Tuscan Holiday, by Lisa Brennan-Jobs, was originally published in the February 2008 issue of Vogue.
We met on the wide sidewalk of the Via Cavour where it intersects the Piazza del Duomo.
Marco* was a friend of a friend.
LOST IN TRANSLATION“I wanted Italy to civilize me, to cover over the parts of me I didn’t like,” says the author of her time in picturesque Tuscany. Photo: Halard Francois.Vogue, February 2008.
I’d just arrived in Florence.
Marco took me to summer dances in crumbling villas, a Mozart concert in a candlelit church.
I planned to stay and learn the language.
I’d dreamed of going to Italy and living there and most of all of belonging.
When I was in elementary school, I watchedCinema Paradiso22 times and memorized the dialogue.
In the movie, everyone had a place, even the bum who thought he owned the piazza.
Eccentricities were celebrated, and no one was isolated.
I had never seen such abundance and luck all gathered together.
We skied on the slopes of Cortina, where the rose-quartz mountains glow pink.
We went to parties.
The talkvaried, buoyantflitted to the next subject just when it touched ground, like a half-filled helium balloon.
In summer,lucciolesparked in olive groves.
We ate with silver.
What was the point of saving it?
I had landed insideCinema Paradiso,but it was better, and it was real.
In California, my mother had raised me mostly alone.
We didn’t have many things, but she is warm and we were happy.
We moved a lot.
The two sides didn’t mix, and I missed one when I had the other.
Marco was twelve years older than I was, charming and sincere.
The boy was still inside the man, joyful and mischievous.
His laugh filled up the room.
His hands looked good on the steering wheel.
I was petite, irreverent, and eager to like.
He dove across the seat to kiss me.
Wasn’t I the one being rescued?
I’d felt the same way: Fade out California; cut to Italy.
Toto had wished for it, but I’d done it.
I was willing to stay forever, to cut my life above the root.
I found a job working for a small American company, writing research reports.
It paid the bills and allowed me to stay.
I took Italian lessons at a language school in the center of Florence named after Dante Alighieri.
One day I walked to the architect Brunelleschi’s Cappella dei Pazzi near Santa Croce.
There was no one else in the vast, domed room.
I sang a note.
It was a metaphor, I thought: Here in Italy I was in harmony with myself.
He dove across the seat to kiss me.
I remember feeling as if he needed me, as if I were a kind of salvation.
Wasn’t I the one being rescued?
I had always wanted a large, close-knit family, and the Italian families I met stuck together.
Now, thanks to the father’s purchase, it was back.
This was a family that recovered its possessions.
Lucrezia had never met the cook or even seen the kitchenthe food just arrived.
She wasn’t supposed to marry a commoner.
For the rest of his life?
Didn’t you feel sad and take a stab at reconcile with him?
No, she said.
That was just the way things were.
We respected each other’s choices.
In the kitchen before dinner the cooks talked to one another in the soured whoosh of a Sicilian dialect.
Americans were known for effervescent, childish curiosity, but in this society naivete had limited allure.
for belong, I accepted the servants as if they were commonplace.
I forged the date of a divorce; I could not bring myself to announce it again.
That was the catch: I could have my Italy, but only if I wasn’t quite myself.
I wanted Italy so much, though, that I didn’t care what I’d have to trade.
In fact, I wanted to trade.
I wanted Italy to civilize me, to cover over the parts of me I didn’t like.
They like you because you’re malleable, my mother said on the phone.
I lusted for the exact right way, the ballast of perfect etiquette.
Such rules look easy because they are absorbed over many years.
Though superficial, they flow from a deep pool of culture and belonging.
That’s the reason they exist: to keep the classes fixed.
I was almost always the youngest woman; did that mean I should sit last?
The men waited for the women, and then they sat down, too.
From then on I relaxed: I sat when I wanted to.
He had neglected to explain this one exception.
I should not have been seated before a man of God.
I learned how guests were seated at a table, by complicated rules that involved status and rank.
I learned that there was status and rank, and that people took these very seriously.
I began to take them seriously, too.
I never wore wrinked linen.
I filed my nails.
For a wedding, I ordered a suit made in pewter silk, and a hat to match.
(I’d run for the bus; the ticket counter was closed.)
He had combined duty with pleasure, the way people did in Italy.
I did the same, and my various obligationsthe suit, the etiquettewere rimmed with joy.
I bought the pewter suit for the wedding of Marco’s sister Anna.
The invitation meant our relationship was official.
He wanted me to look right, almost as much as I did.
My preparations were elaborate.
The rim was sewn around wire so it wouldn’t sag.
Thick, noxious fumes filled the spacethe very fumes that had driven the Mad Hatter mad, I thought.
I worried about these women and their sanity.
I don’t remember worrying about my own as I rushed from shop to shop.
It wasn’t a common word, but it impressed people when I used it outside the atelier.
My desire to impress wascangiante,too.
It seemed innocent at first, but then it darkened to something needy, slavish.
Why did I care so much what everyone thought of me?
I brought the suit home wrapped in tissue in a brown paper bag.
The jacket held its shape with a layer of organza between the silk and the lining.
The wedding was a week away.
Divorce in Italy takes three years, a friend told me.
And with children, it’s worse.
The doughnuts were delicious, but how long would the fat man hold out?
How long would the little shop be there, while tourists preferred the flashy and the new?
I became attached to the idea of a crumbling past that wasn’t mine.
Florence was too beautiful to be torn apart and rebuilt, but in stasis it would surely die.
Marco took me to a stately crumbling villa on a hill outside Padua.
The doorways were boarded up; the aviary birds had flown.
Once it had belonged to a distant relative and bustled with butlers and champagne fountains.
He had attended many parties there as a young man.
He missed his childhood.
At the time I thought it was luckbut perhaps I was naive.
My mother came to Italy and met Marco’s family.
She liked them, and they liked her.
She liked the way Marco always guided the conversation up to joy and laughter.
She is a bright, sensitive, high-cheekboned artist, and she fit in.
She knew me, and near her I felt important, amplified.
But she was not overwhelmed by the fairy tale.
Divorce in Italy takes three years, he said.
And with children, it’s worse, of course.
They can’t leave the country unless both parents agree.
He had seen through me.
Lots of Americans come over here and marry, he said.
They don’t know what they’re getting into.
It’s perfect in the beginning.
I met several American women who had married and stayed.
Some seemed lost and displaced.
These women, like me, had never seen such grandeur in America.
Blood had to do with other things, biological things, like children.
The couple’s son couldn’t yet speak in sentences at three.
At family gatherings, everyone wondered: Was the boy normal?
He seemed slow, but maybe he was fine.
Thin blood, they called it.
They hoped her robust American blood had overcome any potential problems.
The officiant was the same priest who had come to dinner the night I had sat down first.
Anna was radiant, slim and elegant in a long silk dress.
Afterward the guests convened at the family villa for a meal in the golden afternoon light.
A few weeks later, Marco took me on a pheasant hunt in the Umbrian countryside.
If it hadn’t been my first hunt, laced with novelty, I would have hated it.
But for now the hate was poised and quiet beside delight and curiosity.
When that faded, I understood, this sport, like so many activities, would lose its allure.
Marco told me a story about a great-uncle who had loved animals and disliked hunting.
My mother was not overwhelmed by the fairy tale.
I started to see Marco differently, too.
His charm seemed thinner than it had before.
It’s meant to teach children not to say, I want this or I want that.
I thought that Marco loved me for who I could become, how much I could assimilate.
He probably saw me all along just as I was.
Marco had not proposed marriage, but I had a sense that he would.
He planned a trip for us to Portugal.
I felt uncomfortable, as if he’d implied that it would also be his child.
I moved to New York.
I missed Italy, but I wouldn’t have traded my new freedom for anything.
When I left Marco he gave me a gift: a small glass snail.
He didn’t explain.
He was choked up.
She sat smoking on a low chintz couch on the balcony, flanked by two petite friends.
The night was hot, and inside the Baroque palace’s massive rooms hung huge, serious oil paintings.
Most of the guests stood outside in groups, waiting for the dessert to arrive, talking.
I walked over to her and said, Buonasera, Lucrezia.
The friends didn’t look up.
*Names have been changed.
