Italy Realized

Italy was somehow both exactly what I expected, and the opposite of what I expected. As I said in my introduction post, I had extremely high expectations, especially for Venice. Though I don’t think anything was lower than my expectations, some of the places that I had never heard of before were some of my favorites. I had never heard of Le Cinque Terre or San Gimignano before this trip, and now I would totally go back to both sometime in my life. Even being in Poderno de Grappa was amazing, giving me an idea of what “normal” was in a different country, something I had never experienced before. Being in the normal way of life in Italy was actually one of the most impactful experiences of this trip, more than any one monument, no matter how beautiful they were.

Seeing the Italian way of life has totally changed my perspective on my own. I came back home and already our meals were very different. In Italy we had time to sit down and enjoy dinner because we had nothing else to do, so we could take as long as we wanted. But here, dinner changes every day. Either we have to eat really early, or we can’t eat all together as a family because my sister works during the evening. Or my mom works late in the city, and then we all just eat random things we made ourselves, totally different than the Italian norm of always sitting down and eating a several course meal. We don’t really have a choice, my family is so busy that we can’t always spend hours at a meal at night, but that’s part of the point. It’s not something that’s prioritized in America, because people are always working, and there is an emphasis on productivity here. That’s not something I can change, but my short time in Italy made me realize that sometimes it’s okay to take a break, and just enjoy life, and be grateful for the time that I do get to spend with my family because it is so limited.

We learned in class this during the first week that people used to believe that sight was an active sense, that something would come out of your eye and touch the artwork and then touch your eye again. Though we now know how the eye works, I still felt myself drawn to this idea. Every time we passed by a famous painting, even if I had seen it dozens of times online, in pictures, in class, it was different seeing it in person. I felt like I was getting more out of it being there in front of it, rather than just seeing it in a frame within a frame like we do when we see a picture of a famous painting. A similar thing was true about the plethora of beautiful cathedrals we went into. Routinely being around buildings that were three times as old as my very country gave me a lot of perspective. So many people have walked in these places before you that living in Italy, or even just visiting Italy as I did, and constantly being surrounded by these old structures reminds you of your place in the world. As I talked about with the mountains, reminding you of your insignificance, but not in a bad way.

I have been home a week now and my memories are just as vivid as last week. “Already the confusion of the present moment was receding, and certain events had begun to assume prominence, for memory is in this respect similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection” (Alain de Botton, 15). Just like my anticipation of the trip, my memories of the trip will soon be two dimensional and reduced to only a few ideas, but luckily that hasn’t happened yet. As I had hoped, the images and experiences are still fresh in my mind, and I will still be able to feel those feelings for a long time to come. “If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest- in all its ardour and paradoxes- than our travels” (de Botton, 9). I wanted to go on this trip to learn more about the world, and other places, but along the way I also learned a lot about myself, and what it means to be human. Even as the memories fade, these are things I won’t soon forget.

works cited:

de Botton, Alain. The Art of Travel. New York: Vintage, 2002.