On Friday, I returned to Paris after travelling around Italy for two weeks. Before then, I had only been to Italy once before. It was a 37-hour coach trip to the Alps in the North. My standout memory of the trip is biting into a doughnut, expecting jam, and instead encountering a disgusting, orangey substance that, despite its colour, was definitely not fruit-flavoured. It wouldn’t have taken much to top it.
When I look back at the last two weeks, it’s hard to think of a stand-out memory. So much has happened. At times, I felt more stressed than I’ve ever felt before in my life. At others, I was so zen I was almost dead. During the whole process, the backdrop has been beautiful. So beautiful that, when I look back, I can’t help wondering if I made some of it up.
My birthday, on the beach.
We began the trip in Capo Vaticano, in Calabria. If Italy is a boot, Calabria is the top side of the toes. After an excruciating taxi journey through deep fog in the mountains in rural Italy at night, we arrived at our villa, only to ripped out of an extra 50 by the owner. We didn’t like him. When we expressed indignation at the fact he was plucking figures out of thin air, he dangled the villa keys in front of our faces, making it clear that, unless we coughed up, we’d be sleeping in the hedgerows. At 1am in a foreign country, this was not an enticing option.
But then he drove away and we started to have a nice time. The sea was blue and beautiful. The sun shone. I turned twenty-one, we ate pizza and we danced on the beach at midnight. On the last night in the villa, the sky lit up with the most spectacular sunset I have ever seen. The sky was striped; bright pink and dusky blue. We took a million photographs.
We drove to the airport with the intention of waiting seven hours for our early-morning flight. An hour into the seven hours, a policeman came up to me and told me the airport was closing. After a few minutes of heart-stopping panic and after he’d checked our passport, he agreed to allow us to stay. He locked us in the airport. An hour later, the security alarm went off. A few hours later, it got bored and clocked off too. Luckily, they’d left the wifi on – I watched Gangster Squad on Netflix.
Rome may be my favourite place. By the second day, my friends and I were actively trying to find an ugly place. The beauty is everywhere. Highlights include The Vatican, the Roman Forum and the Colosseum. My favourite piece of trivia from the trip – seats at the Colosseum were numbered. When you bought a ticket to a gladiator tournament, you were told which entrance to use and which row/number your seat was on. You might be going to watch men get ripped apart but, by god, you’d do it in an orderly and civilised fashion.
I feel like the food goes without saying. It was glorious. If I say any more, you’ll all get jealous and cry.
Two of us finished the trip in Florence. Beautiful though it is, we couldn’t quite understand why so many people prefer it to Rome. Italians are outnumbered by Americans and the traditional Italian shops have all been gutted and replaced with Chanel and Dior. The Ponte Vecchio – an old bridge still bearing the weight of buildings – is dominated totally by exclusive, non-Italian, jewellers. Someone, somewhere, has realised that tourists like going to Florence and somewhere on the path to making a lot of money have slowly destroyed the reason why people wanted to go there in the first place. This does not mean I had a terrible time in Florence – it was great. I bought myself a lovely jacket. My friend and I had a wonderful meal in a beautiful restaurant. We encountered, bizarrely, a number of extremely talented saxophonists. We met Michelangelo’s David. Then, our airline cancelled our flight and we had to rush back a day early to avoid being homeless. We still managed to have a good time, however, setting up camp in the airport lounge with a bottle of wine and some pizza. It’s hard to be sad in Italy.
But, of course, it’s not where you are; it’s who you’re with. I was with nice people, so I had a nice time. Though I also ate a lot of pizza, which probably helped.
Ellen Lavelle 