Cher in Florence

This was me about one year ago, September 1. I was fresh from the airport, tired and thrilled. I had just put my bags down in my new apartment. Three months!!, I must have been thinking. Wow. A whole three months in Italy. Just imagine what can happen…

It was great to be back in Florence, to see the old sights and catch that startling light.

I traveled around, taking day trips (this is Villa I Tatti, near Settignano)…

and I caught up with my friend Sheila in Pontassieve…

I also went to see Alberto at the Castello del Trebbio (once owned by the Pazzi family) in Chianti…

I went there to do research for an article I’d been wanting to write about the Pazzi Conspiracy for The Florentine. (This pic shows where Lorenzo de’ Medici escaped his assassins in the Duomo.)

My new street, via Benedetto Marcello.

And this is my bike. My very precious bike given to me by a good friend. It changed my life in Florence and made everything so much easier. Especially getting home after midnight . . .

I learned how to cook risotto.

Everything still seemed a bit strange and exotic. To move from New York to here, I felt a bit of an alien. My eyes were very open. And I liked it. Very much.

But still things were a bit precarious. What was I going to do after these three months of my life? Go back to New York? And do what? It wasn’t long before I wondered to myself…how could I leave?

I mean, I love it here. Look at me.

Enter Elizabeth, a fellow writer. She took the train up from Rome one day in October. She’s been living there for six years. When I asked her, “How do you stay?” she said that she teaches creative writing online at some university in Florida..and she thought they might need a composition instructor…

I had some thinking to do…it would be senseless, just impossible, to stay with nothing but a little online job and no real job security.

But then I’d take these bike rides and every beautiful sight would be accompanied by the thought, “But I’d be leaving this…”

…and this…

and this…So. It didn’t take me long to say yes. I applied for the job and started teaching in late October.

In November I had the best birthday I’d had in years. This is at Trattoria Garga.

We had some fun.

Happy.

Christmastime in Florence was like a dream. I’d never seen a city so beautifully, softly lit up like this.

I went north, to Trento, for Christmas. It was very scenic but I was homesick Christmas Day. No one spoke English.

In January, I finally visited my old friend Simon, who I knew from college in North Carolina, who was staying with his mother in Nice. I hadn’t seen him in years.

It was really great to see him.

For all of my fumblings with Italian during Christmas, it was glorious to spend three days with him and his fantastically sharp-witted, D.H. Lawrence-quoting British mother.

In February, I made my first trip home. I’d been worried because of money that I might have to stay home and give up Italy, but I stuck it through and bought a round-trip ticket. Milford, New Hampshire.

Thanks to Facebook, I was able to reconnect with these lovely people, Joe and Lesley: my friends from Suffolk U. I think it had been 15 years since we’d seen each other.

I also got to see my high school friend/neighbor Tammy, who now works in an interior design office but is a full-time passionate dancer. We used to choreograph dances in our living rooms to Michael Jackson and Duran Duran. I still like Duran Duran, I don’t care what people say.

Me and Mom, Dracut, MA. She took me shopping for new clothes and cooked me delicious food all week. She is my Mom and I’m so glad.

The Return. I returned to Italy in the early Spring with a break from the first part of my stay in Italy. I’d had to leave my apartment on via Benedetto Marcello before my trip to the States, so I needed a new place to live. A friend of mine had told me that a woman at her English school was looking for someone to live with her to teach her English in exchange for low rent. I called this woman from the States to arrange a meeting when I got back but she would still be in Sicily a week after I returned to Florence. So, I stayed with my very gracious friends who live on a hill above Pontassieve, outside of Florence, for a week. They have cats, and I adore them.

I also stayed with my friends Sheila and Max for a few days, in Pontassieve.

While I’d been in New York and New England, Spring had hit Florence, apparently. This is the park across the street from my apartment, where I had just started living. The Sicilian woman’s name is Salvina and I moved in with her and her boyfriend Mattia.

This Spring storm made the light all the brighter. It was a strange time because I felt even more disoriented than before. Living with strangers in Isolotto (just outside the city center), having gone through a difficult breakup. It was all new.

Lucky for me, Salvina and Mattia are amazing people.

I started writing regularly for The Florentine, writing about a different street every month.

One morning I woke up to find this big box in the hallway. A truck driver from Sicily had met up with Mattia the night before at a gas station off the highway at 1 in the morning. He was there to hand off the goods: oranges and artichokes plucked from the trees in Sicily. We enjoyed them for weeks.

So pretty, too.

This is a spontaneous English lesson plan for Salvina. Our kitchen is also dotted with post-it notes (kitchen, cupboard, fridge, stove, etc.)

I started going to the nearby Cascine Park a lot.

It’s nice just to sit and have nothing to do.

A walk in my neighborhood.

I went to San Vincenzo for a weekend with a friend. We could see Elba from the beach. It was early in the season, so it was still a bit chilly, but very relaxing and pleasant.

Around this time, I started taking shots of sunsets. It wasn’t that I planned it; it’s just that almost every night they were beautiful.

Ridiculously beautiful.

In May, my lovely friend Lauren visited from New York and introduced me to her guy, Fede. I felt like a witness in front of them; their love is huge.

Salvina and Mattia being silly.

On June 3, my friend Sheila married her boyfriend Max in a small town outside of Florence.

Later in June, my friend Bobby visited from California with his girlfriend, Corrie, who I was happy to finally meet. They are really generous, kind people. Not the kind that just pretend to be; they are the real deal. Also? Bobby knows more about the history of Florence than most people I know. While here, he bought Corrie a ring on Ponte Vecchio and proposed to her when out in the country. She said yes. This is the first time we’d seen each other since he’d popped the question. All this love!

After a dinner with friends on the night of Festa di San Giovanni, my friend Ale and I ran through the packed streets of Florence to catch the fireworks from atop the Hotel Lucchesi. Finally, when we made it to the rooftop, sweating and relieved not to have missed them, my friend Luciano set us up with some prosecco and we were able to relax. Afterwards, he introduced me to Katie, an American who’d been here for three years and hadn’t any American or English friends. We chatted and agreed to meet for brunch the following Sunday. On our drive out to Pistoia for brunch, we chatted about the work situation in Italy. I mentioned that I was looking for more reliable work. She said she’d check in her office at the University of Florence to see if they needed any editors or writers. Hmmm….

This was my very hot lunch perch at the University of Florence, Polo Scientifico. After that brunch with Katie, I had gone to visit the office to meet her boss and colleagues and started work the next day. I was thrilled and relieved. A full-time job in Florence! With visa! My schedule changed from 20-30 hours a week to 60 hours a week, with my online teaching job, which I couldn’t let go of. But fate interrupted again when an American university here in Florence offered me a job that I couldn’t turn down: a book-editing project for their Renaissance studies center. I’d be working freelance from home again. I had that full-time job for only five weeks, but I met a good group of people.

Just a few weeks ago, in the hills with my friends with the cats. It was my first non-working weekend in weeks.

I don’t know why I’m closing with this one. It’s at the bus stop. I was waiting for my last bus ride home from the full-time job. I like the colors.

I won’t and can’t predict what will happen now. I go home to the States next week for another visit. I have good, interesting, and steady work for the next several months. I am speaking Italian more with the goal of fluency now. Vediamo . . .