Revisited Worlds

This post begins as scribbling in a notebook, as I sit on the platform of the Bologna train station very early in the morning. I've had a total of 17 hours of sleep over the last four days and I'm doing pretty well, considering. I woke up feeling cool and languid, even on the sofa bed.

There's something about Italy in the summer. Before my term abroad, I'd never gone travelling other than in the summer. There is still something about the feel of tired feet on paving stones, and a cool morning that you know will be hot as soon as you move, and sharp shadows cast across the piazza. Its the smell, that's not exactly clean. Its sweat on the back of my neck, and a desperate need to drink Fanta. Bologna in the winter felt like Bologna, but it didn't feel viscerally Italian in the way the two days in the city did. Maybe I was conditioned by my first experience when I was 17. Maybe jet lag has something to do with it too. I feel both extra awake and a little unreal.

Somewhere in that sensual experience, it comes to me: I love Italy again. The glamour that I'd lost by December has come back, but this time its combined with the pleasure of recognition. It's the pleasure of returning to a loved place, and finding things exactly as you left them. And Bologna will always be there.

Oh, sure, little things change. If I come back in 50 years, the stores on the corner of D'Azeglio and Farini will be different - but the corner will be the same. Bologna will always be a little bit my city - because while I loved visiting my friends, and I thought that was the point of this trip, I realized that the city itself is a friend. I think I will return in 50 years to be one of those white haired women who walk arm in arm with their white haired husbands in slow steps across Piazza Maggiore in the evening.

By returning, I've retroactively understood and appreciated just what my semester here meant. So many places seem contingent on a time of life, a certain relationship, an particular activity, in order to be properly appreciated. As I got progressively disillusioned in the fall, and felt like I wasn't doing the things college students do, or meeting the right people, or getting enought "out" of the experience, I felt like I was wasting time. I blamed Italy, I blamed my program, I blamed myself. But the point isn't to get something "out" of Italy. How American of me, to constantly be drawing a bottom line!

Italy's great power is that it doesn't care what you or I think about it. It just goes on being Italian. There are terribly superficial aspects of the culture and politics, and in my disappointment, I missed the point. The real culture is underneath, neither Berlusconi and the reality game shows nor opera and the Renaissance. Italy is all of that - and none of it. It can't be summed up so easily. It has a permanence, that is so hard for an American to grasp. Its something of the feeling of sharp morning sun heating the air over the piazza, the smell of exhaust and coffee, the cafes opening. As it ever was, so shall it always be.