I am thinking again of Italy. 

It has been eighteen months and three days since I stepped off the United Airlines transatlantic flight into the noise and grit and sanctioned chaos that is the Rome airport. Eighteen months and three days since I dragged my too heavy suitcase past customs agents that couldn’t have been more than seventeen years old, semiautomatic rifles strapped to their gray uniforms, smoking cigarettes and grinning as the people passed them. A life sized crucifix hung on the wall of the baggage claim area. This is awful, I thought. This is a huge mistake. I should have stayed home. I’m tired. The movie on the plane was terrible. I’m dirty. Let’s go home. 

My friends and I take a cab to our first hotel. The Il Castillo. Here we encounter Romans who hate Americans. Showers that fill up the entire bathroom with overflow. Toilets that drip heaven knows what onto you. "The toilet that pees with you," we say, and laugh. 

Here we first encounter cold. Stone cold. Cold enough to put the prosciutto and mozzarella we bought at the corner market outside the window to stay fresh until the morning. The heat is rationed, we are told, by the clerk who is snug in a parka behind a desk with a space heater. It’s not time for heat now.

But we’re Americans, I think, and even as the words form in my head I realize the lunacy of that statement. We adjust our climate to our comfort. We ask for blankets and we get them. We have American dollars. I have to smile. None of that makes any difference. We are in Rome, and it is not time for heat now. We’ll have to put on a sweater. Or freeze.

We sleep, in sweaters and scarves, although it’s noon and the travel book says to try and stay awake your first day so you can get acclimated. We are tired. The cold iron cots with a single sheet and blanket suddenly become a source of great comfort. We collapse, the weight of our bodies sinking the metal springs of the cots to the floor, and sleep.

We wake up, wide awake at dinnertime. We look around our room with a different lens. We’re in Rome. We’re really in Rome. A bare light bulb hangs from the ceiling. There is no carpet on the stone floor. The window has a huge metal screen that pulls down at night by an iron chain. The bathroom has no electric outlets. It is still cold.

Hunger pulls us out. We slice prosciutto on the window sill. We resolve, silently, to have a good time beginning this very minute. So we dress, triple check for our passports and plane tickets and lire, and head out into the city.

The sight of the Colliseum backlit against a scrim of stars literally takes my breath away. It shines, a soft, edgeless glow, in contrast to the headlights from the Mazdas and VW’s passing on the cobblestone streets. It’s a sleeping giant, next to strip clubs and restaurants and prostitutes. The columns are crumbling. Time and pollution and vandalism have each taken a bite of the stone walls, leaving columns as raw and ragged as half-eaten chicken legs. 

Cats own the Colliseum. They sit on the lights for warmth, casting tall cat shadows into the street. We peek through the metal bars. We can’t go in. We have to wait until the morning. Still, the gladiators fought here. The fights between man and beast. The trials of the heretics. The murder of a nation. Such cliché concepts, yet, here we are, standing on the site where the clichés first happened. The site where they were not yet overdone movie concepts, but life… bloody, sweaty, screaming life.

We stand in silence at the entrance to the Colliseum. The place where the gladiators waited to die. "We who are about to die, salute you," they said. My friends and I move closer to one another, gloved fingers intertwining. The mist hovers over the city; a street vendor hawks scarves; a homeless person begs for change. We are someplace else.

The smallness and greatness of all human endeavors smash up against one another in Italia. Our distinct and defiant humanity butts up against our soft and romantic fleshy insides. Gigantic monoliths to war and myth, and human, male popes dot the landscape of umbrella pines and foggy mountains. The Benedictine Abbey is still in the same shroud of mist south of Rome it has been in for 1500 years. 

The mystery associated with Catholicism and its pagan roots are blatant and pervasive. The brutality of man against man and man against woman paint an impressive picture on the canvas of the semi-modern metropolis that is Rome. To walk among the proverbs and platitudes of Virgil and Dante and Plato is to realize in your very soul that we have not changed. We will pass away from this earth like so much dust and nothing will be left of us but that which we say or do. Nothing will speak for us but our brutalities and our kindnesses. Nothing redeems us but our art. 

Death walks hand in hand with us in Italia. Death is the companero. Death is the redeemer. It is hard to stand in the place where they held Saint Peter captive. The rickety staircase down into the hole where he stayed, chained, until he died upside down on a hill, was added for the convenience of tourists. Peter was simply thrown into the hole like garbage. It is hard to stand on the stones where Caesar bled, knife lodged in his back. "Et tu?" Hard to look at the landscape that is shrouded like fairy tale forests and not imagine soldiers and mystics, druids dancing in the forest, women burning in the square where now you can buy Gucci and Versacci and 18 karat gold. 

Italy is hindered by her size and her age. Modern conveniences just don’t fit. Heat is a privilege. Electricity is sporadic and weak. Cars don’t fit on the cobblestone streets. Neon advertisements in the shadow of the Colliseum clash like corduroy and silk. 

When I returned to America, I had trouble assimilating. When I went to the grocery store, I looked for croissants with the apricot filling like we ate in Venice and they were not there. I looked for salami in the deli and it was not there. I looked for red wine that ached from ancient soils, but I could not find that either. It is harder than I could have imagined to readjust. As difficult as it was moving from here to there, it is more so coming back this way. When we are here in America we believe that the whole world waits for our every move -- our every whim. It is just not so. Only America thinks America is the most important place to be. 

Italy has a pulsing, vibrating sexuality. Sexuality is as much a part of life as birth and death. Maybe that was some of what I felt there. In America, we are consumed by hiding the fact that people have sex. There, it is assumed that everyone has sex. Very different...and for a country that cowers in the shadow of the Vatican, very liberated. It’s interesting how in Italy, although the very streets reek of Catholicism, that the messages of the church don’t seem to be as potent as they are in America. It seems that the rigidity that is wrapped up in the Catholicism of America is somehow softer on its home soil. Catholicism is a culture in Italy. People live it, day in and day out, and they take what they need and leave the rest. 

I kiss a man named Luigi in Florence along the banks of the Arno River. The man is a street artist. A portrait painter. He plays the flute and he thinks I am beautiful. He does not think I am American. I look Scandinavian, and I let him think that. He takes me out for shellfish and wine and a Disney film, where we make out in the balcony listening to "Mulan". He massages my feet. I will go anywhere with this man. He buys me a Fanta on the way back to the hotel. He holds my hand and I remember thinking as I kissed him that one day I would be writing this very sentence ... I would write I kissed a man along the banks of the Arno River in a foreign land under a full moon, and I will never be the same. 

I don’t know why he chooses me. I’m not usually the one selected for such romantic encounters. But now, suddenly, after feeling each other up like teenagers under the tower where Shakespeare dreamed of Romeo and Juliet, sweat, perfume and the knowledge that my own life spun twenty-five hundred miles away, sweeps me into a fairy tale that is not believable enough to tell, except it’s true. "Alone is not good," he says, his lips brushing my fingertips. "You understand?"

I closed my heart in 1987 after my father died. I can even tell you the exact minute it happened. We were driving home from the burial, which took place in broad daylight in September. My mother and my sister didn’t say anything in the car. I looked out the back window, saw my father’s coffin at a forty-five degree angle, ready to plunge into the empty grave shell. He’ll hurt his head, I thought. I put on my sunglasses, his tilted coffin reflected in the lenses, and closed shop. 

Twelve years is a long time to wait for the key.

I have always been drawn to the Italians. I love the fire, the vibrancy, the art and the play. I am drawn to the history. A land where the battles of Herodotus are as important as the stock market is to us. Italy has seen so much suffering. It is a land rich in resources, rich in story, rich in myth. It is a place with a history so deep that I can only begin to scratch the surface. The people I see are weathered. The people I meet have lived. I meet Luigi in the square in Florence where they used to burn witches only 400 years ago. You can’t smell the charred flesh anymore. But in Rome when we walk down into the prison where they kept Peter and Paul, we feel the clammy arms of time around our throats. We know there is something at work very much older than us. Very much stronger than us. Very much a part of us. 

Ashes to ashes. Nowhere is that more obvious than among the ancient, crumbling stones of Italy. And there, among fossils of past lives, I find a piece of my heart, and when Luigi presses it back in, I hear the snap of symmetry, feel tears flow hot from a deep, deep vault. When Luigi whispers in my ear as the elevator door closes, "There is only love," my knees wobble and I clutch at his scarf, smelling of cigarette smoke and me. "You understand?"

Si, mi papa. I understand.