Birds of a Feather...

I do not know how it happens, but every time, without fail, it does indeed happen. Every time I leave Italy it feels like I am leaving a piece of my soul behind. It seems I am being torn away against my every will, from something, from a place that reaches deep down into the very depths of my heart and grabs hold of the core with an unrelenting grip. Italy and I, or rather "we", have over the past three years become intricately intertwined, like the roots of an ancient tree and the soil they've crept into, having wound their way further and deeper still, crossing and crissing, crissing and crossing, until finally they reached a point of indiscernibility. That's Italy and I, we are indiscernible and inseparable. She will always be a part of me and I of her.


Our most recent of rendezvous was a 6-day sojourn of mine in Venezia. I was invited by a good friend of mine, Lara Camozzo, to come down and visit her while she stayed with her Venetian relatives. As it turned out, partially due to fate and partially due to our own coordination, my break perfectly aligned with her stay there and all other travel offers fell through. So early on the 3rd of September, after a cappuccino, a croissant, and a dash of early-morning delirium with one of my best friends, Jo, I hitched a ride with two Croatian-German women "nach Italien". And 6 hours, many an Alp and rolling green hill later we arrived in Udine, a town in the very Northeast of Italy. After getting a bit lost, due to insufficient signage - something I regarded positively as meaning that we were indeed in Italy -, we managed to find our way to "la stazione centrale" and have a caffe' before I got on my train and they in their car and parted ways.


I was on my way to Venezia, "La Serenissima", that elusive city that hovers over Italy like its guardian angle, or perhaps the little devil on its shoulder. Who knows which? Either way, up until this past week, or perhaps even still, it had always maintained an air of mystery for me. Despite all the hype and all the reviews, and all the information that is floating around out there about Venezia, I approached this visit with as little expectation as possible, and perhaps even with a pinch of apprehension, fearing that it would somehow turn out to be some touristic mad-house a la Disneyland. I feared it would have nothing real or tangible to offer, that over the years its sense of history and culture had been lost to the hordes of tourists that swarm and trample its streets. I feared the worse, and in the end had the most surreally blissful of experiences.


After 6 days of roaming her maze-like streets and canals, breathing in her cornucopia of smells, hearing her symphony of noises, tasting her seas, experiencing all the best her vines have to offer, and completely losing myself in her rhythms, I came to conclusion that there isn't a place in this world - at least that I've ever been to - that compares to the pure enchantment that is Venezia. A huge part of this enchantment is her complexity. There is nothing simple or easy about Venice, not the history, nor the streets, nor the buildings, nor the language/dialect, nor the cuisine...really nothing at all. From the minute you step off the train and into her little alleyways, you know complexity is equivalent with normality. I was there for 6 days and I barely scratched the surface. It is a place that would require years, even decades, of living there before you could begin to understand it. Quite an amazing feat when you consider its comparatively small size. But this complexity, this air of mystery, this elusiveness is essential to the city's character, its very being. Without it Venezia would be just another place, nothing special, nothing worth seeing. Luckily, though, the reality is quite the contrary. As Lara's good friend Aurelia said one night while getting a drink with us at L'Erberia, "Venice is hard to leave."

And hard to leave it indeed was. The 6 days I spent there, being guided around literally almost all of her streets by Lara, and living the life of a Venetian with her, her family and especially her cousin Giulio and his friends, seemed like an eternity. It was an eternity of pure contentedness, the kind that erases all sense of time and reality from your mind. Somehow Italy had done it to me again. The minute I crossed her border, she began to wrap her roots around me, seep into my blood and heart and deeper still into my soul. I was back! I was home again. J And I jumped head first into it. It was a week of living la vita italiana again. And even though it was for the briefest of moments, those 6 days reminded me of just how much Italy and I belong together, of how well we fit, and of why it is that I am so in love with it. And better yet it got me REALLY excited for next year!!

Follow these links to see more pics:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=36927804&id=21305513#/album.php?aid=2275414&id=5303189

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=36927804&id=21305513#/album.php?aid=2198600&id=21305513&page=9

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