Another inspiring story involving Tuscany and Florence. If you need to give your life a boost, this lovely guest post by Bianca Gignac who runs an Italian travel blog and she will point you in the right direction.
I landed in Florence with a broken heart and a black cloud over my head.
The year had been a mess. A complete downer. My boyfriend had dumped me like day old bread and I took it terribly. He had been the centre of my universe for 7 years. It was my first big heartbreak. I was 25.
Florence changed my life. Florence jolted me out of my fog. Florence told me, “It was going to be alright”.
I remember the exact moment she whispered it to me. I hadn’t slept for days; canceled flights and too many stopovers made it impossible. It was my first full day in Italy. I woke that morning to the piercing sound of motorini outside my room. It was loud — incredibly loud. And hot — stifling hot. I went to my window and opened the green wooden shutters and looked onto the street below. There were people swarming the sidewalks and miniature cars pushing their way through the narrow streets. I poked my head out the window further. The air was filled with dust and the heavy stink of the latest Italian garbage strike. But the streets were alive. The light was rose coloured. And it was all very different from what I was used to. This differentness soaked inside of me. That exact street scene lit up something amazing inside me. That nasty dark cloud of post-break up loathing lifted. It blew straight away! I knew, in that instance, that I was going to be alright.
It was an epiphany; a clear message given to me by this magical city that would be my home for the next month. I felt like I had won the lottery. Florence was the medicine I needed but didn’t know how to administer.
I really had won the lottery. It was the lottery of school bursaries and scholarships to study Italian language at a local school. My university in Canada even gave me money to assist in travel expenses, which was great as I was broke. I had put the gears in motion to come to Italy and it all fell so quickly and beautifully into place that I spontaneously jumped into my Italian summer. I had wanted to come for over five years. I was thrilled.
I landed in Florence by myself. Did I say that I was heartbroken? I was. But do you know what is salve to the soul when you are down in the dumps? Italians! Especially when you don’t know what they are saying — like I did. All you hear is “bella” this and “ciao” that and everything sounds so lovely and exciting even if, in reality, the men are just complaining about their team losing the match and the women are just complaining about how much ironing they have. But you don’t understand a thing! You just walk around in your bubble thinking that the sound is pure poetry. And the lack of familiarity lifted my spirits. The language barrier never seemed like a burden, just a sing-song sound while I lost myself in the streets and in my own thoughts.
I did very little studying that summer. I was having too much fun to study. And that was coming from someone previously preoccupied with high marks; but I knew I just needed a break from the constant pursuit of academia. In fact, I failed every test I wrote in Italian class. I couldn’t get it. I couldn’t conjugate a verb if you paid me in gelato. I was hopeless but too stubborn to quit. Most of my classmates quit over that month.
Full immersion is brutal! I attended my daily classes but what I looked forward to was the nights full of friends, aperitivi, dinners, and lots of laughter. Being a foreign student in Florence is akin to living in a nightclub for a month. You only go out in the daylight hours to eat food. And go to school. Then you return to the dark caves of clubs and parties and hanging out on the Duomo steps at dusk. It was something I never did at home. But in Florence at 25, it was just what the doctor ordered: a strong prescription of fun. A strong dose of fun was salve for my cynical soul. I washed the pill of fun down with laughter after nightfall. I followed it up with teaspoonful of watching the sunrise after dancing the night away.
Travel is the kind of experience that rattles your cage. It strips you down, it builds you up. Travel is a drug that haunts you and makes you crave your next fix. We metaphorically use the travel drug to cure boredom, stagnancy, marriage difficulties, mid-life crises and twenty something angst. You don’t need to travel to be cured. But you better do something else to lift your fog. You need to re-light your fire somehow.
Do I think Italy is a country worth visiting in your lifetime? Yes, absolutely and without a doubt. I have actually made it part of my life’s work: I help you travel to Italy. Ten years later I am a very different woman from the one looking out the green shutters of my Florence apartment. I also have a completely different relationship with Italy. It is less rose coloured. It is more evolved and useful.
Travel is still my sermon. Why buy a new car when you could buy a flight to Rome? Why take the kids to Disneyland when you could take them to Venice? Would you sell your couch to travel to Florence? When will you absorb the powerful medicine of travel? Do you have what it takes to take control of your dreams? What are you willing to give up? What are you willing to get?
When will you travel to Italy?
Bianca helps people travel to Italy and plans itineraries for the Cinque Terre on the Italian Riviera. You can find her at Italian Fix.
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