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When I first returned to America after living in Italy for three years, my friends told me the shape of my head had changed. As laughable as this may sound, I think they were onto something. My cranium was certainly the same dimensions as previously, but they were correct in observing that I'd changed deeply, organically, even metabolically, while I was away.
Italy specializes in metamorphoses of just this kind. Something about the ravishing theatricality of the country, along with its apparent openness, renders Italy irresistible to people looking to trade in their old perceptual universes for new. It's a land of conversions and transformations, and the peculiarly recessed quality of Italian life, which slowly reveals its depths only over time, is a key component of its spellbinding power. It seems so easy, the arriving foreigner says to him or herself: I'll just relax, let my hair down, drink coffee in the sunlight, take a lover, speak the funny, open-voweled language, and somehow or another I'll squeeze through the grid of my previous personality and blossom--eccomi qua!--in a dramatic new version with Mediterranean accents.
It was 1984 when I met a vacationing Italian girl on a bus in Manhattan and struck up a conversation that led to a blazing friendship which eventually drew me to Milan on the trail of her warm, beautiful, eccentrically Englished letters. I was tired of my New York life, just then. I wanted to write and felt hemmed in by the pace and predispositions of the city. After a year of increasingly intimate correspondence between us, I dropped everything and soared romantically across the sea to join her--and, like most relationships based entirely on the bodiless exaltation of letters, things quickly crashed and burned to a crisp.
But I was determined to stay on, and because I disliked her city of Milan, finding in its metropolitan aloofness a Europeanized version of New York, my friend suggested that I try Padua, where she had attended university. I took the train there through the perfectly level fields of the Veneto, that giant outlying region around Venice which is famed for its industry and clannish indifference to the outer world. The residents of Padua, the most important city of this region, live at the intersection of great wealth and cultural marginality, and thereby produce some of the purest flowers of provincialism in the entire Italian peninsula.
Of course, I knew none of this at the time. Like most fresh arrivals, I was living almost entirely in the visual plane. And Padua knocked me out with its coiling cobbled streets, its porticoed arcades of rhyming light and shadows and its Renaissance feeling of essential human proportions made manifest in architecture. It is a beautiful city, with one of the oldest universities in Europe, and I knew immediately that I'd made a congenial match. I found a large apartment in a faintly down-at-heels neighborhood just outside the circonvallazione, or ring road around the city. At the time, I spoke about a dozen words of Italian, and to compound my loneliness it was then the beginning of Ferragosto, the two-week-long national summer holiday in which the entire country, as one, picks up and flees the cities for the mountains and beaches.
But I persevered, living there three years, becoming a university lecturer and learning the language in depth against all neurological odds. I adopted the local furled and flowing dress code, and established a circle of friends in the speeded-up rhythms of acquaintance that semi-exile seems to confer. In reaction to the absolute lack of menace, I dropped my repertoire of quick-twitch Manhattan street responses, relaxed and started to breathe from lower in my abdomen. I began drinking wine at lunch.
And Padua gave me something else as well. I don't think I'll ever forget the joy that spontaneously lifted my father's face when he saw his son, long a promising wastrel, come to meet him at the airport in Milan, wearing a natty Italian suit and speaking fluently. It was a strange and fateful moment. I had been raised in an atmosphere of fairly doctrinaire Marxism, and had grown up understanding that, for all its gifts, America was also a coercive international Cyclops to be resisted at all costs. Yet in the thick, culturally sluggish Italian provinces, the unthinkable had happened: as I'd been drawn into the language, I'd gradually come to understand that a certain abstract liberty of thought I'd taken for granted was not necessarily universally the case but was, instead, specifically American. Ditto the social mobility that had allowed me to change jobs four times in two years in career-mad Manhattan. Ditto the unfettered intellectual horizon-line that had informed my own education.
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