex pandemic restrictions, no one knows the rules. We’re all fools, and we’re all trying our best (well, most of us—I’m deliberately ignoring the belligerent anti-masking folks here). There’s a graciousness that wasn’t there before, a bit of understanding from both sides that this world is not so easy to navigate, and never has been.

Mid-afternoon shadows on a medieval building, Arezzo, 2021

Bringing It All Back Home

To try to summarize these stray thoughts, I have to say that for me, travel in the age of the pandemic includes perhaps a bit too much overthinking, but also a sense of awareness and generosity—I’m more aware of my own privilege and others’ generosity, and in turn more generous in my interactions and reactions.

I’ll admit that when we finished the first leg of our rapid-fire tour through guidebook-Italy and settled at our apartment in Arezzo, I was at a bit of a loss. I felt like I’d seen it all before but also like I was a tourist for the first time. What did we just do? I asked myself. Who am I in this context, trailing after a group of students, pinging around from St. Peter’s Basilica to Capri’s blue grotto to the Peggy Guggenheim to the Uffizi? Who am I now, leisurely reading by day in a Tuscan garden and congregating over deliciously sour white wine at night in a piazza beneath an astounding old church?

I’m lucky. I’m guilty. I’m an interloper. I’m a visitor. I’m a participant in life, here, in this place.

A participant—as a traveler, that’s really all any of us want to be, isn’t it? And when I’m sitting in my room next to an open French window and I hear the clinking dishes from the apartment next door, the voices in the courtyard, the church bells from the duomo which looms over it all, I have to remind myself that this is it. You’re here, and that’s all you need to be. It applies to traveling of course, especially when that aggressive voice pipes up, imploring you to make the most of the experience, see everything, do everything. But it also applies to our lives back home.

It reminds me of David Foster Wallace’s famous “This is Water” speech, something I’ve assigned to students for its uniquely incisive take on a modern dilemma: we ignore the good things that are right in front of us, and this leads to a lack of compassion. Something many have learned during COVID, I think, is that participating, being here is not just what happens when we’re on vacation. It happens any time we think to notice it. I’m here. This is the world. Isn’t it glorious.

On Losing Yourself: Preparing for a Trip Abroad

After a long hiatus, I’m excited to resume my writing about travel! As much as I enjoy writing about travel all times of the year, I’ve gotten out of practice due to work, other creative projects and various life events (including having to unexpectedly move), not to mention the fact that I haven’t done much Traveling with a capital “T.” But my husband is teaching a study abroad course in Italy this summer and attending a conference in Dublin beforehand, with me along for the ride. (He noted that he did not even tell me he applied to such a conference until he received his acceptance because, apparently, I tend to get unduly excited about such prospects.) So I currently find myself, for the first time since my spring semester abroad 15 years ago (yes, I am now OLD), preparing to spend a substantial amount of time (two months) abroad. It’s pretty cool, and I feel incredibly lucky that we (barely) have the money and the flexibility to pull it off. But I do have one small worry: that my anticipation, high expectations and tendency to over-plan juuuuust might be my downfall.

Born to Itinerary

The thing is, I am a great planner. I love planning a trip, something I didn’t realize until I planned my first, our honeymoon to Dublin (where we met) in 2016. I was drunk on the freedom of deciding where we would go and what we would do, thrilled by the ability to put together pieces on how we could get to each place and move smoothly from one thing to the next. The truth is, I was probably born to be a travel agent (but not really, because the idea of dealing regularly with airlines makes my palms sweat). But this tendency doesn’t necessary help one enjoy travel; in fact, it can have the opposite effect. While I strive to take a slower pace and avoid the marathon sightseeing of the stereotypical tourist, I have to admit that the kind of planning I do – writing down in a notebook everything I’d like to do, reading restaurant and coffeeshop reviews and the best hive-mind recommendations – is not exactly a recipe for the more romantic and immersive aspects of travel I claim to love.

The Beauty of Being a Know-Nothing

When I think about the experiences that solidified my love of travel, after all, they were not those that I had written beforehand in a mini-notebook or booked through Trip Advisor. During my semester abroad in Dublin, for example, I pretty much knew nothing about anything, bouncing around to whatever bars and clubs that I heard about from my peers (quite a few of them trendy hell-holes), wandering the streets not knowing where or what the historical, cultural or other tourist attraction were, but rather learning as I came across them. (My brother loves to tell the story about visiting me a few weeks into my study abroad experience and having to point out the Spire of Dublin to me, which I had never noticed despite standing right next to it.)

When I returned to Dublin (and I will again this summer), it was with a mind of correcting that behavior a bit, learning more history and culture and trying to go to “good,” “authentic” and “historical” places. Did I see interesting things and eat good food? Yes, of course. But was it more impactful and enriching than the first experience? Absolutely not. Sometimes to really immerse in a culture, you have to try losing yourself, ignoring that pesky controlling voice within. Sometimes, I suppose, you’ve just got to go to some trendy hell-holes to see the light.

Yet with our two-month European adventure – to Ireland, England, The Netherlands and Italy – just a few days away, I’ve already written way too much in my little notebook (and the impulse remains to write more). The travel agent in my head wonders if it isn’t a good idea to look up a few more London restaurant recommendations, to pour over my Dublin map and find out what route I might take on a meander (yes, I’d still prefer to call it that) through the city. You really should review a map of Venice, it says, despite the fact that I’m not even going there until July, and I’ll have my laptop and phone with me the entire trip.

Thus, I’m attempting to push that little travel agent within aside. Instead of building my anticipation and sheer delight at the thought of the summer ahead (and that delight is a big reason travel planning is such an addiction), I’ve decided to turn my attention to why I really enjoy travel. I’ve written in the past about things I like to do when traveling, the places I love, and why travel is important, but in my cloud of precision-planning, I don’t want to lose my own reasons for travel, its mental and emotional impact.

Focusing on the Why

So, why is it that I like to travel? This may seem like a strange question, as generally in our society long-distance travel, even for work, is something about which we’re expected to be excited. When I happen to share the news that I’m embarking upon a two-month trip to Europe, the standard responses include “That’s so exciting!” “You must be so excited!” “I’m jealous!” etc., etc. I’m sure that, in part, this has to do with my tone and countenance; if I sighed heavily and explained that I *had* to travel all summer because my husband was dragging me all sorts of places, perhaps they’d react differently. (Though they’d probably think I was at best odd and at worst a potentially miserable person.) But what is it about going somewhere with a different culture (even one that’s only slightly different in the grand scheme of things) that feels so thrilling?

Lost and Found

There are many schools of thought on travel, and it’s honestly a subject that’s been written to death by backpacker types on every blog and website imaginable (insert photo here of girl in anorak standing on edge of mountain). Two perspectives seem to come up again and again: 1) that travel helps you find yourself and 2) that it helps you lose yourself. I’ve personally vacillated between these. I think of the times, when I was a kind simple traveling to my grandparents’ house in eastern Pennsylvania from Illinois, how I felt blissful at the opportunity to be away from home, and how it stoked my imagination with dreams of being somebody different. I think of the delight I feel still in being anonymous on a foreign city street, in a market, on a bus or train, willing myself to fall into a new city’s complex choreography. These sensations fit pretty snugly in category two.

But I also think of the more enriching moments of travel, the negotiations and interactions, the attempts to explain myself and to find out about others. I think of the things I’ve seen and the things I’ve learned, and how I must wedge them into my formed conception of the world, how I’ve turned them over in my mind and processed them through my experiences. I think of the experience of a semester abroad, and how what at first felt disappointing and disorienting became a time of personal evolution, of coming of age and developing a sense of myself.

It’s this last thing that really gets to the heart of it. The fact is, travel can be about both losing yourself and finding yourself. If I really dig deep to suss out the appeal of travel, to me, is the way it combines a feeling of hyperawareness of oneself with a sort of forced reset. Thrust yourself into a foreign country, with all its attendant communication issues and challenges, and you’re forced to confront the person you truly are: how you relate to others, how you respond to challenges, what aspects of culture you are drawn to, which ones you misunderstand or fear. You are removed from the familiar surroundings that sometimes obscure these aspects of your identity, and thus they come into sharp relief.

But you lose yourself in some ways, too. Trying to forge relationships with those from other cultures can be challenging; because you lack a cultural shorthand and perhaps also have a language barrier, it can be difficult to show them who you really are. It can be frustrating to compare these encounters to those with friends at home, and wish the people you met abroad could know you in that same way. But isn’t it thrilling to be someone ever-so-slightly different, to figure out how to present yourself in a new context? To navigate new situations like this can make us feel foolish and uninteresting (in Italian my conversation is basically limited to asking a person how they are, and then naming different types of food, clothing and animals) but it also shakes you out of complacency, and forces you to answer for your beliefs and attitude in ways you never have before.

Coping Mechanisms for Losing Yourself

When I’ve led study abroad classes in the past, I’ve at times had to check my frustration when students become absorbed in Instagram during sightseeing expeditions, meals or meetings, or when they ignore the tour guide’s insights in favor of discussions about the minutiae of life back home. Think about where you are! I want to remind them. You may not be here again! And yet, I also realize that these behaviors are not a sign of apathy or disinterest per se: they are in fact a natural response to the unmooring sensation of travel. The students are out of their cultural context – many for the first time – and it can feel alien and dangerous; not only in the sense of physical, walking-down-an-unfamiliar-street-at-night danger, but in the sense of losing the context within which we feel defined and unique. Some of us turn to social media and to banal discussions of fraternity parties to continue to grasp a firm identity, to make sure we still understand ourselves.

And some of us, we plan.

It’s a natural reaction and, whether or not you give in, travel will change you.

I know that this summer will not be as life-changing as a first trip abroad, but I also know that if I let go a little, these two months will have something to teach me. Here’s hoping I can stay committed to write a bit about the amazing places I will visit. Stay tuned!

Flâneuse by Lauren Elkin & the Joys of Wandering

Does the simple act of walking facilitate the best travel experiences?

A Flâneuse, as defined by Lauren Elkin in her book of the same name, is the “feminine form of flâneur [flanne-euhr], an idler, a dawdling observer, usually found in cities” (pg. 7). As a scholar of French literature, Elkin was struck by the fact that men have historically been the ones depicted as walkers, wanders and ponderers – so much so that a word was created for them. But women flâneurs exist, too, and Elkin’s book weaves together the stories of famous flâneuses – Jean Rhys, George Sand, Martha Gellhorn and Agnès Varda, to name a few – as well as chronicle her own history of traveling and wandering.

Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London is not your typical travel book. It’s not a travelogue, nor does it aim to get inside a particular place. Yet Elkin writes with such insight about the ways we experience place that it will likely appeal most to lovers of travel and travel literature.

A photo of New York City at night, taken while flâneuse-ing. — A (blurry) photo I took of New York City at night while flâneuse-ing.

The Joy of Wandering

I was excited to read Flâneuse when it came out last year, because the concept of the flâneuse gets to the heart of what I find so exhilarating about travel. Walking the streets of a city, particularly in a foreign country, is when I feel the most moved by and connected to a new place. I feel myself become one in a crowd, watching people and storefronts, experiencing a day in the life of a place half a world away from where I usually spend my days. I remember loving this feeling even as a child, when I would leave my small town and go with my parents to Chicago or New York. Walking with them on the streets, I would feel the energy of the city, and long to break off on my own and become a part of it.

Elkin puts this feeling into words regarding her first extended stay in Paris:

In those six months, the streets were transformed from places in   between home and wherever I was going into a great passion. I drifted wherever they looked interesting, lured by the sight of a decaying wall, or colorful window boxes, or something intriguing down at the other end, which might be as pedestrian as a perpendicular street. Anything, any detail that suddenly loosened itself, would draw me towards it. Every turn I made was a reminder that the day was mine and I didn't have to be anywhere I didn't want to be.[pg. 6]

Since those days as a child and teenager longing to amble through a city on my own, I’ve tried to take the time to do just that anywhere new I’ve visited. In recent years I’ve been traveling to Italy, a country that rewards flâneuse-ing almost as much as Paris, with its piazzas and hidden archways, its food and clothing markets, and its vibrant public life, even in smaller towns.

Piazza San't Agostino, Arezzo — Piazza San’t Agostino in Arezzo, Italy, at dusk.

Environments that “Inhabit Us”

Elkin’s book covers a lot of ground (and spends perhaps more time than I would have liked on close readings of works of literature and film). She discusses the debt that the modern flâneuse owes to feminist pioneers, who made it possible for women to walk the streets alone in many parts of the world. And in the memoir sections especially, she writes of the glorious feeling of independence such an action can bring. But she also talks about the struggles of being in a new place, and the difficult journey of figuring out who you are and what you want while also being far from home. It’s a sentiment any ex-patriate or nomad will relate to strongly. In one of the most affecting passages, she writes,

'Environments inhabit us,' Varda said. These places that we take into ourselves and make part of us, so that we are made of all the places we've loved, or of all the places where we've changed. We pick up bits and pieces from each of them, and hold them all in ourselves.

And sometimes we hold on with both hands to things we really want to release. 

This is a hard thing to admit. How do we know what to keep, and what is just an old idea we had about ourselves? [pg. 240–41]

This is a thought-provoking question, particularly for those of us that travel. We are often prompted to change and adapt quickly, to revise our assumptions about both ourselves and others. We are thrust into new situations with new people that cause us to rethink our positions and the way we envision ourselves and our lives. And then there’s the leaving – the sometimes painful process of leaving a place for somewhere new. And the struggle to reserve a piece of your heart for that place while still moving on. But we wouldn’t want it any other way, would we?

Dublin Castle, photographed while flaneuse-ing.

Flâneuse-ing Favorite: Dublin, Ireland

While reading Elkin’s book, I couldn’t help but think of Dublin, the only non-American city I can say I’ve actually “lived” in (I spent six-plus months there on study abroad in 2004). It was the first place in which I really practiced flâneuse-ing for the first time on my own, and I recognized immediately how much it suited me.

When I think of my time in Dublin now, I remember myself hopping on the bus to the city center and ambling around, sometimes with friends and sometimes alone, strolling past shops or over the Ha’penny bridge or through St. Stephen’s Green. I’d hear snippets of conversation, smell sizzling fish and chips or sticky cider and cigarette smoke wafting out of bars, spot graffiti and murals on walls and sidewalk panels. I remember the riotous fun of St. Patrick’s Day, leaving the dorm at 11 a.m. and wandering around all day with this companion and that, meeting friends and acquaintances old and new, and returning at 5 a.m. the next morning with a new zeal for the city in which I found myself and the life I was living.

James Joyce graffiti in Dublin, Ireland — James Joyce mural in Dublin, Ireland

Dublin is a great city for flaneuse-ing, but not for photographing. It’s perpetually dark and cloudy, and the last time I visited in 2016 (when these photos were taken), the city was swallowed whole by construction. It’s not classically beautiful in the way of Paris, Venice, Barcelona or other romantic cities I could name. And yet it’s an incredible city to walk around. It’s almost certainly in part my own nostalgia – I’ll never be able to separate this place from my own journey, as cheesy as it sounds, into adulthood. But there’s something else about it, too. It has a unique, haunted beauty all its own.

When I’m being a flâneuse in Dublin, I often think of Louis MacNeice’s 1939 poem, simply called “Dublin.” The entire poem captures the essence of roaming around the city, though the second stanza speaks to me most:

This never was my town,
I was not born or bred
Nor schooled here and she will not
Have me alive or dead
But yet she holds my mind
With her seedy elegance,
With her gentle veils of rain
And all her ghosts that walk
And all that hide behind
Her Georgian facades –
The catcalls and the pain,
The glamour of her squalor,
The bravado of her talk.

I’ll leave it there for now. For all you flâneurs and flâneuses out there, may you never tire of exploring. I know I won’t.

Top image: Harcourt Street in Dublin, photographed while flaneuse-ing.

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A Love of Travel…and Where It Comes From

There is something about travel that quenches some essential human thirst — to understand the lives of others, to see the earth that we live in and exploit, to experience the truly novel, to feel uncomfortable and awed and like the most rock-solid version of oneself.

A Childhood of Road Trips

I’ve had a love of travel for as long as I can remember. I think one reason for this is that I’ve always felt I’ve had multiple homes. My father is a professor, and with the academic life comes uprootedness: my parents, both from eastern Pennsylvania, moved to a small town in Illinois before I was born and, despite initial misgivings, remain there to this day. For me as a child, this meant lots of road trips “back east.” Every summer (and some winter holidays), we would load up in the car for the one-and-half-day’s drive to Mountain Top, PA, the tiny town near Scranton where my maternal grandparents lived, tucked away up a steep road in the Appalachian mountains. I loved these trips, and the regular contact with relatives far away made me feel not-quite-midwestern, but not-quite-northeastern, either. Though my home was in Illinois, I never remember feeling completely owned by it, always aware of the fact that it is possible have roots all over.

These early road trips meant a lot to me. I loved the chance to go to a different place — to breathe different air, see new landscapes, and be someone just a little bit different. But I also loved the journey itself. My family became pros at the road trip: we would compile bags full of travel games, books, and magazines, load up a cooler with a picnic lunch (bologna and cheese with a mustard happy face, please), and crank up the oldies radio. We’d play wiffle ball at rest stops and splash in the hotel pool — no matter how rinky-dink. Though my brother and I would have our occasional backseat squabbles, and certainly, things went wrong, I can’t remember much of that now. My memories focus on the bliss of being on the road.

One of the things I loved best about traveling was what one might call roadside Americana: truck stops and rest areas; motels, hotels, and lodges; the people, signs, and oddities that flew by the window. When I was only six years old, we took the quintessential Americana road trip, a journey across the western U.S., taking in the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, the Corn Palace, Yellowstone National Park, and a multitude of other things I can’t specifically remember, but which left an impression on me. I recall a big horn sheep perched on the edge of a mountain, aisles of glorious kitsch at Wall Drug, the unfamiliar and thrilling sights, sounds, and smells.

The degree of adventure, however, was beside the point: We went a number of exciting places, like Walt Disney World and New York City, but I never lost my love for that familiar summer road trip, through the flat plains of Indiana to the Cross Country Inn in Toledo, Ohio to the quirky Appalachia of my parents’ hometowns. The trappings of the road were everywhere, and they were enough to satisfy me.

The Magic of Study Abroad

Photo from my semester in Ireland, 2004, which contributed to my love of travel. — One of the few non-blurry photos from my semester in Ireland, 2004. This was taken on Inis Mór, in the Aran Islands.

If those summer road trips were the first way travel changed my life, then the second was the semester I spent in Dublin, Ireland as a junior in college. I had been to Ireland once previously to visit my brother on his study abroad, and briefly to France on a class trip, but that had been the extent of my international travel. My semester in Dublin was a revelation. Difficult at first (and I should note that I wrote a whole essay about this experience for proFmagazine.com), the semester turned into the best of my life. I grew up that semester, came into my own, fell in love with my now-husband, and fell in love with both Ireland and Europe. After a period of poverty and graduate school (don’t they always go hand-in-hand), I was able to go back, and have since been lucky enough to travel more in Europe — particularly Italy.

I realize that my stories are not unique. There is something about travel, whether it’s a simple day trip or an international adventure, that quenches some essential human thirst — to understand the lives of others, to see the earth that we live in and exploit, to experience the truly novel, to feel uncomfortable and awed and like the most rock-solid version of oneself.

Why Write a Blog?

As a writer, I’d never before thought about writing a “travel blog” — one reason for this is that I never considered myself that much of a traveler. Sure, I traveled more than most people, but constricted as I was by a full-time job, I couldn’t be constantly on-the-go, nor could I spent long periods of time away from home. But in 2016, I realized it was time for a change, and transitioned from my full-time university job to a life of freelancing and teaching (more thoughts on that here). My husband is an Art History professor with summers free and many opportunities for travel, and we decided the small hit to our income was worth it for the sheer flexibility of my new career. And it has been 100% worth it, not least because I’ve made travel a central component of my life, and I haven’t looked back, traveling for work (teaching study abroad students), to visit friends and to simply see as much of the world as I can on my limited budget.

I share my love of travel today with college students, leading study abroad trips in Italy. — With our study abroad group in Napoli, learning about the mafia, 2017.

In Lieu of Postcards won’t necessarily be your typical travel blog, however. While I do travel frequently, my husband and I don’t live the #vanlife that’s so popular these days, that nomadic existence of life constantly on the road. We are middle-class people with jobs and responsibilities, after all. I see this blog as an outlet for my writing, not simply to document the places I’ve been and the experiences I’ve had there (though it will certainly be that). I’d like to explore travel and wanderlust more deeply, as states of mind. I plan to supplement the travelogue model (went here, did that) with investigations of the quirks of places I visit, their history, and the attendant pop cultural and literary associations that whirl around in my thoughts. I’m not a mountain climber, a gear-head, or much of a foodie (though like any traveler worth her salt, I appreciate good cuisine — and good puns), and you won’t see me striking meticulously glamorous poses or doing yoga on the edge of a cliff (spoiler alert: I fear cliff-edges). To summarize: I hope to write a blog that’s not just navel-gazing but thought-provoking, not aspirational (did I mention I don’t have much money?) but simply interesting — and perhaps occasionally inspirational — to readers out there who also love travel, whether it’s just a few hours or half a world away.

Did I scare you away with my long-winded thoughts? If not, I hope you’ll consider visiting me here from time to time, whenever that wanderlust mood strikes.

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