…in 2023.
Venice: One of the oldest, most beautiful, most fascinating tourist traps in the world. A city impossible to modernize, navigate or map, where you can safely get lost and where police work consists of giving directions to wandering tourists in the dead of night. Rococco, slightly vulgar and brightly painted in places, laced with canals and bridges, gift shops bristling with expensive masks and tschoskes, piles of muticolored cannoli in the windows of cafes. Excellent food, but it’s not a good idea to ask for a table too close to a canal.
Florence: Unlike Venice, a working city where people live that still functions as a working city where people live. Car horns honking among the ancient buildings, traffic lights, Vespas… Somewhere in the many red-to tan warrens of old buildings is the pensione where I stayed as a student, part of an old Medici palace, but damned if I could figure out which one. “I don’t want to constantly be visiting cathedrals” Michael had warned me before we left San Francisco, but he couldn’t seem to pass a single one without wanting to go in to look around. We stayed in an ancient building which had for a while been a 20th century monastary, now a hotel. Ours was a spacious, windowless suite with arched frescoed ceilings and a modern kitchenette so some past monkish resident (I pictured him as an earnest young man in a brown cassock and horn-rimmed glasses) could use the microwave to heat his solitary dinner in between meditation and prayer.
Pompeii: A sunlit walk through what amounted to a graveyard. The most haunting sight for me was not the plaster casts, but the beautiful black concrete floor of a villa’s courtyard, flecked with silvery chips of mica and as smooth and polished as it had been before the eruption. This was, we were told, so that someone carrying a lantern at night could easily navigate by the lampight catching the mica. I imagined how familiar, even comforting that pattern on the floor would have been to a resident over two thousand years ago. Then I imagined the skinny, battered feral cats who infest Pompeii running and stalking across it in the empty city at night.
Capri: Another joyful tourist trap. Stunningly well-dressed and wealthy tourists, scarily narrow roads, many fat, indulged and calm stray cats, especially the one that decided to sit and groom itself in the middle of the road while our macho, burly, Mastrioni-like guide pleaded with it from the driver’s seat. “Oh, kittykittykittykitty…” (After a minute or two of this, the cat, a long-haired gray tabby, glanced at us and magnanously strolled out of our way, tail in the air.) Getting up before dawn to see the Blue Grotto, eating an incredible arugula salad for lunch, drinking wine on the balcony of our hotel at dusk. A few mosquitos, but the wine and view were so good we really didn’t care.
Rome: More honking cars and vespas among ancient piles, occasional Roman era rows of cordoned-off ionic or corinthian columns, nighttime streets filled not just with tourists but with students, and so many gelato shops, pizza shops, olive oil shops… The biggest , best change I noticed from my student days were the many young women I saw walking by themselves at night on the streets of Rome and yet unmolested and unharassed by obnoxious men. Charming residents eager to show off their city, who confidently answered “yes” if we asked if they spoke English, then offered incomprehensible directions in a version of it we could not understand. Art museums where, quite possibly, my artist great-great-grandfather, a successful 19th century artist, sat and sketched copies of Renaissance paintings. The closer one got to the Vatican, the more serious young priests one saw with briefcases, usually walking alongside older men in black cassocks. The young nun in the Vatican shop who, except for her habit, looked like every other young woman working in a tourist shop, obviously bored and tilted forward, her elbows on the counter as she scrolled through her phone.
Pam Troy 