The Impromptu Italy Adventure

Earlier this year, a friend from college reached out to me to say she was getting married. I was excited! Where was the wedding?

Italy, she said.

As some of you may remember, I took three months away last year, an exorbitant amount of time that required more than a bit of finagling, to explore the US, specifically the Pacific Northwest. So when my friend said she was having a destination wedding in Italy, I was a little panicked. But the S.O. and I talked about it and decided we were going to try to make it happen. After all, it was kind of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I told her we would see her there.

A few months and a lot of logistics later, off we went for a two-week, whirlwind tour of Italia.

I speak almost no Italian. That is to say, I can understand simple words that share root terms with Spanish or French and otherwise am useless at the language. The S.O. is far less of a polyglot than I am, and so his Italian is nonexistent. I had a day-by-day itinerary for this reason, with as much planning done by email beforehand as I could manage. It easily absorbed most of my extra time for new words, and though I did make some continued progress on my edits, I am thoroughly behind on all of my writing goals for this year. I’ll have to take a long look at that soon — I’ve also conveniently blown past my six month navel gazing window — and I imagine that will be a painful process. But one of the things the past two years have taught me is to seize the opportunity to taste life while you have it. I learned a whole lot on this trip, and no doubt it will feed directly into my stories and projects going forward. Plus it was fun!

Anyway, over the next couple of weeks I will try to do some posts about my itinerary, things I learned, and highlights from that adventure. I think it’s the kind of thing you folks might be interested in and it will be good to write everything down while it’s fresh in my mind. I already have some stories I’m noodling away on inspired in part by the dense history of this region of the world. It’s really a fascinating place, so I hope you will enjoy it vicariously through the blog. All the posts will be tagged with “Italy” for easy navigation.

Until next time!