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Catania and Italy a million years ago
Mar. 10th, 2008 11:20 amI just bought my ticket to Catania and intentionally am taking a stupid flight back so that I can spend a morning in Rome because there is Something I Must Do. I haven't been to Rome in over 20 years.
Now to find/solve passport.
Travel and travel booking stress me enormously. It's a testament to how much I like travel that I do it anyway. It's also a testament to how much I like things that are hard. The fact remains that on some level, any place that is far will always feel like home to me, because it makes sense to feel like an alien there, in a way that it never does (and yet always does) here. Certainly, I think part of the reason I was stalling on this is that I miss Sydney so desperately, and this is not my science-fiction future city. But it's all right, every fantasy I have about this trip involve climbing the Saracen fortress down the end of the beach and that's something too.
When I went to Italy as a kid, it was the first time I'd left the country. It was also the first time I was largely left to my own devices -- my parents got food poisoning on the flight out, and so I spent weeks in Rome and Florence wandering the cities by myself (I was 13). It was Christmas, thanks to the romantic heart of my Jewish mother, and the 1980s height of European hijackings and terrorism. We tried to go to the Jewish quarter, but founds guards there with machine guns -- only residents were allowed. And when we flew out of Rome the airport staff was "striking against terrorism" as soldiers roamed the airport with machetes.
But what I truly remember is the graffiti on the walls of Florence and the stationary shops I spent hours in touching the paper, marveling at gold and texture. I remember street whores barely older than me I befriended in Rome and how they would offer me cigarettes I would pretend to smoke. On New Year's Eve, my parents and I went to dinner in Trastevere, which is apparently fashionable now, but then the woman at our pensione said we'd be killed there. At midnight we threw streamers and the lover's knot ring I'd worn on my finger since I was four flew off and disappeared forever. I was very sad and tried to be brave, because I knew a rightness in it.
I touched everything in Rome: ruins in the Forum, the damp of buildings on the street that sells religious vestments, the paper pastries were wrapped in, photographs left in prayer at a shrine in the Cappucine monastery, plastic roasry beads.
I became a teenager in Rome, watching Italian MTV in our hotel when my father became sick of the cold water in our pensione. I sang along with Falco and Shriekback, and bought clothes at Fiorrucci.
In Florence I was haunted, by the houses built up out over the river with their mossy underpinnings, by the antique shops in the old city my parents dragged me to. I remember a painted wooden status of St. Lucia that was so old it seemed pagan and frightening that it was for sale.
Everywhere we went I figured out all the money for us, and wore big costume jewelry earrings as were popular then. People looked like me and flirted. Children were something different there than back home. Coy and knowing; sexual and brave. We were warned constantly of Gypsy cutpurses, but the only place I ever saw Rom children was playing ball on the Spanish steps.
And for all these worldly, boisterous things, I found my ascetism there, in the grey solemn city of wintery Rome, full of scale and cobblestones and too many types of prayers like soot, covering everything.
Fri, May 16, 2008
New York J F Kennedy International Airport (JFK) to Catania (CTA)
Depart: 03:50pm
Arrive: 06:15am
New York, NY (JFK) to
Rome, Italy (FCO)
1 Stop – change planes in Rome, Italy (FCO)
Connection Time: 1 hr
Depart: 07:15am
Arrive: 08:30am
Rome, Italy (FCO) to
Catania, Italy (CTA)
Sunday, May 26, 2008
Catania (CTA) to New York J F Kennedy International Airport (JFK)
Depart: 07:10am
Arrive: 08:30am
Catania, Italy (CTA) to
Rome, Italy (FCO)
1 Stop – change planes in Rome, Italy (FCO)
Connection Time: 5 hrs 45 mins
Depart: 02:15pm
Arrive: 05:35pm
Rome, Italy (FCO) to
New York, NY (JFK)
Now to find/solve passport.
Travel and travel booking stress me enormously. It's a testament to how much I like travel that I do it anyway. It's also a testament to how much I like things that are hard. The fact remains that on some level, any place that is far will always feel like home to me, because it makes sense to feel like an alien there, in a way that it never does (and yet always does) here. Certainly, I think part of the reason I was stalling on this is that I miss Sydney so desperately, and this is not my science-fiction future city. But it's all right, every fantasy I have about this trip involve climbing the Saracen fortress down the end of the beach and that's something too.
When I went to Italy as a kid, it was the first time I'd left the country. It was also the first time I was largely left to my own devices -- my parents got food poisoning on the flight out, and so I spent weeks in Rome and Florence wandering the cities by myself (I was 13). It was Christmas, thanks to the romantic heart of my Jewish mother, and the 1980s height of European hijackings and terrorism. We tried to go to the Jewish quarter, but founds guards there with machine guns -- only residents were allowed. And when we flew out of Rome the airport staff was "striking against terrorism" as soldiers roamed the airport with machetes.
But what I truly remember is the graffiti on the walls of Florence and the stationary shops I spent hours in touching the paper, marveling at gold and texture. I remember street whores barely older than me I befriended in Rome and how they would offer me cigarettes I would pretend to smoke. On New Year's Eve, my parents and I went to dinner in Trastevere, which is apparently fashionable now, but then the woman at our pensione said we'd be killed there. At midnight we threw streamers and the lover's knot ring I'd worn on my finger since I was four flew off and disappeared forever. I was very sad and tried to be brave, because I knew a rightness in it.
I touched everything in Rome: ruins in the Forum, the damp of buildings on the street that sells religious vestments, the paper pastries were wrapped in, photographs left in prayer at a shrine in the Cappucine monastery, plastic roasry beads.
I became a teenager in Rome, watching Italian MTV in our hotel when my father became sick of the cold water in our pensione. I sang along with Falco and Shriekback, and bought clothes at Fiorrucci.
In Florence I was haunted, by the houses built up out over the river with their mossy underpinnings, by the antique shops in the old city my parents dragged me to. I remember a painted wooden status of St. Lucia that was so old it seemed pagan and frightening that it was for sale.
Everywhere we went I figured out all the money for us, and wore big costume jewelry earrings as were popular then. People looked like me and flirted. Children were something different there than back home. Coy and knowing; sexual and brave. We were warned constantly of Gypsy cutpurses, but the only place I ever saw Rom children was playing ball on the Spanish steps.
And for all these worldly, boisterous things, I found my ascetism there, in the grey solemn city of wintery Rome, full of scale and cobblestones and too many types of prayers like soot, covering everything.
Fri, May 16, 2008
New York J F Kennedy International Airport (JFK) to Catania (CTA)
Depart: 03:50pm
Arrive: 06:15am
New York, NY (JFK) to
Rome, Italy (FCO)
1 Stop – change planes in Rome, Italy (FCO)
Connection Time: 1 hr
Depart: 07:15am
Arrive: 08:30am
Rome, Italy (FCO) to
Catania, Italy (CTA)
Sunday, May 26, 2008
Catania (CTA) to New York J F Kennedy International Airport (JFK)
Depart: 07:10am
Arrive: 08:30am
Catania, Italy (CTA) to
Rome, Italy (FCO)
1 Stop – change planes in Rome, Italy (FCO)
Connection Time: 5 hrs 45 mins
Depart: 02:15pm
Arrive: 05:35pm
Rome, Italy (FCO) to
New York, NY (JFK)
