Seeing beyond the surface

Jan. 1 

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I always feel safe when I’m traveling, running. Like I’m in protective bubble wrap — or like I’ve found a spot of land off the coast with a breeze. Loneliness, freedom, sometimes they feel the same to me.

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As usual, my thoughts bled into ink on paper as the airplane carried me between the converging and diverging planes of my life — what has been and what will be. Back home, everything had a way of continuing, like a conversation never fully settled for the night.

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I glanced up from my fervently scribbled notebook, my head resting against the foggy glass barrier between my small, havened capsule and the endless starry expanse. At 7:19 a.m., a beam of yellow and orange surfaced through the sea of clouds.

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Somewhere underneath that horizon waited Florence.

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Jan. 5

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I fiddled with my pen as my “Food and Travel Writing” professor outlined our study-abroad final assignment. I jotted phrases along the margin of my notebook: creative nonfiction, sensory observation, avoid clichés, how have you changed as the setting changed?

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Something in me scoffed, though I wasn’t sure why. 

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Jan. 7

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The humid air clung to my cheeks that morning, gathering at my nose and flushing my skin pink. A shiver slid down my spine and settled into the ache of my back — the kind of gnawing cold that pulls moisture from the air and exhales an icy breath across your skin. My thoughts wandered as we rode through Tuscany’s winding roads on the tour bus. The hills rose around us, my view obstructed by frosted trees and a winter wonderland.

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Tour guides and civilians alike kept noting that the snow was the first in 10 years. I felt like I was a part of something rare, a brief break in my alienation as the Tuscan natives and I witnessed something new together.

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By 2 p.m., my peers had given up on finding open restaurants. We knew, in theory, about the midday rest, but only then did we fully understand it. I watched them sit and wait, like children after a long school day.

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I observed the quiet town of Pienza as if it were a specimen sealed under glass — stone facades frosted white, shutters drawn, streets emptied and still.

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I had written plainly in my journal:

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In between lunch stop @ some small town w/10 min radius:

—wandered the abandoned town, visited humble churches w/beautiful prayer rooms

—everyone was cold and bitter. I loved it though

—i love the towns outside the city that haven't adapted to tourism

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I sifted its grounds for what I had decided must be “real” Italian culture, as though it had frozen itself in place, waiting for someone willing to squint hard enough to separate the picturesque from the authentic. And yet, I was already framing it into a picture of my own.

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Jan. 10

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Rome came and went in one sentence.

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With a 7:48 a.m. train ticket and a 9:33 a.m. arrival, we breezed past cathedrals (very big, very pretty) on the way to the Colosseum, scurried to the Roman Forum, spent “enough” time there, rushed over to the Trevi Fountain (had my Lizzie McGuire moment), watched the Pope come out in front of the St. Peter’s Basilica (I took a video and will brag about seeing the Pope), moved through the Vatican museum’s labyrinth of hallways (picture, next; picture, next), complained about missing the Palatine Hill and the Pantheon, took a taxi back to the train station for the 9:48 p.m. departure and, by 11:30 p.m., collapsed into bed.

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Thirty-five thousand steps, toes bleeding and a haphazard blur of artifacts behind me, Rome felt less like a city than a montage — monuments flashing past in six-second clips. In a single breath, Caesar’s words seemed to narrate the itinerary: I came, I saw, I conquered.

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Jan. 13

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My eyes squinted, trying to see what everyone else did. The towering pillars of the Galleria dell’Accademia pillowed my senses. Hushed voices folding neatly into the corners, shuffling feet, flashes of cameras and dozens of doe-eyed, vacant stares, all orbiting on the Renaissance prize at the center of the room: David.

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Some visitors scribbled feverishly in notebooks at the edge of their seats; others flocked to the marble statue like vultures claiming a retrospective badge of intelligence. Some whispered in corners, tracing the veins in his limbs, the soft tuft of curls of his hair, the muscles coiling around him like vines. But I had seen only a man whose story was in some faraway land, and whose victory was one I did not share. I cleared my throat and also began flocking.

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David:

—powerful stance, leaning back

—from left side — looks so confident + assured

—from right side — eyes look weary, scared even, lips pressed, shrinking back, clenching rock

—a lot of people here are drawing the art. others are taking notes. I wonder what they're thinking about

—when the David is all you see, you look @ it for 10 min

—when you're in a room w/dozens, you breeze past each one

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Jan. 14

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I didn’t begin to value home-cooked meals until I came home from college for the first time. Those microwavable, pasta-and-butter (maybe) salted dinners thrown together in 10 minutes to keep me alive were less of a meal than a function. So when I walked into my pasta-making class, it wasn’t the pasta that made my stomach rumble — it was the aroma of spices filling the air.

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We pressed past our hunger at the 8 p.m. time stamp, hands busy with the slow mechanics of kneading dough, separating it again and again into long, rolled sheets. Vegetables were sliced and piled into a pot, then left alone to soften and simmer. Wine lingered in the air. I drew its sweet, tangy scent toward my nose with the guide of my hand. Flour crusted beneath my fingertips.

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We sat down to eat at 9 p.m. The pasta was far from Italian cuisine; though, smiles lingered, aprons slipped off and hung back on their hooks, and we enjoyed what we had created together.

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For a moment, the room felt strangely familiar, as if a word from English class had suddenly taken shape before me — “proustian,” the way smells evoke memories.

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Jan. 15

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During class, we read John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing.” His words clung to me as I wandered through the quieter edges of Florence. My camera drifted toward the motorcycles lining the pavement, the damp clothes hanging limply on balconies — mundane nuances that wouldn't appear in the postcards.

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Perhaps there is a quiet arrogance in believing only the monumental is worthy of notice. As Berger writes, “We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.”

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Jan. 16

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Everyone knows of Vivoli’s famous affogato. Though hardly the inventor of espresso and gelato, it had become an aesthetic target of the media’s gaze: a tiny medieval window repurposed for Instagram snapshots, everyone outside photographing cappuccino mugs balanced neatly on their saucers.

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The line wove lazily through the store and out the door, gathering visitors itching to taste the fame. I extended my hand, positioning it for the barista to take my ticket, when gasps and giggles pulled my eyes upward, landing on a decadent chocolate cake ringed with small candles being carried behind the bar.

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The giggling employees flocked to the cake, lighting its candles, and as if on cue, the choir began: “Tanti auguri a te, Tanti auguri a te …” and surely enough, one of the male employees entered from the corner of the room, shock and bliss melting perfectly across his face.

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My ticket felt heavy in my hand. I could feel the toes tapping behind me, arms crossed, faces drawn long, impatience dawning like a ticking clock. 

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A pop snapped through the air as an older employee burst out laughing. “Who wants prosecco?” she announced to the waiting customers, deep crevices lining her face from beaming. The handful of 10 or so employees began taking pictures, selfies and videos with their birthday boy, and before I knew it, a smile of my own mirrored theirs.

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I had forgotten entirely about my delayed affogato.

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Jan. 17

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There was a break in winter’s chill — 60 degrees — and everyone emerged from hibernation to bask lazily by the riverfront, bottles of wine and panini in hand.

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Last night’s wine pressed at the crown of my head. A dull clarity settled in, easing the pressure of the inevitable question waiting back home: How was your trip? Oh — it was a movie!

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I left my apartment anyway, chin tilted upward in quiet defiance. For a moment, I stopped looking for anything more, letting my feet wander.

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A deep puddle splashed, reeling me back as I cut through a back alley. One window caught my eye — books lined the ledge beside a small sign that read, “Art books chosen by artists.”

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The concept alone carried my feet to the door, where a small café sat inside. I journaled for a couple of hours before asking the chef for an Aperol Spritz, my waitress nowhere in sight.

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“You don’t ask the chef for a drink,” she noted when she finally returned, a light scuff in her voice.

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Heat rose to my cheeks, faint amusement tugging at the corners of my lips. 

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All that commotion for an Aperol I didn’t even like.

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Jan. 19

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In “The Art of Travel,” Alain de Botton writes that the “twin purposes of art” are “to make sense of pain and to fathom the sources of beauty.” It seems fitting that when we travel to “find ourselves,” we are often met with a mirror. 

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I had felt that uneasy clarity as I stood before Michelangelo’s David. I tried to meet him with the neutral gaze of a viewer. Instead, it was as if I had been stripped just as bare. “What is it like to stand there as yourself?” My professor’s voice echoed in my ear.

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Though our differences in nature were obvious, for a moment, our diverging planes seemed to converge. Face-to-face, we stood frozen, as if caught in a quiet exchange across centuries.

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We like to imagine our sight is objective, like a camera capturing an image. But we are not cameras, and our sight never arrives alone.

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Perhaps this tension is what made the statue so compelling. Scholars have noted structural weaknesses in the marble — small crevices beginning at his feet that would one day bring the marvel down. As Sam Anderson writes in a New York Times article in 2016, they suggest a strange destiny, “Not to stand, but to break.”

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Jan. 20

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Renaissance: rebirth — a rediscovery of the greats.

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As I stepped onto the street, I realized the word was less a historical term than a process we live through. The breeze was brisk, the city unfolding with each step. I took the route my feet knew — past the cluster at the bus stop and across Piazza Santa Croce, its shadow tall and arching.

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Sam Anderson’s piece lingered, almost invasively, in my mind. In “From Marble to Flesh,” art historian A. Victor Coonin describes Michelangelo’s David as emerging “like a person being slowly revealed as water drains from a bath” — a line Anderson and I both return to.

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Days had gone by since then, standing defeated in front of his gaze. Yet Florence herself seemed to share something with the marble that defined her. The longer I roamed her streets and learned her rhythms, the more she slowly drained herself — her stone facade giving way, her glass-exhibit sheen dissolving. The glamor faded.

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Like David revealed beneath the surface of marble, we, too, are not so much rediscovered as revealed. I arrived searching for transformation — some sort of reconfiguration of the self that only the Italians can cure.

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But the small disorientations of travel worked slowly, like a growing pain, peeling back the thin linings of my familiar facade. What remained was not something new, but something steady, exposed and quietly ordinary.

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Firenze had not changed at all. I had only learned to see her.

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At the bottom of the page, only one line remained,

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I heart Firenze

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