I am in love with my apartment.
The whole thing is terracotta tiles, heavy exposed wood-beam ceilings, coarse white walls, shell-shaped wall sconces and windows worthy of Juliet. These windows are so tall that, were I to stand in one of them, there would still be air above my head. It's raining now, and the effect of the open windows and rough white walls and uneven light from the shell-shaped sconces is so, sigh- Italian.
At night, a street sweeper brushes trash away, and in the morning, I wake up to the fruit vendor unloading crates of peaches and pears below my window. Tour groups stop at the corner below the living room. Reasonably so, as the small piazza I overlook is something of a midpoint between the gigantic marble Duomo and the colonnaded Uffizi.
But the sheer density of tour groups becomes problematic whenever I want to leave the apartment. Groups swamp the narrow alleyways I use to make my way to the Corso, then down Via Dello Studio, to the Duomo. There are countless others contentedly licking cones of gelato on the cathedral's steps. I push through these fleshy human traffic jams and bruise myself on the hard corners of the digital camcorders in their fanny packs. Heads turn, trying to determine whether I am one of them, and decide that I must be Italian because I can walk from A to B, alone.
Tourists are everywhere. They flow past the city's monuments and artistic wonders like so much human diarrhea, sullying every site at which they aim their camera lenses. This constant presence of outsiders is still new to me, and I dislike it immensely.
It is little relief to tell myself that I'm exempt from said aversion because I'm a student, and not a tourist, the difference being that one makes a life around learning a place while the other merely passes through. True, students don't snap photos of themselves pointing at the David's nether regions; instead, they walk through Florence in iPod oblivion.
I have a list of streets that are unsafe after a certain hour. I know the American bars-the ones that have Beirut tourneys every night at 10-and have started to ask people what program they're on instead of whether they parla inglese. Many students only go to places where they know they will encounter other Americans. They walk between the hotspots in groups, speaking loudly to each other from across crowded squares. And at the end of the night, the only difference is the setting. "Instead of stumbling past the Chapel, you're stumbling past the Duomo," one friend said.
This weekend I met up with friends in Cinqueterre. Its waterfront restaurants and apartment buildings rise from the Ligurian mist in peach, saffron and cream. Terraces anchor these buildings to cobblestoned streets that sweep up, to a castle, or down, to a rocky beach. Riomaggiore, where we stayed, is a picture of serenity aided by Cinqueterre white wine-a local specialty.
The idyll continues on the hiking paths that connect Riomaggiore to the other four terre, interrupted only by shouts between guys in backwards hats and fratty t-shirts. "Dude," one yells to the others. "There's a nude beach!" We stand to the side to let them by.
It seems possible to conduct an academic and social existence without ever interacting with Italians. I understand the very human disposition to seek comfort in familiarity, but familiarity can be stunting, and wasteful. So much sameness has led me to react with pleasant surprise when I encounter Americans who actually don't annoy me. It's the insularity that gets me. No place in Europe deserves to be treated as if it has the depth of a postcard, or a wineglass.
Now, I like postcards and I love my wine, but I've come to measure my connections to Florence in tiny transactions. Silent smiles exchanged with other coffee-drinkers over an espresso drunk standing at a bar, or the extra apricot the vendor in Mercato Centrale throws in when I try to speak Italian have become tokens of success. Each road I can add to a previously blank spot in my mental map of this place roots me more firmly in it. I suppose the only way to avoid exasperation is immersion, and realistic acceptance that I too am the object of the oft-confirmed stereotypes that go hand in hand with being an American abroad.
I stand at my window, looking out in the piazza. A couple stands in the center, looking at a map and pointing this way or that. He is holding the map, and she is wearing the fanny pack. They are arguing loudly in English about how to get to the Duomo.
But there, there in the corner, is an Italian boy kicking a soccer ball against a wall. He calls out in his own language and he is the one the vendors answer with kind voices. This is, undoubtedly, his home.
Emily Rotberg is a Trinity junior studying abroad in Florence, Italy. Her column runs every other Monday.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.