Signora?

The first time I went to Italy I was just a few months past my nineteenth birthday. A college friend and I took the overnight train from Barcelona to Rome, arriving at the station bleary-eyed and minus my friend’s camera bag, which had been stolen from her lap while she slept. (Incredibly, she had found the camera itself dumped in a tiny bathroom a few cars down.) Outside, we tried to take the bus to the hostel that we’d read about in our tattered copy of Let’s Go, Italy!, but the driver shook his head fiercely at the liras we held out to him. That’s great, we thought, clamoring aboard with our enormous packs. Italian buses must be free! We cheerfully rode the buses without paying for two days before some fellow tourists informed us of our mistake: you had to buy the ticket before you got on the bus.

Travelling in Italy opened my eyes in a way I had never experienced before. It was not my first time out of United States; I’d been to England, where my brother and sister and I laughed that our British cousins said “tea” for “dinner” and “pudding” when they meant “dessert.” But to set foot in a country where I understood nothing but grazie and bellissima, where the landscape seemed something out of a fairytale, where simply walking down the street made me feel more beautiful than I had in my entire life... Italy was a different sort of awakening. Surely, then, too, hundreds of foreign tourists must have milled around me, but they were not what I saw. The rustic looking pizzeria near the Fontana di Trevi was not an over-priced tourist trap; it was the real Italian deal. I climbed clock tower after clock tower, the red-roofed panoramas nearly pushing my heart out through my chest. This was Italy, and I was in love. I left ten days later determined to make her mine.

And I did. A year and a half later, I arrived again in Siena in February, with three semesters of Italian under my belt and my suitcase lost somewhere between New York and Florence. I spent three nights shivering in the frigid medieval apartment I shared with three other American students before the suitcase finally arrived and I piled my warmest clothes on top of the thin blanket that covered my bed.

Every morning when I left the apartment for the university, stepping out onto the narrow, stone-paved street, my heart rose into my throat. Was this really my life? I felt half-choked by the excitement of what the day would hold. A short semester later, I was just beginning to feel at home. Encouraged by my parents, I took a leave of absence from college and found an apartment just outside the city walls with three Italian students.

It was there I learned how to enjoy Italian coffee, how to use a bidet, how to appreciate the almost-crunch of pasta cooked al dente. We cleaned the bathroom thoroughly at least four times a week and set the table for our breakfast of hot milk and cookies before we went to bed. I made lists of new words only to find that a few weeks later I knew them without having once glanced at the list. I became best friends with Andrea, a quiet, intelligent boy who cared enough about what I had to say that my Italian blossomed, my journals filling with the beautiful rhythm of my second tongue. I borrowed a bicycle from another friend-- a beautiful gay boy from Sardinia who wouldn’t come out of the closet until years later-- and spent long afternoons riding around Tuscany’s rolling hills. I played hours of chess with Andrea in our favorite cafe, kissed a smooth-skinned soldier under an olive tree, walked home more than once in the pre-dawn, the air outside the bakery already sweet with the smell of baking bread.

* * *

A year ago, when Don took all three kids to visit his family in Alabama and Georgia, and I was left with a quiet house and some time on my hands, I finally wrote a long over-due email to Chiara, the one Italian roommate with whom I’d forged a lasting friendship. When are you coming to Italy, she wanted to know. It was seven years since I’d last seen her, when Don and I had travelled through Milan on our way to our honeymoon in Slovenia. And although I had truly meant only to reach out to an old friend, the seed was planted... When was I going to Italy? I ordered a collection of Italian short stories to brush up on my Italian and started scheming.

Still, I couldn’t even think of going without feeling selfish. When the twins were little and still nursing, I had often fantasized about a weekend-- even a day-- to myself. I needed it. I deserved it. But the children were so much easier now. My desperation gone, the thought of a week to myself felt extravagant and self-indulgent. And even though I had my own money saved, I balked at the idea of spending so much on a ticket when we were economizing all we could at home.

And then, of course, there was the obvious: whatever time I spent in Italy would mean Don flying solo at home. True, I had solo-parented for equally long stretches of time, but it had always been when we were travelling and my parents or my sister were there to lend a hand. But my rock-star husband insisted that he “wasn’t scared.” In fact, he hardly seemed daunted. When a friend reminded me over dinner one night, “You can’t take it with you,” I made up my mind. I was going to Italy.

* * *

Chiara and her husband live in Rome now, with their two-year-old son Mattia and a baby girl on the way. They live near the center of the city in a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment with a narrow balcony and marble floors. It is spotless. Everything is white-- the walls, the floor, the kitchen cabinets-- and there is not a mark or a fingerprint anywhere. I can’t help but think of my own home, with its muddy floors and sticky cabinets, and feel ashamed.

I have arrived with two guide books checked out from the library at the last minute and no plans. At home, everyone kept asking me this:“What are your plans?” To speak Italian, to eat Italian, to pretend to be Italian... this was all I had in mind. I haven’t come to sight-see. And yet, how can I be in Rome and not sight-see? On Monday, Attilio gives me a ride to the Fontana di Trevi on his scooter on his way to work at the bank. We squeeze past cars, speed around round-a-bouts, weave through creeping traffic. He points out monuments and buildings; I take in all the suit-clad men lined up on their motolinos as they make their way to work. With my helmet on no one can see my face, so my fantasy of being Italian is holding up just fine. I’m just another girl on the back of a bike, zooming through the streets of Rome.

Ten minutes later, after Attilio has dropped me off and I’ve wandered over to see what I can of the famous fountain, now almost totally under reconstruction, I know I have to let go of the fantasy, at least for now. I think of Don saying, “What’s wrong with looking like a tourist if I am one?” I sit down in a piazza and study my map.

An hour later, I enter a cafe and order my favorite Italian coffee drink, a latte macchiato, the only one that I have yet to see in an American coffee shop. While I’m waiting, I overhear one of the baristas say, “What is the signora having?” and that first time, it catches me by surprise, to hear that I am signora now, not ragazza or signorina. I think of my eighty-year-old grandmother saying to me once, “You feel just the same on the inside.” I look at my face in the bathroom mirror as I leave and wonder when I became signora. Because Gran was right; I feel just the same on the inside.

Except, of course, that now there are three pieces of my heart walking around on their own two feet, more than four thousand miles away. When I think of them, my heart aches, so mostly, I don’t. My time here is like a latte macchiato, mostly the sweet milk of utter freedom, marked just a little by how much I miss my children.

Near the end of my trip we go to Tivoli one evening, a small hill town near Rome. We eat panini in a piazza and then go inside Villa d’Este, a grand Renaissance villa with a spectacular garden filled with fountains. The sun sets over the countryside below, and golden lights illuminate the fountains. It is Attilio’s first time here, and he fairly bursts with pride. “Italy should be able to live on places like this!” he says. Chiara’s eighteen year old cousin declares she’s found the place where she wants to get married; now she just has to find a boyfriend. I nod in agreement. This place is magically beautiful, quintessentially romantic. I long for Donald and for my family.

Before I left Asheville, when I told an older lady who takes my gym class that I was going to Italy to celebrate my fortieth birthday, she said, “What a great idea! You should do that every decade!” As my days in Italy dwindle, I latch onto this idea. I’ll be back when I’m fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty. Divvied up like that, into just four remaining visits to Italy, the rest of my life suddenly seems frighteningly short. I have to remind myself that I’m still-- hopefully-- in the first half.  I mention as much to my friends, and Attilio sighs. He is a bit melancholy at times these days, worn down by the daily routine of work and parenting and maintaining a spotless house.  Yes, he admits, but the second half will be the harder half, since our bodies will inevitably begin to fail. I know he’s right, but somehow I don’t see it that way. Sure, it’s hard for me to look in the mirror these days without cringing a little at the lines on my face. Still, at every race or triathlon I do, there are scores of older men and women, often finishing ahead of me. I choose to believe that my own body won’t hold up any differently. And when I think of my first years in Italy, with all the youthful folly and self-searching that they held, I’m sure I’d rather be forty than twenty, rather signora than signorina after all.

Spending the week in Rome alone reminds me how little my pleasures in life have changed. My best times are spent on Attilio’s twenty-five year old mountain bike, riding alone down an ancient Roman road one day, risking my life in the city traffic the next. When I reach my destination on the bike or make it home again, I am jubilant. I look at churches and mosaics, monuments and fountains, and I appreciate them as I always have. But my favorite moments in Italy are spent meandering down the green paths of secluded villas and exploring the lonely remains of Ostia’s fallen city. You always liked the green places, says Chiara over dinner, remembering me on Carlo’s bike. 
We are both struck by how little we have changed. “Sei proprio uguale,” were Chiara’s first words to me when I got off the plane. You’re exactly the same. In the eight years since I’ve seen her, I have experienced the most drastic transformation of my life: I am now a mother. I feel changed. Still, I know what she means. Chiara has a huge baby belly, strands of gray in her thick black hair, and a lovely, high voice she uses only when talking to her son. But she is still my Chiara-- still patient, clear-hearted, generous, and kind. On my last morning in Rome we drink our hot milk together at the small kitchen table, both in our pajamas. The pan of brownies I made for her yesterday are almost gone, and I smile as she cuts herself another piece. We could almost be in our little apartment on Via delle Luglie in Siena, so many years ago. I smile again, thinking how this evening I can I tell my children that in Italy you can eat brownies for breakfast. Then Mattia calls to Chiara from the bedroom. “I’m coming!” she calls, and she goes to him.