The Long Trip Home: Tangible Discoveries

We met up in Bologna. The four of them waited outside of the train station as Antonello and I drove through the crowds on a Sunday morning heavy with Italian traffic. I had really never driven to Bologna before, and, pulling up to the station, searching through the faces until I spotted Corrie’s, I felt almost like a native. I jumped out of the car as Antonello promised to park it, and I almost skipped my way over to my friends.

Corrie and Eric greeted us, dropping backpacks and purses to hug us as Antonello came back from parking the car. There were things that had changed, things that stayed the same: Corrie marveled at the engagement ring that Antonello had given me only weeks before. We laughed together, all four of us, like good music. Two of Eric’s friends were along for a mini-grand-tour of Italy: brother and sister whose parents had moved to America from Italy years ago. We greeted and helped them with their luggage. Antonello tried to speak the little English he knew, but stopped short and just grinned, words not coming to him. Corrie and I hugged again, our faces red and smiling—two old friends finding each other here in Italy, where we had first met five years back.

I had been back in Italy since January, and now, in March, it looked like this time was more of a commitment. I had been here to study once, then to work, and now I was here for Antonello, engaged and planning to stay with him in Italy, to spend my life here. Each day back had been a lesson in what it meant to settle down in a foreign country, to be far away from family and friends. It had been more difficult than I had imagined. I had already begun to grow tired of speaking in Italian day in and day out, and I was longing every once in a while for the thick, blocky sounds of an American accent. I started to ache for my own past, and I imagined what it would have been like to have been a child in Italy—growing up amidst ancient cathedrals and Roman ruins, and perhaps never even noticing. It would have been life lived normally. The idea of somehow owning those memories appealed to me. I wanted history, and a place, ready before me. It shouldn’t feel like starting over, I thought.

Therefore, seeing Corrie and Eric, two good friends arriving like packages on the shore of the train station, gave me an immediate sense of home being a little closer. Antonello would tell me later that my smile, so sudden upon seeing them, was brighter than he had seen in weeks.

We took Via Independenza all of the way to the city center under a porticoed sidewalk, passing pastry shops, small markets, and lots of people. As I talked to Corrie, I felt a positive sense of being back—a warmth, almost, setting each step on familiar pavement. This was my third or fourth time in Bologna and, from day one—a sunny morning in late October over a year ago—the city had a definite hold on me. Despite its large size and student crowds, Bologna retains a well-preserved city center: onion-like layers of medieval walls, some of Italy’s most important art treasures, not to mention Europe’s oldest university. Still, with its ancient narrow roads and hallway-like sidewalks, each one sheltered by elegantly placed porticoes, Bologna has an almost private feel.

The six of us finally found a restaurant and devoured half of the menu, the pasta list so long that the waitress stood there impatiently as we changed our orders ten times each.

"Dessert?" she asked, as we finished up the last scraps on our plate. We all nodded and listed off six orders of tiramisu. She groaned, scribbled it down, and walked away.

After lunch, we took in gelato at my favorite gelateria, a memory of my first trip. Then, as we started walking back to the city center, Antonello took my hand in his and smiled at me. This was our first time together in Bologna. I smiled back and watched as he then walked ahead, talked with Eric and the others, as I stayed back and picked over years of memories with Corrie, each one involving some sense of Italy, this country that we loved.

"How are things in America?" I asked. And she filled me in on her life, the busy routines of it all, stuff I had missed unconsciously.

We also talked about my life here, the every-days of living, speaking, even going grocery shopping, and the adventures encountered along the way. We laughed about it—going to the store and misunderstanding the price of something, buying stamps and having to place what seemed like thirty of them on each letter, getting lost in all of those tiny alleyways until you find yourself again, in the same place where you started. I felt at ease with the fact that she could understand. She had lived here once before as well, and talking it over was like discussing shared dreams. We laughed and chatted and passed down tiny streets that beamed with pockets of sunshine.

Heading back to the station as the sky turned deep blue, the six of us walked through an antique market. By this time we were all tired and walking rather slowly through the piazza of Santo Stefano—a church where some seven temples were built one upon another in a sort of heavy sand-castled effect. Tables were lined up all over the street, some on the porticoed sidewalks but most crowding the piazza and overtaking it. I had always been interested in what exactly the word antique meant in such an ancient country, but here were ceramic plates painted with lemons and navy blues, old brass candlesticks, etchings of the Roman forum bordered in fancy picture frames. It felt like a flea market, or a huge garage sale, and the noises of people playing wooden pipes and singing for money filled in any space that was left empty. No one spoke—we just looked down at the items around us, the sudden mix between old tea sets and hard-backed book collections—dozens of other people’s memories.

No one bought a thing but, as we left, I wanted to go back. While I knew I would never purchase anything, it was such a good feeling to see the sky like that, and a piazza filled with people and objects and happy chatting. It was something you could feel dissolved in—everyone searching through stacks upon stacks of stuff to find that one valuable silver-rimmed vase or jewel-trimmed pin that someone, long ago, owned and held near to them, like thoughts washed up on the shore. I wanted to be crowded in there, to search for my own somethings and to find them—memories that you could buy, as easy as that.

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