Boomer on the Loose: Italy and a Handshake with History

Foreign travel, like childbirth, is best experienced in prospect and in retrospect.

Looking forward to my trip to Italy was a joy, filled with hazy expectations of good food and kind strangers.  Now that I'm home from a two-week shopping tour, with a few days of independent travel, the idea of "vacation in Italy" has a golden glow as I try to remember certain scenes to describe to friends at home.

And I'm trying to remember what happened to keep my own memory straight.  It's fun to compare this trip, now that I'm retired, with the carefree, solo European jaunts I made in my 20's and 30's.  In those days I'd leave town with no reservations and only a general plan to "see Big Ben" or "check out Monaco".

Back in the days, when I'd walk miles to see what's around the next corner, and think taxis were for the rich folks.  These days my arthritic knees dictate how many tourist sites I'll walk through, and how the majority of places will be seen from a taxi or bus.

While I was there, of course, it was sometimes uncomfortable --hard beds, meager showers, medieval cobblestones and many stairs to climb.  And I was surprised to find the menus in every restaurant stuck with Italian stereotypes:  pizza and pasta were about the only dishes I could decipher.  Wine was cheaper than Coke, but I'm a Coke-with-ice addict (had to cut back on that, just due to the hassle of finding and buying them).

Prices were pretty reasonable in the cities I visited:  Milan, Venice, Florence, and Rome.  A pizza that was too big for one was about $10, and a drink about $5.  After filling breakfasts each day, I somehow wasn't very hungry, but I was thirsty from walking,  so I only ate one other restaurant meal a day. I only saw one candy store, in touristy Via del Corso in Rome. I seemed to find only hard candy and licorice there, so I bought that. The most horrible-tasting licorice ever!  Without all the junk food choices I have at home, I could hardly think of anything to eat, so I lost five pounds.  

I never had a problem with speaking Italian, because everyone that I encountered spoke enough English to understand me. One taxi driver I asked about his English said he learned it "on the Internet, playing games."  Who knew?

I joined a tour for shopping, and we went to several designer outlets, a leather factory, and a winery. I bought purses, jackets and a few pairs of very "Dolce Vita" sunglasses. 

It was good to leave the driving to a couple of bus drivers, especially when we were traveling in the rain and snow in mountainous northern Italy. The country in March looks just like I expected it would, kind of misty, with spare trees and brownish wintry earth. And the cities are so old that I had to keep reminding myself, especially in Rome, 'People have walked on these streets and stairs for many HUNDREDS of years.'

I felt the past particularly in Venice going through the Doge's Palace with imposing, high-ceilinged anterooms where citizens would wait to conduct business in the Middle Ages.  And I felt a hint of the gloom of the prisoners when I was wandering through the ancient prison with its tiny apertures for light and damp breezes blowing across the cold cement floors.

A highlight of the Venice visit:  having a super-expensive dinner at Harry's Bar.  Well worth the 25-Euro-each artichoke soup (yummy!) and spinach and bacon salad.  And  when I mentioned to the waiter my belief that Hemingway had hung out there, he brought over a book about the place with photos from the 1920s and '30s that had been written by the son of the owner, the original Harry.  Then this son, now an elegantly dressed, white-haired gentleman who'd been dining in the same room, came over to my table.  We shook hands, and he signed the book to me, and made me a present of it.  For an English major, shaking the hand that shook Fitzgerald's and Hemingway's was a unique thrill.

I want to remember, too, that feeling of freedom and that anything's possible.  I felt that way on my first afternoon in Rome. I started with directions from the hotel clerk, then a second question to the carabinieri on the street corner:  "Which way to the Via Veneto?"  After only a couple of blocks, I was striding through an ancient arch, and then strolling downhill on the famous Via Veneto.  It was a cool, sunny day, there were plenty of shops to peek into, and I had a whole, free day in front of me.  

In Rome, it was pretty awe-inspiring to go through the Vatican Museum, with the sculpture especially beautiful and fragile.  Because I happened to be at the Vatican during the Papal Conclave to elect the new Pope, the Sistine Chapel was closed.  I got in plenty of walking, anyway, in and around the Vatican and St. Peter's Square.

My best decisions in Rome near the end of the trip were to relax with a facial and a massage in a nice hotel. The nice part about being older is that when I saw my masseuse, a fine-looking young man, I didn't worry about the embarrassment I would've felt in my 20's.  When he whipped off my towel, I just closed my eyes and thought, "If he's ok with looking at my mostly naked body,  I'm not worrying about a thing."

So I came home looking less haggard from the jet lag than I did after a previous trip to Paris. And my only regrets were the hours of misery on ever-smaller airplane seats, and the Roman duty-free wine the homeland security took away from me on my plane-change in New York.  So many rules... But, overall, a fine trip. 

And in retrospect, experiences that'll improve each time I think back.