to recap:

In Florence we added arugula to street pizza

and to goat cheese gelato.

We saw some fancy scientific instruments,

then left Florence for The Leaning Town of Pisa and its Perfectly Normal Tower.

Our traveling companion Catbee held the tower up

and flew over it!

Áine visited a labyrinth in Lucca

and we worked on a farm

picking lettuce

playing with bees

and having a costume party. I say samurai, Áine says Darth Vader. (photo by Á).

Our host Vanessa with her bees.

The farm was in the town of Castelvecchio, a medieval villa.

Bells from towns throughout the valley tolled the hour.

We parted ways. I went to meet a long-lost relative (more on that later),

while Áine hiked her legs off at the Amalfi Coast (photo by Á)

A fish swimming the labyrinth. (photo by Á)

We reconvened in Alvignano, a small town outside of Napoli where Áine's relatives live. No pictures got taken during our three days there — too busy eating, I guess. A special thanks to Angela, Vera, Vincenzo, and both Raqueles for making us feel like royalty.

We climbed Mt. Vesuvius. Áine looked into the crater.

Now, we are on another farm, this one in the mountain country of northern Italy. Milk cartons are German on one side, Italian on the other. When you picture us, picture us in Heidi.

at the Duomo

photo by Áine

The step wound up through the bowels of the dome, a narrow spiraling course that made me think of the occult. The walls crawled with penned graffiti. Four hundred some steps we climbed that morning, so when we finally popped out on the roof of the Duomo we plopped ourselves down and took a rest. Florence stretched out below us, its red roofs on white buildings thinning out into the green hills at the edges of the city.

A steady stream of tourists poured onto the Duomo balcony. From the bench we had a better view of them than of the city, so we people-watched. When I'm around tourists my default attitudes are mild embarrassment, condescension, or outright contempt. It's the worst when I'm a tourist myself as I am here, afloat without much knowledge of the place. I came to Italy with only a rough plan, and it feels funny to merely follow the crowds to famous places. But here I was the the top of the Duomo, clueless as anyone.

We sat for awhile, probably an hour. We pointed out landmarks to each other, the domes and spires of the city rising around us like siblings. Kids begged Euros off their parents to play with the binocular viewing machines. People took pictures of themselves deep in shadow, pictures that would probably be washed out by flash. I tried not to worry about it. We watched the light pass from mid-morning glow to noon glare. It got hot. We had our picture taken -- twice, because my shirt was ridiculously unbuttoned the first time. And headed down.

I'm traveling with little knowledge, but also with no expectations. It's liberating, in a way. My itinerary is a mash-up of Áine's recommendations, random guidebook flipping, and mere whim. In a place like Florence I just focus on staying super, super open and observant, smile at the other tourists, and let myself be moved.

a Michaelangelo freak-out

I saw the Sistine Chapel. It was lower than I expected but magnificent in a way I couldn't have imagined, especially when I stood at one end and all the figures popped out (he was a master of perspective).

I saw the David. Even after seeing the two Florence-sanctioned copies of it, it still stunned me. David is poised. And the poise itself is a state of grace.

And I saw Michaelangelo's tomb, in the Basilica di Santa Croce. The tomb is a relatively runty thing, the three statues around it not hardly as good as anything the artist made. Apparently he was making work for his own tomb, but didn't finish before he died. A tragic figure. The picture of Jeremiah on the Chapel ceiling is his self portrait, and the exhaustion and anguish in the prophet's hung face is heartbreaking. Some guidebook told me that Michaelangelo was 80 years old when he died, and sculpted right up to the end.

What made me freak out, though, was the realization that his body is actually there in the marble casket in the corner of Santa Croce. The same bones that held him up as he moved over the chapel ceiling, the same ones that pounded out the David — they were right there, not ten feet from me as I stood before his tomb.

the mentality

(photo by Kiera)

Me: "Four gelatos in a day? That's pushing it."

Áine: "Oh, I've done it."

Me: "That's a lot of money!"

Áine: "Not if you don't buy any other food. Then it's just sustenance."

...and in global news....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13985611

Forest fires in the Jemez Mountains northwest of Santa Fe. Big news because Los Alamos had to be evacuated, and "thousands of sophisticated experiments underway at the lab, where the world's first atomic bomb was developed in 1945, remain at a standstill." I hope that everyone I know in the area is safe, that the fires don't explode some experiments into nuclear meltdown, and that access to climbing in Las Conchas is unchanged.

I wonder if the fires will affect construction of the nuclear materials production facility that no one's talking about?

July 4th

I'm a victim or benefactor of jet lag. The hostel clock said 5:25 am when I slipped out, and it's probably a quarter hour later now as I sit on the beach watching the sky lighten. I'm getting accustomed to Italy's morning bird chorus; heard them twice in Rome (not counting the birdless daybreak in the train station) and now I've head it in the more rural Lévanto. The coos and warbles were replaced my gull shrieks once I got on the beach. A man biked past on a rusty bike, spear gun slung over the handlebars. A museum of Lévanto's farming history shares the building with the hostel. This place is cool.

-

In my home country the clock is striking midnight, opening our independence day. What do we celebrate? A few hours ago I finished The Poisonwood Bible. The Congo: another country we robbed of independence. We chop down so many plants like this after they struggle so long just to sprout. Arundhati Roy gave a list of the countries the US has had military involvement with since the Vietnam War. I can remember them all as easily as I might carry a fist full of sand from this beach through my day without spilling.

-

In college I could not study abroad because I could not, I thought, go anywhere except as a tourist (missionary, colonizer, gentrifier, it amounted to the same thing). Parsing the ethical dilemmas involved was scary, so I took the easy way out and stayed "home." Now I am in Italy, a country I feel OK visiting because my ethnic roots are here. The connection is thin, though, stretched by time and distance. My great (great?) grandparents crossed an ocean to the United States, and then two generations later my mother put a whole continent between herself and her family/ethnic enclave in Connecticut. Everyone who knows anything of the people with my my mother's maiden name, Sirica, are dead. The handful of Italian words I know I learned off a language CD. But I have a third cousin name Tony and a third cousin named Vinny, guys with grey hair slicked back over ruddy domes, arms bulging out of tank top they won at a sock hop in the 50s. They say if I go to a town called Cercemaggiore and ask for a man named Domenico Rainone, I'll be greeted as family. I guess I'm desperate enough to take their word for it.

-

When I understand places and landscapes relative to one another, am I connecting or am I confusing myself, shrouding the underglimmer of a particular place? The way east Texas was southern Michigan, the Battle Creek to Detroit interstate corridor; or Dorchester, Vermont in the mist almost reminded me of Chilean Patagonia. Yesterday the path out of Lévanto was eerie in its likeness to a path that runs out of my hometown, the Matt Davis Trail below Table Rock. The trail narrow, dusty, cut with stone steps; the foliage oak and what looked like bay. Granted, olive trees were interspersed and the forest was a bit drier than that part of Mt. Tam. But the mountain faced the same south-westerly direction out on the ocean and the sun set just off the shoulder of a landmass like Bolinas mesa. In a few hours they'll be unwinding a long rope there for the town vs. town tug-of-war. Then there'll be a floats, dancing, the national anthem sung off the balcony of "the oldest bar west of the Mississippi." We'll eat pork ribs, coconut popscicles, shrimp tamales, mango on a stick amidst the smell of smell of pot, hamburgers and firecrackers. Celebrating independence, from something.

from a friend

safe travels, bon voyage, keep on loggin' and bloggin', don't forget your dear friends stuck back in the good ole US o' A (hope you remember english upon your return :), eat some tiramisu too, be mistaken for steven spielberg in jeff howard's honor, eat some pasta figoli and wiggle your hand (italian movement), ride a scooter, dream big, meet a movie star, become a movie star, ride a chariot, become a gladiator, chill with the pope, and anything else that seems suitably italian.

- r

An Account of Myself

I think what I've been doing the last year, what I'm still doing, is getting my values together. For four years of college I was inundated with ideas (and the ideas between the lines of ideas). So I take some space and ask, Now how am I to live?