When I left Rome in 2007, I did so in furia e fretta. Harried. I was stuffing things into my suitcase when my friend came to pick me up, and I ran for my flight, looking back briefly to see him shake his headout of disbelief or dismay, I wasn’t sure which.
I was leaving the Eternal City after nearly eight formative years (my twenties), and I knew that America was going to be a tough landing. My mother was very sick and not getting any better. Much as I loved Rome, I knew my place was home.
In reality, my literal landing was soft, even sweet. On the flight, tears streamed down my cheeks, and a priestly-looking man next to me handed me orange chocolates. As we neared New York at sunset, the orange and pink sky reminded me of the sherbet I ate as a child, and the Long Island beaches below looked like breadcrumbs, dwarfed by the Atlantic Ocean.
As I scurried to the curb, people sitting on it got up to help me walk to my apartment, where a cockroach the size of my thumb caught my attention.
The taxi driver whispered prayers in Arabic as he drove me to Washington Heights, dropping me and my Army-green American Tourister suitcase off in the middle of Broadway. As I scurried to the curb, people sitting on it got up to help me walk to my apartment, where a cockroach the size of my thumb caught my attention. I crashed on the Beauty Rest mattress and woke up to a text in Italian from my friend wishing me well in the New World.
Over the next fifteen months, I completed graduate school and lost my mother, exhausting the reasons for my return to America. It didn’t take people long to start asking me, “When are you going back to Italy?” to which I always drew a blank. I knew that I could never “go back,” not to the same experience. This was also 2008, amidst the recession that hit the journalism industry particularly hard, so the jobs that I might have gone back to Italy for were quickly disappearing. Besides, much as I had cautiously re-entered America, I had an itch to remake myself there, or at least improve myself enough to earn a respectable re-entry to Italy someday.
That day finally came this summer, when I was asked to teach in a study abroad program in the Apennine mountain village of Cagli, in the Marche region, where I’d never been. With six students — all young women — a photography teacher, and an Italian-American professor emeritus — we set off for our three-week adventure in storytelling. I quickly learned that I was the only person proficient in Italian, so I also became the translator, which despite logistical challenges, delighted me, since I love living in the Italian language. If publicly, I become a more engaged and animated version of myself, privately, I become neatly confessional, meaning I don’t over-think as I often do in English. But I have a certain intimacy with my thoughts, which coalesce with clarity and insight.
We told the stories (in shortened form) of many people in Cagli, from barbers to butchers and shopkeepers, dancers, nuns, and the list goes on. This, too, was a delight: connecting to people through their stories. I began reporting in Italian, on Italians, so for me, this was the greatest homecoming.
Of course, a trip to Italy would not have been complete without going to Rome, or as one friend suggested, “Home Sweet Rome.” What makes Rome sweet, though, is experiencing some of its bitterness first. As such, I arrived to an extreme heat warning, and quickly took refuge in a department store, and then at the sea. I also devised a homemade cooling system, since I was staying in the sixth-floor attico of my friend’s, without AC; I found wrapped slices of bread in the freezer that I placed all over my body.
We told the stories (in shortened form) of many people in Cagli, from barbers to butchers and shopkeepers, dancers, nuns, and the list goes on.
After a few days, the heat tapered off, and I was able to enjoy Rome the way it should be enjoyed — on foot, following its wayward ways. I saw old friends and made a few new ones, and I went to my hair stylist, who despite only cutting my hair once every several years, cuts it better than anyone else. I happily discovered the neighborhood Monteverde Vecchio.
Perhaps my sweetest moment came the morning after the heat wave, when I ventured out for my morning coffee and wound up at Panella, in Monti. Of course, it was packed, and I paid my dues waiting amongst the crowd. I was not in a good mood, reeling from a fit of anger for something back in the U.S., but once I got my macchiato and cornetto with apricot marmalade, I relaxed. My quiet pleasure must have been evident, because at a certain point, I locked eyes with the barista, who seemed to be enjoying my breakfast as much as I was.
I saw that same exquisite cornetto at the airport several days later, as Panella now has a store there as well. Of course, I only admired the entire row of cornetti from a distance this time, knowing that sometimes the sweetest things in Rome, which beckons both remembrance and continual rediscovery, are indeed a once.
