Here I am in Bologna, gastronomic centerpiece of the Emilia-Romagna region, sipping burnt coffee that’s been stagnant on an all-too-familiar drip-coffee burner at my hostel all morning. I’m silently pondering my dinner last night of peanuts, 2 pints of ice-cold German beer and half of a pizza shared at midnight with a hostel resident of Roman, Egyptian and (Cuban?) roots while chatting about Umm Kulthum, Egyptian and European music traditions and dating in Italy…

What is an “authentic” experience?

Each of my successive trips to Italy has left me less and less romantic about this country and yet more deeply in love with it in general; like a relationship with a significant other that transitions from the all-too-exciting high of the first few months and settles into the reality, the routine, and the progressing stages of familiarity. My relationship with Italy is becoming decreasingly romantic with each train cancellation, deepening knowledge about the economic and political problems, and the witnessing of the effects of mass tourism (which I understand that I am apart of..).

Yet, coming away from my one-night stay in Verona with my host family from two winters ago, I reminisce about why I romanticized Italy in the first place. Was there a reason why I purchased my first solo trip overseas to the most romantic of all cities in Italy, arguably all of Europe? Did my childhood exposure to Shakespearean tales of impassioned love, lust, and loss really dictate unconsciously how I decided to romanticize Italy and spend my travel dollars?

Regardless, each trip to this place has deepened my sense of reality about travel, life outside of the United States, and the beauty of being a romantic in the first place. I never really considered myself a romantic person, but now as I feel my quasi-romantic nature slipping out from under me, more and more I am trying to cling onto the lighthearted freedom and bliss that lies in naivety. Perhaps, though, I could hold onto my romantic nature through the experience of navigating a new reality..

For now, I question the “authentic” experience as I weave my way through the same streets that I passed on my first trip in Italy. I stroll past the bars that I had my first Italian coffees in when I was unsure of the ways of coffee culture in this cultural context. I see groups of people that I can now group together in my mind as being from particular places in Europe, in Italy. I pick up on more minute differences in Italian accents. I can understand the differences in age gaps; the differences in the complexities and expectations between American early-twenty-somethings and Italian early-twenty-somethings.

This is my new romantic world… getting deeper and deeper into the culture while still remaining outside of it. Outside of my own, even. Peering in from the edges of the world.. a short-term transplant, enjoying the way things are done without ever fully prescribing to them, anywhere.

Arena di Verona.

I decided to sign up to run the 2018 Chicago Marathon on a snowy day in November last year. As soon as I made the commitment, I felt a sense of excitement met with dread because I knew my summer plans would put me in a nomadic position.

Fast forward to now. It’s July. The Italian sun beats down on the earth and I am not in the midst of a productive training schedule. If anything, I am overwhelmingly stressed about the impending race in October, my lack of raising funds for our marathon charity, and the lack of stability as a nomadic traveler.

I moved out of my apartment in Chicago on June 1st and am currently 7 weeks living out of one single backpack: three dresses, two jeans, three shirts, running shorts and shoes, sandals and a nice Italian-made skirt. Half of my clothes are dirty, half are kind-of clean.

From a farm in rural Wisconsin, a friend’s sofa in Chicago, my mom’s on the coast in Maine, a variety of Airbnbs in Milan, Turin, Bra to many trains, BlaBlaCars (one of which got a flat tire during the trip), planes and motorcycles; I have eaten at tables with complete strangers, alone, and with people who feel like family.

I create my own schedule. I have been awake at ungodly hours, have overslept, under-slept, overeaten, under-eaten. I have gone days without having an in-person conversation with anyone; I have also spent hours chatting with people I met only hours previously.

I have ran in Bra, Italy during the hottest part of the day (why do I do this to myself). I have ran along the Po River in Turin, accidentally joining runners in a 10K race. I have ran along Lago Maggiore in Switzerland, hopping in the crisp water to finish things off.

I have eaten more pasta in the past 10 days than I have in my entire life. I have drank more beer around a campfire than ever before. I have eaten wild strawberries, wild blueberries, wild blackberries.

Looking at the rest of my summer, there are so many questions. I don’t know when I will fly home. I don’t know where my next run will be, let alone my next bed.

I think about the Chicago Marathon. I think about stability and instability. There is no floor underneath me at the moment. I am free falling, enjoying the ride, but need to open my parachute sooner rather than later.

Back in Milan.

I spent the past week on a mountain in beautiful Ticino, Switzerland harvesting legal cannabis. The string of events that led me there: a couch surfing profile, a missed message, a toga party, an interview with an Italian affineur de fromage, and a wonderfully open and welcoming group of people.

I can still hear the clipping of the scissors; the tiny “tick, tick tick” sounds amidst the working hands of family and friends all helping to hoister a newly formed business up off the ground. The odor of the cannabis plants fading as the senses acclimated to their distinct smell blending with the mountain air..

Never would I have thought that at the beginning of this summer journey I would be on a local news station in Switzerland. Never would I have thought that I would share my deeply personal voice in a field of weed plants. Never would I have thought that I’d get a glimpse into a family, a business, and a lifestyle in a country I didn’t intend to visit.

The motorcycle trip through the alps, the late-night drinking of natural wine next to an open fire cooking ribs with a group of friends, the intensity of the night sky with its stars set against the majesty of the mountains, the discourse about what it means to have, or not have, national identity. America, Italy, Switzerland. My foggy brain drifting in and out of hours of Italian conversation as I worked to decipher a language that I am still trying to find meaning in..

I don’t know how I ended up there, exactly. What I do know is that the amount of hospitality welcoming me into the community of a newly-formed business between two twenty-something-year-old cousins still leaves me dumbfounded, awestruck, and above all, thankful.

Now, sitting on the bed of my Airbnb room in the Navigli neighborhood of Milan, highly familiar and yet as foreign as Ticino was to me a week ago, I look over at the variety of clothing resting in my single travel backpack: the expensive Italian-made full-length pleated skirt, perfectly pressed, next to the linen cloth dress that I purchased for 5 euros last summer in the Spanish hills, still holding onto the faint aroma of marijuana from the days spend cutting the plants. Both sides of my wardrobe, both sides of me.

The city has always fed some grotesque side of my ego. Either I’m fascinated by it, observing it without allowing my ego to decide how I feel, or I am fully embraced by what it means to project success in a place where it seems like everyone else has already secured it. In the mountains, I allow the land to feed my soul and to spark my curiosity through a different kind of over-stimulation. It’s not that cities are more stimulating than the countryside for me, it’s that the countryside stimulates parts of me that brings me back to my roots and allow me to flourish in a richer setting for who I am.

While on the mountain in Ticino, I woke up one morning to my friend blowing off steam regarding a wine producer in the area having problems growing Merlot grapes. These grapes are not regional to the area.. so the method of growing them in that setting is, in his opinion, absurd. Grapes that are natural to the area thrive while the ones that are not meant to be in that environment either need constant modification through interference and/or they are overtaken by insects.

Maybe I’m overvaluing the meaning of this.. but of all things, this short vacation away from my research in Italy this summer has taught me the value of putting myself in an environment that is most fertile for me to grow in. Feed my soul, not my pocketbook. Feed my sense of wholeness, not my ego.

Pondering when I should purchase my flight home..