L'Americaine

There will be no pictures for this part of the journey. I didn’t bring my cables. So it’s nothing but words for a little while. Sorry, or maybe not. I’ll add photos later, when there are photos to add.

Every summer for almost my entire life, my family rented a cluster of whitewashed cabins on the shore of a lake in New Hampshire, and this is as close as I have ever come to enjoying camping. I don’t even really like the word. Camping. There is hardship implied, as though we’re all trying to immitate what it would be like to be at war.

But in Pisa, Italy, in a town in which there is nothing to do except gawk at a lovely, albeit precariously leaning tower, I suddenly find myself camping. My hostel is in a camp ground and my dorm is a trailer. Granted, it has heat, electricity, and spare blankets, but something about the shower, the swath of trees just outside the window, reminds me of that lake, of all my family in one place at one time, which never happens anymore. Or maybe it never seems to happen anymore because I am always the person who isn’t there.

To see Pisa, all of Pisa, took three hours. I didn’t climb the tower because I’m sick of climbing things.

I’m in Florence now, and the train was either free or I did something illegal or both.

There are no affordable English books in France. Even the biggest, most well-stocked bookstores simply don’t carry them or carry them at absorbitant prices. (Draw your own cultural conclusions.) And two weeks ago, when I saw an English-language copy of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities in a bookstore in Venice, a voice in my head said.

Buy that. Because it’s important that you read it right now. And you won’t find it in France.

I didn’t buy it.

So when I saw it today in a bookstore in Florence, one of six copies gleaming white on a shelf like treasure because the Italians love their Calvino, even in English, I bought one. It’s out of my budget. Still.

My quest for tomorrow is to find a place to read it. Maybe the Boboli (yes, like the pizza) gardens. A corner of a piazza. Florence is full of those corners, if you look.

I’m here for two weeks. Italy is here. And then…