According to Rosalyn, our mutual friend Carol had gotten a good deal on a flight from San Francisco to Zürich. From there, she would take a train to Florence, the rendezvous point for all three of us. Roz and I had split from each other three weeks before in Madrid and, in the interim, I had gone to France. I visited the Mont St. Michel in Normandy, cycled in the Loire Valley and passed the last of my days on French soil along the Riviera, all of this after sharing a magical time with Tristan in Paris. I discovered that I liked being in Tristan’s flat for ten consecutive days, I liked being in France, and I was not particularly inclined to race off to another country. After traveling for two and a half months, I yearned to be in one place for a while to rest, to get comfortable with one language, to know I could clearly communicate how I liked my coffee without overtaxing my brain. France was perfect for me because I had studied French and, once I left Paris for parts south, had gotten much more confident and bold in speaking it. But the plan to meet Carol had been arranged months before and yet another travel lesson presented itself. In the future, I would try to not promise to meet someone months into my travels, having no idea where my head, or for that matter, the rest of my body would be at that time.
​
Before saying au revoir to France, I indulged in some wonderfully relaxing days in Menton on the Côte d’Azur, not too far from the Italian border, where I shared a room with four people I met on the train. We had lots of fun just being spontaneous. The beach was crowded with well-tanned wannabes in the skimpiest of bathing suits, wishing they were in Cannes. Morning walks were cool and lovely. Menton is quite hilly and most residences are lush with a variety of bushes and flowers including, in frequency, bien sur, the ever-present bougainvillea of the Mediterranean. An easy uphill hike was rewarded with views of the seaside and boats anchored at the shore. The produce market on the main square was always busy and the fruits and vegetables were so gorgeous and perfect, they seemed to have been put on display for a House and Garden photo shoot. One evening all of us roomies boarded the train to Nice and had dinner at an old bistro featuring regional specialties such as bouillabaisse. I could easily have spent more time exploring Nice and doing the French Riviera thing, but I had only a short time to spare before my appointment in Florence, so I opted to squeeze in brief stops in Milan - where I was floored by the train station and famous gothic duomo - and Venice.
​
My first glimpse of Venice as I emerged from the train station is forever burned into my memory. It felt as though I had landed in Disneyland or on a Hollywood set. Venice was immediately spectacular, and one of the few places I have ever been to that was true to my pre-imagined vision. My packed-in two days went from morning to night and my map, on which I so depended in a maze of streets, alleys and canals, was more stained, wrinkled, and torn than any other during my five-month jaunt to Israel and Europe. At the time, Venice was packed with American tourists and though I longed to be back on a bicycle on the country roads of the Loire Valley, I gritted my teeth and decided to enjoy myself. There were no available pensions to be found, so I sought lodging in reasonably nearby Padua from where I would ride the morning train with commuters. Padua is itself an interesting historical city with a university and a lively plaza filled with the bustle of produce vendors, students, bicycles, and cafés.
​
If you allow yourself to daydream while walking in Venice, you may become totally lost. Aren't there a lot of creepy movies that take place in Venice? I could certainly understand why. Meandering through, around, under, and over streets and canals, there were moments I felt claustrophobic and welcomed the wide-open expanse of the Grand Canal. Venice possesses a labyrinthine charm and I could sense the voices and shadows of times past, especially on the empty quiet streets far from the center where all the tourists congregated. In one way it all begins to look the same. Yet from a photographic perspective, I could not get over each building’s uniqueness, the special view of one canal from the one just around the bend. The visual bounty was spectacular, and I found myself shooting more slides in Venice than anywhere I’d been since Paris. Of course, this might be because while in the Loire Valley, I unfortunately dropped my camera into the toilet, oops! The roll of film that was in the camera at the time of the accident had been shot at an old French cemetery. When the film was eventually processed, the smears and blending of water with photo emulsion were clearly evident, but tended to add a strange, yet apropos mood to the images of tombstones, which were streaked with color and had an eerie, dreamlike effect. My friend Carmine, who was with me at the time, lent me her camera before we parted, not only because she was returning to New York, but as a way to show gratitude for my putting up with her utter inexperience and sometimes irrational fears as a traveler.
​
On my second afternoon in Venice, I stopped for an ice cream at a café. The waiter and I started to flirt with each other but pretty quickly discovered that neither of us spoke the other's mother tongue, so resorted to French with which we both seemed to have equal command, not very much. Pietro was a young, slender, delicate man with sandy colored hair and green plaintive eyes that I could not turn myself from. He invited me to go out to dinner that evening and, with a little urging, I finally agreed, though I knew the conversation would be simple. I went back to Padua to rest and shower, then boarded the train back to Venice to meet my date, where else? At the Plaza San Marcos, naturalmente. I know this is beginning to sound like a 1950s Hollywood movie, but Pietro was no Rossano Brazzi, so don't get excited. He took me to a restaurant which, though nearby, took us around so many corners to get to, I knew that without Pietro I would be completely disoriented. My escort told me he had already eaten but proceeded to order dinner for me. Then when my food came, he insisted on cutting it up for me. This whole experience was bizarre, but I felt touched by this young man with his sad eyes, who could probably only afford one dinner and who gazed at me over his wine glass as I ate it. Afterwards, we ambled through the narrow streets, and even though the mood was quiet and conversation was sporadic, it did not take long for it to reach a dead end, as we both exhausted our combined knowledge of French and Pietro’s even smaller range of English. I told Pietro that I would catch the next train and he asked me if I would like to stay at his place that night. I graciously refused but he continued to press.
​
“I live with my sister, do not be afraid. You can have your own room.”
“I prefer to go back to Padua. I am leaving early in the morning for Firenze.”
​
At this point, Pietro got down on one knee and implored me with such melancholy earnestness to come home with him, that I almost gave in. Never in my life has a man put so much gloriously dramatic effort into trying to get me to spend the night with him. I finally managed to withdraw from Pietro and the allure of the Shakespearean moment to make my train.
​
My pension was only a fifteen-minute walk from the station, but it was already pretty late and the streets were deserted. I started walking briskly when a car appeared and some men started catcalling to me from the windows. I just ignored them and kept walking, but they became rather persistent and slowed the pace of the car to match mine and, even coming from New York City, where harassment from men was a frequent contention, I was beginning to get apprehensive. When I rounded the corner onto a larger street that I knew led to a plaza not far from my pension, I broke out into a run until I reached a bar that was still open. The men in the car followed me and sat in front of the bar with the motor running, but after a few minutes just drove off. Wow, that was one of the few times in my life as a traveler that I actually felt both threatened and vulnerable. Curiously, I hardly ever feel nervous in New York, a city awash with light and people throughout the night and rarely have I felt creepy or cornered as I did on this night in Padua. I probably would have been safer taking my chances with Pietro.
​
The train I took to Florence the next morning arrived hours before I was to meet Carol and Rosalyn, but I decided to check the train schedule to confirm the one from Zürich that Roz said would be carrying our Carol. I had no idea where Roz was coming from. Not too surprisingly, this train was not scheduled. I recalled that when traveling with Roz and Anil in Spain and Portugal, if Roz, in reading the map, said we should turn right, Anil would automatically turn left and we hardly ever got lost. Suddenly, it occurred to me that Roz being Roz, may have even gotten the date wrong. I had no idea when I should be at the station to meet Carol, but more immediately I had to find accommodation and was uncertain if I would be sharing it with my friends or not. Florence was expensive and I preferred to split the cost of a room with another, so I started to scan the train station for a possible roommate for the night. My keen eyes settled upon a young man with a backpack who looked like he too was on a budget. Unfortunately, I learned he was on his way out of Italy, to his home in Kufstein, Austria, in the Alps.
​
“Kufstein is very beautiful. It is in the mountains,” he said proudly. I will give you my address for when you come there.”
“Thank you, but I have no plans to go to Austria on this trip,” I replied.
​
How many travel lessons learned so far? One of the rules of the sort of travel I do is there are no rules and one never knows. As it turns out, Carol and I found ourselves in Austria less than one month later, and even ended up going to a party in Kitzbuhel after which we were driven to the train station in Kufstein, to board a train back to Italy. It was a damp, chilly night, even for August, and we had several hours to kill before the train’s departure. Between the two of us we had enough Austrian shillings left for one brioche and two cups of tea and needless to say, these barely filled the time nor our stomachs.
​
“If only I had the address and telephone number of that nice man with the long, curly blonde hair that I met that time in the train station in Florence,” I complained dejectedly to Carol.
​
There are moments when you simply must make a decision and act. I left the railway station to find accommodation and chose a pension close by, which allowed me to make frequent trips to the station to find Carol and (grrr) Rosalyn. The room had enough beds to accommodate all of us as I felt there was probably some part of Roz's information that bordered on being correct. In the early evening, I went to the station for the third time that day, and spotted Rosalyn, who was all atwitter about the peacefulness she found on her trip to Switzerland, where she had spent time some time with her friend Janet. Roz recounted all this in a rapid discourse:
“Janet and I met up in Paris, where Anil flew home from, for work stuff…and even though we had a great time in Switzerland, which is so beautiful…you should really go there…now Janet and I aren’t talking and the friendship is probably over.”
​
Whew! Did she take a breath during that accounting? I’m not sure. I just stared at her for a moment before I finally got it out of her that Carol's train would arrive at any minute. Apparently, Roz had mixed up to the time of the train with Carol’s flight number, or something like that.
​
Sensing my irritation, Roz said, “Don’t make such a big deal out about it. After all, everything worked out, didn’t it?”
​
And now here was my dear friend Carol, whom I had not seen in two years, stepping off the train and looking a bit dazed. In running to welcome her, one of my earrings came flying off and can you believe it? I never found it. This very same favorite earring had been lost one evening, months before in a kibbutz in Israel, and I actually found it the next day in the dewy morning grass, but Italy finally claimed it as her own. It's funny how the power of one emotion can so obscure another. Being in Carol’s presence and consumed with warmth and love was suddenly much more important than the loss of the earring, even one I especially liked. And as a traveler, I have had, so many times, to deal with loss, from the trivial to the more deeply felt pain of goodbyes. I always say that when you travel take nothing with you that you absolutely cannot part with, even your heart.
Carol:
Carol and I had been friends since seventh grade and even a continent could not distance the closeness we shared. In high school we were inseparable, in our vintage fur coats, tattered jeans, long, middle-parted hair, and enough jewelry to move the needle of a scale a few notches to the right. When we made our first jaunt to Europe as two wide-eyed eighteen-year old’s, we were introduced to an experience which to some extent would forever more define our yearnings. After a window of some years apart following that first trip, we ended up living together in San Francisco, where we were reunited with our original traveling buddy, Rosalyn, whom we had met in Amsterdam, so the circle had come around. I eventually moved back to New York and by the time Carol and I found ourselves hugging on that Florence train station platform, considerable time had passed since our first shared European tour. Though our lifestyles and interests have often taken separate courses, Carol will always be like a sister to me. She has a spiritual nature, coupled with a cynical sense of humor. With her dark hair, fair skin and strikingly radiant blue eyes, her smile transforms her into a salient beauty.
The story continues:
A siesta was much in order, especially for Carol, who was jetlagged and acclimating to a different continent. We all crashed for a while and then stepped out for some pasta at a cheerful nearby Trattoria that I had espied earlier that day. The waiter was adorable, with black hair, a deep complexion and dark mischievous eyes. He coerced us to stay until closing, which did not take a great deal of effort on his part, as we were all so tired and more than happy to sit there drinking wine and catching each other up on our lives. When the restaurant closed, our waiter was joined by more of his friends, who appeared so suddenly, that it almost seemed they had been hiding all night in the pizza oven. The waiter had his sights set on me as his date and I am sure all of the uomos had convinced themselves they were in for a night of major partying with some loose Americanes. But they were just boys and after a little dancing and flirting we became bored and ended up disappointing them. There was no on-their-knees begging however, as we said goodnight and wobbled back to our room.
​
We awoke early, ready to explore lively, historically rich, stunning Florence. Everywhere we looked was a vision of vivid architecture and renaissance colors. On the agenda for this day were some of the major cathedrals and museums, which are scattered about, thus allowing us to observe many different parts of this handsome city. I had already done a little probing the day before in between my visits to the train station, so I had a sense of where things were, thank God, or we might have had to rely on Roz's map-reading abilities, or lack thereof. In visiting Europe, one has the opportunity to gain a wide and diverse exposure to art history. Throughout this journey, I had the privilege of seeing great works of art that I had only known from reproductions in books or teachers’ art class slides, and it was utterly rewarding to view these canvases and sculptures before me. I found that my mood for what I wanted to see matched exactly where I was at the moment. At this time in Florence, my predilection was for Renaissance art, so that the Caravaggio's and huge Tintorellos of the Uffizi gallery completely satisfied my soul. One can almost breathe in the Renaissance in the streets and in the duomos. It was overwhelming to behold such a wealth of breathtaking creations. Carol, Rosalyn and I shared a reverence for all of the creative achievements of Florence, from its architecture to its murals and were constantly exclaiming “Ooh, ooh, look there!…did you see the carvings on that building?…Check out the floor of this church!…did you love the colors of that painting?”
​
After the Uffizi and a perfect gelato, Carol suggested, “Let’s go shopping!” These were the times of the mighty US dollar, strong against every other currency. Even a traveler on a low budget could afford to spend, so the cities of Italy were swarming with American shoppers procuring garments and leather goods. Needless to say, we all purchased new leather boots. I positively adored mine. Sometimes buying something you especially like, or even the essence of shopping in itself, is so full of good cheer, it can elevate your mood like no other experience. This is how I felt acquiring those boots, like life at that moment could not be any better.
​
Our other needs thus gratified, we were armed to absorb exposure to more great art and late that afternoon we made it to yet another gallery. I saw him as soon as I entered and realized I had become catatonic when I had to remind myself to breathe. Gazing at such male magnificence, I knew I would forevermore compare other men to this paragon of beauty. His stance, his expression, his physique, all exuded the most powerful sexuality I had ever encountered. Though his hands were almost grotesquely large, I have always found large hands on a man especially desirable. As I moved closer and looked into his carved features, tears began to moisten my cheeks. Here before me was Michelangelo's David, a work of such sensual grace that it actually made me cry. Never before, nor since, have I experienced such emotion in the presence of art.