Once upon a time, I found myself partner-less and living alone, after decades of having had a partner. This wasn’t what I ideally wanted for my life, but I had adapted to it, and on the whole, I was really pretty happy. I did sometimes miss the companionship of having a partner, but honestly, I’ve always been fairly independent and cherished my alone time. The only thing that really got to me, during those years, was the thought that my life (happy though it was) might very well go on in this mode indefinitely, and I might never again experience the kind of partnership and togetherness that I had once known. Still, I was determined not to let this situation stop me from doing and experiencing any of the other things that I wanted out of life, if I could help it. One such thing was traveling to fun and interesting places around the world (but especially in Europe). Thus, there came a time when I decided to plan a trip to Italy, all by myself. It was a somewhat intimidating prospect, but also exciting, and I chose to go forward with confidence in my ability to travel the world on my own. Of course, as most of my readers probably already know, those plans ending up colliding with a global pandemic, and thus getting postponed for reasons beyond my control (while in the meantime, my life became even more solitary due to working from home and the rest of the COVID isolation protocols). You all know the next chapter in that story, too, though: how, within a month of getting vaccinated and starting to venture out into the world again, I met Emily…and just 15 months later, we got married (and had already started talking about eventually going to Italy together).
Inevitably, I found myself reflecting on all of this at many points during our nearly three-week-long Great Italian Adventure. One such moment of reflection, though, especially stands out. It was while I was sitting in a kind of giant speedboat, surrounded by other vacationers (most of whom were Italians), cruising along the Gargano coast and enjoying the ocean breeze and the gorgeous scenery. It was not at all difficult, in this moment, to imagine having found myself in a similar position during that other, solo version of my Italian adventure that I had first envisioned (though it would likely have been in different waters, on the other side of the Italian peninsula, perhaps en route to the island of Capri)…except for one key difference: in the actual event, as I sat there on that boat, I was also experiencing the feeling of Emily’s arm wrapped snugly around me, reminding me that I am loved, and not alone. It felt a little surreal, in this moment, thinking back to 2020 and pondering how I had gone from my life situation of that time to where I was now, and imagining if that earlier version of me (from not so very long ago!) could see me now, or could have known what the future had in store for him. At other times during our trip, I thought about questions like how I might actually have fared if I’d gone to Italy on my own (I think of myself as being pretty good with languages, for example, but Emily proved to be much better than me at communicating with Italians who didn’t speak English), or just what things might have been the same or different. But in this particular moment (which, incidentally, occurred on the day before our 4th anniversary), I mostly just felt (as I often do these days, but even more intensely than usual in this case) really, really lucky.
But of course, I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m still deciding exactly how (in what order, in how much detail, etc.) I want to go about telling the story of our trip. I’ve known since the day on which it occurred that I wanted to begin with this moment, but doing so does fly in the face of my more usual adherence to chronology! So, backing up…
Our Italian adventure spanned a total of three weeks, from Thursday, September 3rd through Wednesday the 23rd (though it was supposed to have ended two days sooner than that), and it consisted of five (or six?) distinct parts (visiting different parts of/places in Italy). This was the longest vacation I have ever taken, and there was so much packed into the trip that I’ve scarcely begun to process it all. The trip was not without its pitfalls and frustrations, but a few of those are to be expected when stepping out into the unknown and navigating foreign places, systems, and languages, and in the end, they were all just part of the adventure. We saw, felt, ate, and otherwise experienced so many wonders!! Also, we baked and sweated in the hot Italian sun, with temps in the 90s almost every day for the first week that we were there, and this coincided with the parts of the trip that saw us walking ourselves to exhaustion almost every day. Later, though, there was a solid week that featured mostly lazy days spent on the beach. We saw big cities, small towns, countryside, and coastline, and we traveled the peninsula by train and by bus. My favorite of the places that was visited was definitely Rome, but there were awesome things at every one of our individual destinations. I’ll devote the rest of this post, though, to just the journey from home to our first destination: Ciano d’Enza, the small town that constitutes the “municipal seat” of Canossa.
Going to Canossa
It took 3 planes, 3 cars, one tram, two buses, and one train to get from home to our B&B near Ciano d’Enza. The planes took us from Minneapolis to Chicago, from Chicago to London, and from London to Milan; the tram was (if memory serves) between different parts of Heathrow airport in London, and one of the buses was to take us from the plane to the actual terminal at Milan’s Linate airport. (The cars included our own, to get to the Minneapolis airport; a taxi in Milan to get from the airport there to the train station; and…well, I’ll get to #3.) By the time we arrived in Milan (around 1:20 pm Friday, local time), we had already been traveling for something like 21 hours (since leaving home for the MSP airport)—and our “day” was still far from over. First, there was a long delay while we waited for Emily’s checked bag to appear on the baggage carousel…which, alas, it never did. A friendly airport employee (with whom Emily communicated mostly in Italian) managed to determine that the bag was still in London, and we left the addresses of the first two places that we would be staying so that the airline could deliver it to us once it arrived in Italy…but this all took so much time that we ended up missing our pre-booked train from Milan to Ciano d’Enza (via Reggio Emilia), where there was a bed waiting for our very jet-lagged selves. We managed to book replacement transportation via train to Reggio Emilia and then via bus from there to Ciano, but this meant arriving in Ciano a couple hours later than we originally would have. The trouble was, we were counting on being picked up at the station in Ciano by our hosts from the B&B outside of town where we would be staying…so now we had to try to get ahold of them to let them know that we were arriving later, and hope that they would still be able to pick us up when we finally arrived! This caused us some stress during the train ride to Reggio Emilia, but after a few tries Emily managed to connect with our hosts via phone, again communicating mainly in broken Italian. After that, even though we still weren’t 100% sure what the situation would be when we got to Ciano, we tried to relax and concentrate on just getting ourselves that far. We were sooooo tired, and we also hadn’t eaten since many hours earlier on the transatlantic flight.
Upon reaching Reggio Emilia, we faced the challenge of figuring out where to catch the bus (and which bus to get on) to go from there to Ciano, and also scrambled to grab some food at a little train station cafe (stazione bar) quickly enough to avoid missing the said bus. Happily, we managed to find the bus and get ourselves, our luggage, and our on-the-fly dinner (a panino that was nothing special, and some kind of lemony soda for me; I don’t recall what Emily ate, but her beverage was chinotto—a novel and distinctively Italian experience that she would return to a few more times during the trip) aboard it in time. About an hour later, after numerous stops (and several irate outbursts from a comically/disturbingly temperamental bus driver—including one aimed at us, about my suitcase being too large to safely stow on the overhead shelf), we disembarked at a tiny, deserted train/bus station in the very small town of Ciano d’Enza (population ~2300 according to the internet), in the dark (it was now around 8:40 pm local time). To our immense relief, a car (the aforementioned third one from my list of the vehicles that it took to get us to our destination) pulled up within minutes of our arrival, and the older woman driving it rolled down her window and called out to us “Emily?” Our ride! She didn’t speak more than a few words of English, but it didn’t matter; we were able to communicate in Italian somewhat, and anyway, not much communication was really necessary at this point. (She conveyed to us that her daughter, who did speak English, would be around to answer any questions we might have in the morning.) It took maybe ten minutes to get to the B&B (careening at somewhat alarmingly high speed around sharp curves on a narrow-ish two-lane road winding up into the foothills of the Appenines), and we passed a gorgeously lit-up castle (Rossena) on the way…but I’ll save details about the place for another post.
Earlier, during the train ride, while we were stressing over trying to contact our hosts to let them know about our delay and whatnot, Emily had remarked that we were crazy for trying to get ourselves all the way to some little town in the middle of nowhere the minute we arrived in a foreign country and at the end of such a long and exhausting day of travel. Admittedly, it was a lot to take on, and perhaps no surprise that we hit some snags along the way. Granted, the airline losing Emily’s luggage was not our fault…but scheduling so much all in one day, and expecting it all to go smoothly and to be able to figure it all out on the fly, and counting on getting picked up by our hosts at the end of it all even though we have limited means of getting in touch with them and a language barrier to negotiate even when we could reach them? Yeah, maybe a bit on the unrealistic side. Later, though, I realized how thematically perfect the whole situation was. After all, as a result of the historical event that made this destination a place that I wanted to visit, “going to Canossa” became, centuries ago, an idiom that connotes humbling oneself! Our (mis)adventures en route to Canossa, on this first (long) “day” of our Italy trip, certainly had humbling aspects…but at the same time, and not unlike the experience of Emperor Henry IV, the final outcome was nevertheless a win. I had finally made it to Italy after six years, and we had successfully gotten ourselves to our half-crazy, middle-of-nowhere initial destination!