Ciao a tutti!
Today I'll finally be talking about my long-awaited trip to visit my family in Italy over this year's holiday break, and some related reflections that came to me as a result.
Andiamo (let's go)!
As I spent the entire break in Italy, I left directly from and returned directly to my college campus. This time I flew with Swiss and had brief layovers in Zurich both ways (on the outbound trip it was a little too brief; I had to go to another terminal to catch a flight with less than an hour to spare). I found Swiss pretty good, a comfortable and quality airline with which to travel. I had a little bit of a scare when it became clear that my American passport was only a few months away from expiration, and also because my flight was delayed an hour because (get this:) it was so freaking cold that they had to restart the engines so that the plane could take the eff off.
Though the flight was fine overall, but because of that delay I had to RUN in the Zurich Airport, as my connection was in a different terminal and I had less than an hour to reach that departing gate.
But somehow I managed it, and after the mesmerizing descent over the snowy mountains between the two cities, I landed in my other country, my second home, for the first time in almost a year and a half.
Milano, Lombardia:
Unlike most trips, this time I was not picked up directly at the airport by relatives or family friends, but instead stayed overnight with one of those family friends at her Milan apartment. As one of my mother's closest friends since childhood, she's essentially been an aunt to me growing up. I took the Malpensa Express train into town from the airport, and had a much-needed nap at her apartment before she got home from work and we went out to dinner at a nearby Trentino Alto-Adige restaurant (a foreshadowing of the lovely experiences I would have in Bolzano and Trento later on in the trip, unbeknownst to me at the time).
The next morning I had several hours to explore the center of Milan by myself before we headed back to Viadana, my mom's hometown where this friend of hers is also from, that night.
I didn't get to tool around nearly as long and see as many things as I might have liked, but what I did get to do and see were pretty wonderful. I had a delicious doppio espresso and chocolate croissant breakfast, and then headed over to the Duomo in the center of town.
I had been to Milan and the Duomo specifically before, but hadn't remembered it being so...beautiful. The inside of the Duomo was breathtaking, expansive and enormous in a way that made me feel humble and tiny, wondering how my ancestors had gone about constructing such a majestic monstrosity with the technology available to them at the time. There were also a number of splendid stained glass windows.
I also went to the top of the Duomo, which I remember having done as a young child the last time I went to Milan, but again, I didn't remember it being that wonderful. Despite the gray, cloudy day, the view of the city was amazing, especially as the windows started to light up close to dark. The spires and shadowy statues made for a beautifully chilling effect. And overall it was just great.
I definitely intend on spending some more time in Milano on future visits, as aside from being a very lovely place it combines so much of what I love about Italy and my culture with a more cosmopolitan and open-minded lifestyle and way of thinking.
I'll give an overall account of how all my time at home in Viadana went now:
Basically, it was really wonderful. I spent plentiful time with my relatives and friends. I spent a day with some of my close friends at their university campus. I made a couple of day excursions to Parma, which is the nearest big(ish) city to Viadana. I ate plentiful delicious food. Hung out with my friends. Went with my aunt and uncle to one of her relatives' houses in the foothills of the Alps. I experienced my first real Italian Christmas celebration with my aunt's extended family - it was crowded, chaotic, noisy, and I loved every second of it. I spent a fun and crazy New Year's Eve at a party hosted by one of my best friends there. And even though there were many days when I didn't really do much - when I would wake up late, have lunch almost immediately after, then go out for long walks or bike rides alone and take pictures of the sunset - there was a sort of leisurely beauty to be found in that as well. Many of my other trips recently have been shorter, a week to ten days, and in those trips I've always had to portion my time carefully and be busy more or less all the time in order to make sure that I went everywhere, did everything, and saw everyone I wanted to. But this time I had a routine, more stable and tranquil, and I reveled in it.
Bologna, Emilia-Romagna:
Immediately prior to Christmas, I made my way down to Bologna to visit my dear friend Sofia who I got to know during my language program in the Westfjords of Iceland last summer. She's from Imola, a small town right outside Bologna, but mostly lives in a family apartment in the city center as she was studying (and just graduated a few days ago!) architecture at the University of Bologna.
I had been to Bologna a couple of times in the past, as it's not very far from where my family lives and sports one of the closest (and certainly most convenient from our relatives' standpoint) international airpots to my mom's hometown, so we've often flown into it in the past. But somehow this time I got to see it in a bit of a different light, and just ended up really falling in love with it.
Sofia and I wandered the city together, climbing up to the top of one of the hills on its outskirts, San Michele in Bosco, which overlooks the city with a view uncannily similar to that of Bursa from Tophane. We ate delicious food in little restaurants she knew, ran into a poet with a little booth on the street who wrote poetry (that was bizarrely accurate) about us just from staring into our eyes for thirty seconds. We saw Oceania (the Italian dub of Moana) at the movies. And the next day she introduced me to a couple of good friends of hers over a lunch of pretty tasty sushi.
Overall, it was an amazing time. Not just because she's one of my best friends in Italy and all the world, and catching up after so many months apart was fun, restorative, and memorable in so many ways. But also because I got to see her city in a different light.
From the convenient launching pad of her apartment, which was a delightfully literary and worldly little corner of existence, I got to experience Bologna's fiery colored, gorgeous architecture, its strong left-leaning politics, and dynamic, educated nature as a result of the aforementioned university (one of the oldest and most prestigious in all Italy). It was amazing, and I fell in love with La Rossa ("the Red," one of the Italian nicknames for the city in honor of one of its most widespread colors) in a way that I had not on previous visits.
Siena, Tuscany:
I went to Siena with my aunt and uncle immediately following our Christmas festivities. It was actually on Christmas Day itself that we left - we'd been talking about going somewhere for Santo Stefano (St Stephen's Day, the day after Christmas, which is a pretty big holiday in Italy), but as we were making our way through the center of Viadana, taking a walk there to get an espresso in a feeble attempt to work of the catastrophically enormous caloric bomb of my grandmother's Christmas lunch, my aunt said, "perche' non partiamo oggi?""Why don't we leave today?"
And so it was.
We headed home, threw some stuff into backpacks, and went off on our merry way, booking an Air BnB in a little village right outside the city called Monteriggioni.
We stopped in another little village on our way to the one in which we stayed, but I remember little of it. Likewise we took a quick walk through the center of Monteriggioni and up to the castle that overlooks the town, but the center was quite small, and of course at 10:00 at night on a holiday there was little to be had there.
The next day we had breakfast and spent the morning exploring Siena, which was breathtakingly beautiful. The bizarrely shaped Piazza del Campo is the heart and soul of the city, where the annual Palio, a horse race in which all the city's rival neighborhoods are represented, takes place, is in my opinion a sublime place. My aunt and I climbed to the top of the Torre del Mangia that overlooks it, where we were treated to twenty minutes of incredible views of the city as oncoming fog gradually overtook the tower and obstructed the view of the city below, which made for an incredibly ethereal sight.
The Duomo, though we didn't have a chance to get inside, is also quite pretty, as it and most of the area around it is constructed from marble, which looked amazing when the early morning sun shone against it.
Siena was definitely one of my favorite cities I've visited in Italy thus far. Even the little residential streets on the outskirts of the city look like something directly out of the Middle Ages; ignoring the odd TV antenna and pair of jeans drying outside windows, being there feels like having stepped back in time.
Beautiful to the max. 10/10 would recommend.
Bolzano, Trentino Alto-Adige/Bozen, Südtirol:
Bolzano was truly an unexpected gem among the places that I visited on this trip. My trip to Trento was a constant and given in the places I would visit, and I dreamt of attaching something else along with it. For a while, hoping to take advantage of this longer trip to Italy compared to the past few I've taken, I teased the possibility of trying to make it to the south of the country. For days, my plans veered astronomically on a constant basis, and in the end I decided to abandon that particular bit of craziness. What in the end happened was that my aunt and I explored Bolzano together prior to her dropping me off at my friend Francesca's in Trento.
I expected to like Bolzano, but I honestly did not expect to fall in love with it as much as I did. It always mystifies me how much cultural identity, dialect, and local consciousness in Italy can shift even in minuscule distances, and no clearer was this true than when we ventured to Bolzano. We left Viadana around 7:45, and by 10:30 it seemed as though we were half in Austria.
I think in some ways it makes sense that I liked it as much as I did; I'm someone who is fascinated by intersections of national identity and bilingualism, among other things, and as a bilingual Italian-German region that belongs to Italy politically but culturally seems much more akin to neighboring Austria. The true proportions of 75% native Italian-speakers to 25% native German-speakers almost seem improbable when German feels like it's the principal language spoken everywhere, and although my aunt and I had no trouble as Italians moving around and interacting with people using our mother tongue, most locals spoke it with an accent resembling German high school students taking it as a foreign language.
In any case, I loved it. The bizarre but nonchalant togetherness of cultures and languages. The breathtaking, dramatic backdrop of the jagged, snowcapped peaks of the Dolomites. The hearty, tasty Germanic food. The relaxingly creamy and light blue shades of the buildings.
I would heartily recommend Bolzano as a destination to anyone interested in Italian, German, or certainly both. Not to mention mountains and pretty places, more generally.
Trento, Trentino Alto-Adige/Trient, Südtirol
This trip was made mainly for the purpose of visiting my dear friend Francesca. Francesca is originally from Nuoro, Sardegna, and I first met her when she was studying in Pinckney, about an hour from Ann Arbor, as an AFS exchange student in 2014 at one of the local chapter's orientations I volunteered at. She's now studying at the law school of the University of Trento, which is why I visited her there, and as it had been three years since we'd seen each other, needless to say, we had quite a bit to talk about.
For two days I stayed at her place, comfortably hosted by her and her amazing Bosnian Serb roommate Tanja (who spoke beautifully fluent Italian), and we wandered around the city, hitting up in particular the Castello del Buonconsiglio and the MUSE, the town's famous natural history museum. It was amazing to be together again. Ours is one of those awesome friendships that can just pick up from the last time we left off as if no time has passed at all, and the hours pass like minutes in our conversations. I'm so glad that we had this chance to meet up again, and look forward to hopefully ensuring that, as she so aptly put it, "non passi un'altra morte di papa fino alla prossima volta che ci vediamo" (that another death of a pope doesn't pass until the next time we see each other - she's got a great sense of humor, as can be seen).
Trento as a city I found honestly to be a little less interesting. Being much more homogeneously Italian-speaking it doesn't have the same bilingual-blurred-cultural-and-political-borders thing going for it like Bolzano, and the mountains around it are more foothills, devoid of jagged snowcapped peaks. But it's still a very pretty little town with a bright and welcoming town center that certainly deserves to be seen.
Bologna, Emilia-Romagna (again):
Since we live so close to each other, Sofia and I had been planning on seeing each other once again before I left Italy. Originally we'd thought about meeting up in Mantova, but because of some changed circumstances we decided I'd just come to Bologna again, as our Dutch friend Louise who was also on our program in Iceland with us (she and Sofia were roommates).
I took the train down to Bologna directly from Trento, and Sofia and I enjoyed a couple of hours on our own having a pizza dinner and chilling in her apartment prior to Louise's arrival. There had been an awful ice storm ravaging the Netherlands that night, and though she arrived three hours late due to a very delayed flight, we were very cognizant of the fact that she'd been lucky to arrive that night at all.
I remember us hugging when she got into the apartment, but at this point I remember little else of the first evening we spent together, as both of us guests were very tired after many hours of traveling and it was getting into the early hours of the morning, so we went to bed almost immediately.
The next day we had a fairly leisurely start, though we didn't sleep in terribly late either. After chatting over breakfast we went out to the city center, and toured many of the same monuments Sofia had showed me the first time I'd come to Bologna. It was fun being able to function as a second-tour-guide in command in that way. :)
We had lunch in a hidden little trattoria, and walked through the colorful centro storico, just chatting and catching up. It was as though a little bit of our time at Núpur had come to life on the streets of Bologna, which was bizarre, but magical, a welcome clash and blending of two beautiful places and experiences.
Later that evening, I said goodbye to them, and my aunt and uncle picked me up from Bologna to take me back to Viadana.
The last week was relatively tranquil. Getting back with only a week left, I began to lose the tranquil routine, thinking increasingly in terms of who I needed to say goodbye to or things I needed to get to bring home before leaving, and I didn't like that. I had a couple of great sendoffs, one of my favorites being a delicious dinner at a Ligurian restaurant in Parma with my four closest friends my age in Viadana. Couldn't have asked for better.
I left on the 15th of January, accompanied to the airport by my dutiful and doting aunt and uncle. The trip out was arduous and marred by pretty awful sleep deprivation, but I had a little down time on this leg of the trip to sit and relax in the Zurich Airport before my connecting flight to Chicago, and by far the highlight was sitting next to a delightful and adorable Mexican nun named Ana on the transatlantic flight. We made great and pleasant conversation (not too much, not too little) in Spanish and Italian (as she's lived and worked in Rome for years), she fed me abundant snacks, high-fives me when the plane landed, and we hugged each other goodbye when we had to step into separate lines as a resident and a visitor. I'm very thankful that I got to meet her, and remain thankful for the calm and positive energy that she gave what was otherwise a pretty sucky trip.
This trip to Italy helped me to realize a number of things about myself, my identity, and the nature of the place in the world that I wish to fashion for myself.
As I've doubtless written about in past posts, I am half Italian and half American, a dual citizen since birth. Over the years, I've developed a proud identity of duality and blended culture, language, and upbringing, which something that I'm hugely proud of. Even so, I've realized from this trip that from a distance, it's easy to maintain this dual pride while still allowing my traveler's instinct to command more, and focus more on going places where I don't have strong connections, fearing that otherwise I'll never have the chance. But during this trip, feelings that I can only describe as belonging reawakened in me, and I felt a burning desire to return and never go away. I feel very at home in Italy, and I love it there, and it can sometimes hurt when people there do not fully recognize the validity of my Italian identity because I am not fully Italian by blood or did not grow up there. There are also a number of ways in which I don't feel completely at home, mainly concerning the sometimes racist, homophobic, or otherwise small-minded attitudes typical of a small northern town. I also have a sort of pride that is in some ways atypical; loyalties in Italy tend to be by hometown and region far before nation, whereas I have a pride in my heritage and history that is pan-Italian more than Viadanese, and far more so than Lombard or Mantovano. As I've grown older, I've begun seeking connections with places and people that will allow me to build a sense of my Italianness against a background of more worldly and open-minded places and friendships, and I'm well on my way, thanks in no small part to this trip.
It was an amazing one, and I've already been missing Italy dearly. I cannot wait to go back, hopefully this winter in between my semesters in Russia and Finland.
Arrivederci, Italia mia. Quanto mi manchi.
Today I'll finally be talking about my long-awaited trip to visit my family in Italy over this year's holiday break, and some related reflections that came to me as a result.
Andiamo (let's go)!
As I spent the entire break in Italy, I left directly from and returned directly to my college campus. This time I flew with Swiss and had brief layovers in Zurich both ways (on the outbound trip it was a little too brief; I had to go to another terminal to catch a flight with less than an hour to spare). I found Swiss pretty good, a comfortable and quality airline with which to travel. I had a little bit of a scare when it became clear that my American passport was only a few months away from expiration, and also because my flight was delayed an hour because (get this:) it was so freaking cold that they had to restart the engines so that the plane could take the eff off.
Though the flight was fine overall, but because of that delay I had to RUN in the Zurich Airport, as my connection was in a different terminal and I had less than an hour to reach that departing gate.
But somehow I managed it, and after the mesmerizing descent over the snowy mountains between the two cities, I landed in my other country, my second home, for the first time in almost a year and a half.
Milano, Lombardia:
Unlike most trips, this time I was not picked up directly at the airport by relatives or family friends, but instead stayed overnight with one of those family friends at her Milan apartment. As one of my mother's closest friends since childhood, she's essentially been an aunt to me growing up. I took the Malpensa Express train into town from the airport, and had a much-needed nap at her apartment before she got home from work and we went out to dinner at a nearby Trentino Alto-Adige restaurant (a foreshadowing of the lovely experiences I would have in Bolzano and Trento later on in the trip, unbeknownst to me at the time).
The next morning I had several hours to explore the center of Milan by myself before we headed back to Viadana, my mom's hometown where this friend of hers is also from, that night.
I didn't get to tool around nearly as long and see as many things as I might have liked, but what I did get to do and see were pretty wonderful. I had a delicious doppio espresso and chocolate croissant breakfast, and then headed over to the Duomo in the center of town.
I had been to Milan and the Duomo specifically before, but hadn't remembered it being so...beautiful. The inside of the Duomo was breathtaking, expansive and enormous in a way that made me feel humble and tiny, wondering how my ancestors had gone about constructing such a majestic monstrosity with the technology available to them at the time. There were also a number of splendid stained glass windows.
I also went to the top of the Duomo, which I remember having done as a young child the last time I went to Milan, but again, I didn't remember it being that wonderful. Despite the gray, cloudy day, the view of the city was amazing, especially as the windows started to light up close to dark. The spires and shadowy statues made for a beautifully chilling effect. And overall it was just great.
I definitely intend on spending some more time in Milano on future visits, as aside from being a very lovely place it combines so much of what I love about Italy and my culture with a more cosmopolitan and open-minded lifestyle and way of thinking.
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| The inside of the Duomo |
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| Stained glass |
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| My breakfast |
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| Landing in Zurich |
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| I found some pretty awesome murals - this one says "what has been written without passion will be read without pleasure." |
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I'll give an overall account of how all my time at home in Viadana went now:
Basically, it was really wonderful. I spent plentiful time with my relatives and friends. I spent a day with some of my close friends at their university campus. I made a couple of day excursions to Parma, which is the nearest big(ish) city to Viadana. I ate plentiful delicious food. Hung out with my friends. Went with my aunt and uncle to one of her relatives' houses in the foothills of the Alps. I experienced my first real Italian Christmas celebration with my aunt's extended family - it was crowded, chaotic, noisy, and I loved every second of it. I spent a fun and crazy New Year's Eve at a party hosted by one of my best friends there. And even though there were many days when I didn't really do much - when I would wake up late, have lunch almost immediately after, then go out for long walks or bike rides alone and take pictures of the sunset - there was a sort of leisurely beauty to be found in that as well. Many of my other trips recently have been shorter, a week to ten days, and in those trips I've always had to portion my time carefully and be busy more or less all the time in order to make sure that I went everywhere, did everything, and saw everyone I wanted to. But this time I had a routine, more stable and tranquil, and I reveled in it.
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| The banks of the Po |
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| New year's fun |
Bologna, Emilia-Romagna:
Immediately prior to Christmas, I made my way down to Bologna to visit my dear friend Sofia who I got to know during my language program in the Westfjords of Iceland last summer. She's from Imola, a small town right outside Bologna, but mostly lives in a family apartment in the city center as she was studying (and just graduated a few days ago!) architecture at the University of Bologna.
I had been to Bologna a couple of times in the past, as it's not very far from where my family lives and sports one of the closest (and certainly most convenient from our relatives' standpoint) international airpots to my mom's hometown, so we've often flown into it in the past. But somehow this time I got to see it in a bit of a different light, and just ended up really falling in love with it.
Sofia and I wandered the city together, climbing up to the top of one of the hills on its outskirts, San Michele in Bosco, which overlooks the city with a view uncannily similar to that of Bursa from Tophane. We ate delicious food in little restaurants she knew, ran into a poet with a little booth on the street who wrote poetry (that was bizarrely accurate) about us just from staring into our eyes for thirty seconds. We saw Oceania (the Italian dub of Moana) at the movies. And the next day she introduced me to a couple of good friends of hers over a lunch of pretty tasty sushi.
Overall, it was an amazing time. Not just because she's one of my best friends in Italy and all the world, and catching up after so many months apart was fun, restorative, and memorable in so many ways. But also because I got to see her city in a different light.
From the convenient launching pad of her apartment, which was a delightfully literary and worldly little corner of existence, I got to experience Bologna's fiery colored, gorgeous architecture, its strong left-leaning politics, and dynamic, educated nature as a result of the aforementioned university (one of the oldest and most prestigious in all Italy). It was amazing, and I fell in love with La Rossa ("the Red," one of the Italian nicknames for the city in honor of one of its most widespread colors) in a way that I had not on previous visits.
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| The beautiful door of a church we stopped by |
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| The view from San Michele in Bosco |
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| As Sofia accurately commented on this picture as uploaded on Facebook, "maestri del selfie" ("selfie masters"). |
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| The big, beautiful Christmas tree of Piazza Maggiore |
Siena, Tuscany:
I went to Siena with my aunt and uncle immediately following our Christmas festivities. It was actually on Christmas Day itself that we left - we'd been talking about going somewhere for Santo Stefano (St Stephen's Day, the day after Christmas, which is a pretty big holiday in Italy), but as we were making our way through the center of Viadana, taking a walk there to get an espresso in a feeble attempt to work of the catastrophically enormous caloric bomb of my grandmother's Christmas lunch, my aunt said, "perche' non partiamo oggi?""Why don't we leave today?"
And so it was.
We headed home, threw some stuff into backpacks, and went off on our merry way, booking an Air BnB in a little village right outside the city called Monteriggioni.
We stopped in another little village on our way to the one in which we stayed, but I remember little of it. Likewise we took a quick walk through the center of Monteriggioni and up to the castle that overlooks the town, but the center was quite small, and of course at 10:00 at night on a holiday there was little to be had there.
The next day we had breakfast and spent the morning exploring Siena, which was breathtakingly beautiful. The bizarrely shaped Piazza del Campo is the heart and soul of the city, where the annual Palio, a horse race in which all the city's rival neighborhoods are represented, takes place, is in my opinion a sublime place. My aunt and I climbed to the top of the Torre del Mangia that overlooks it, where we were treated to twenty minutes of incredible views of the city as oncoming fog gradually overtook the tower and obstructed the view of the city below, which made for an incredibly ethereal sight.
The Duomo, though we didn't have a chance to get inside, is also quite pretty, as it and most of the area around it is constructed from marble, which looked amazing when the early morning sun shone against it.
Siena was definitely one of my favorite cities I've visited in Italy thus far. Even the little residential streets on the outskirts of the city look like something directly out of the Middle Ages; ignoring the odd TV antenna and pair of jeans drying outside windows, being there feels like having stepped back in time.
Beautiful to the max. 10/10 would recommend.
Bolzano, Trentino Alto-Adige/Bozen, Südtirol:
Bolzano was truly an unexpected gem among the places that I visited on this trip. My trip to Trento was a constant and given in the places I would visit, and I dreamt of attaching something else along with it. For a while, hoping to take advantage of this longer trip to Italy compared to the past few I've taken, I teased the possibility of trying to make it to the south of the country. For days, my plans veered astronomically on a constant basis, and in the end I decided to abandon that particular bit of craziness. What in the end happened was that my aunt and I explored Bolzano together prior to her dropping me off at my friend Francesca's in Trento.
I expected to like Bolzano, but I honestly did not expect to fall in love with it as much as I did. It always mystifies me how much cultural identity, dialect, and local consciousness in Italy can shift even in minuscule distances, and no clearer was this true than when we ventured to Bolzano. We left Viadana around 7:45, and by 10:30 it seemed as though we were half in Austria.
I think in some ways it makes sense that I liked it as much as I did; I'm someone who is fascinated by intersections of national identity and bilingualism, among other things, and as a bilingual Italian-German region that belongs to Italy politically but culturally seems much more akin to neighboring Austria. The true proportions of 75% native Italian-speakers to 25% native German-speakers almost seem improbable when German feels like it's the principal language spoken everywhere, and although my aunt and I had no trouble as Italians moving around and interacting with people using our mother tongue, most locals spoke it with an accent resembling German high school students taking it as a foreign language.
In any case, I loved it. The bizarre but nonchalant togetherness of cultures and languages. The breathtaking, dramatic backdrop of the jagged, snowcapped peaks of the Dolomites. The hearty, tasty Germanic food. The relaxingly creamy and light blue shades of the buildings.
I would heartily recommend Bolzano as a destination to anyone interested in Italian, German, or certainly both. Not to mention mountains and pretty places, more generally.
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| The Christmas markets were still open on January 5. |
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| The Duomo. |
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| We went up a cable car. |
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| And then took an incredible panoramic train ride. |
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| My aunt and me. |
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| The center of Collalbo, or Klobenstein, the town at the end of the panoramic train line. |
Trento, Trentino Alto-Adige/Trient, Südtirol
This trip was made mainly for the purpose of visiting my dear friend Francesca. Francesca is originally from Nuoro, Sardegna, and I first met her when she was studying in Pinckney, about an hour from Ann Arbor, as an AFS exchange student in 2014 at one of the local chapter's orientations I volunteered at. She's now studying at the law school of the University of Trento, which is why I visited her there, and as it had been three years since we'd seen each other, needless to say, we had quite a bit to talk about.
For two days I stayed at her place, comfortably hosted by her and her amazing Bosnian Serb roommate Tanja (who spoke beautifully fluent Italian), and we wandered around the city, hitting up in particular the Castello del Buonconsiglio and the MUSE, the town's famous natural history museum. It was amazing to be together again. Ours is one of those awesome friendships that can just pick up from the last time we left off as if no time has passed at all, and the hours pass like minutes in our conversations. I'm so glad that we had this chance to meet up again, and look forward to hopefully ensuring that, as she so aptly put it, "non passi un'altra morte di papa fino alla prossima volta che ci vediamo" (that another death of a pope doesn't pass until the next time we see each other - she's got a great sense of humor, as can be seen).
Trento as a city I found honestly to be a little less interesting. Being much more homogeneously Italian-speaking it doesn't have the same bilingual-blurred-cultural-and-political-borders thing going for it like Bolzano, and the mountains around it are more foothills, devoid of jagged snowcapped peaks. But it's still a very pretty little town with a bright and welcoming town center that certainly deserves to be seen.
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| The center |
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| The view from the MUSE |
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| Inside the MUSE |
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| Me and Francesca |
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| "United Against Racism - Refugees Welcome" |
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| Frescoes |
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| The view of the city through arches was beautiful. |
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| Heading out at sunset |
Bologna, Emilia-Romagna (again):
Since we live so close to each other, Sofia and I had been planning on seeing each other once again before I left Italy. Originally we'd thought about meeting up in Mantova, but because of some changed circumstances we decided I'd just come to Bologna again, as our Dutch friend Louise who was also on our program in Iceland with us (she and Sofia were roommates).
I took the train down to Bologna directly from Trento, and Sofia and I enjoyed a couple of hours on our own having a pizza dinner and chilling in her apartment prior to Louise's arrival. There had been an awful ice storm ravaging the Netherlands that night, and though she arrived three hours late due to a very delayed flight, we were very cognizant of the fact that she'd been lucky to arrive that night at all.
I remember us hugging when she got into the apartment, but at this point I remember little else of the first evening we spent together, as both of us guests were very tired after many hours of traveling and it was getting into the early hours of the morning, so we went to bed almost immediately.
The next day we had a fairly leisurely start, though we didn't sleep in terribly late either. After chatting over breakfast we went out to the city center, and toured many of the same monuments Sofia had showed me the first time I'd come to Bologna. It was fun being able to function as a second-tour-guide in command in that way. :)
We had lunch in a hidden little trattoria, and walked through the colorful centro storico, just chatting and catching up. It was as though a little bit of our time at Núpur had come to life on the streets of Bologna, which was bizarre, but magical, a welcome clash and blending of two beautiful places and experiences.
Later that evening, I said goodbye to them, and my aunt and uncle picked me up from Bologna to take me back to Viadana.
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| A very funny sign I agreed with a lot - "Sleeping is a right, preventing it is oppression" - this was a street that is apparently notorious for late-night student partying, much to the chagrin of the non-student residents. |
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| From left to right: Louise, me, Sofia. |
I left on the 15th of January, accompanied to the airport by my dutiful and doting aunt and uncle. The trip out was arduous and marred by pretty awful sleep deprivation, but I had a little down time on this leg of the trip to sit and relax in the Zurich Airport before my connecting flight to Chicago, and by far the highlight was sitting next to a delightful and adorable Mexican nun named Ana on the transatlantic flight. We made great and pleasant conversation (not too much, not too little) in Spanish and Italian (as she's lived and worked in Rome for years), she fed me abundant snacks, high-fives me when the plane landed, and we hugged each other goodbye when we had to step into separate lines as a resident and a visitor. I'm very thankful that I got to meet her, and remain thankful for the calm and positive energy that she gave what was otherwise a pretty sucky trip.
This trip to Italy helped me to realize a number of things about myself, my identity, and the nature of the place in the world that I wish to fashion for myself.
As I've doubtless written about in past posts, I am half Italian and half American, a dual citizen since birth. Over the years, I've developed a proud identity of duality and blended culture, language, and upbringing, which something that I'm hugely proud of. Even so, I've realized from this trip that from a distance, it's easy to maintain this dual pride while still allowing my traveler's instinct to command more, and focus more on going places where I don't have strong connections, fearing that otherwise I'll never have the chance. But during this trip, feelings that I can only describe as belonging reawakened in me, and I felt a burning desire to return and never go away. I feel very at home in Italy, and I love it there, and it can sometimes hurt when people there do not fully recognize the validity of my Italian identity because I am not fully Italian by blood or did not grow up there. There are also a number of ways in which I don't feel completely at home, mainly concerning the sometimes racist, homophobic, or otherwise small-minded attitudes typical of a small northern town. I also have a sort of pride that is in some ways atypical; loyalties in Italy tend to be by hometown and region far before nation, whereas I have a pride in my heritage and history that is pan-Italian more than Viadanese, and far more so than Lombard or Mantovano. As I've grown older, I've begun seeking connections with places and people that will allow me to build a sense of my Italianness against a background of more worldly and open-minded places and friendships, and I'm well on my way, thanks in no small part to this trip.
It was an amazing one, and I've already been missing Italy dearly. I cannot wait to go back, hopefully this winter in between my semesters in Russia and Finland.
Arrivederci, Italia mia. Quanto mi manchi.
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