Moving on

This will be my last post here in Italy. It has been a good, fun year, and I am very glad to have had the opportunity to spend it in this gorgeous country eating the amazing food and singing the language. At the moment, I’m in a sort of lull, a time in between when I have finished everything for my courses and when I leave July 19^th to go to Paris with my best friend Martin, and while all the things I have to get done for leaving Italy or for going to Africa it seem to be running around my mind I feel calm, and sad that I will have to leave the porticoes of Bologna behind for other parts of the world.

So maybe the time has come to list the things I will miss about this city. Gelato comes quickly to mind. Gelato is like Italian ice cream, but there is hardly any ice in it and it goes down so much smoooother. I eat gelato every chance I get. At the moment I have discovered the best gelatteria in Bologna on Piazza Cavour, and my goal is to eat my weight in gelato before leaving in 8 days.

I will miss the sound of my feet echoing off the walls as I run under the porticoes. While I’m still dealing with this knee injury, there was a time six or seven months ago when I would run for over an hour and the last stretch would always be this long line of porticoes beside the hospital. Sometimes it felt like a dream, like my body was moving faster than the sound of my feet.

I would like to reiterate that I will miss gelato. It is very, very good.

I will also miss all the other food in Italy. Just last week I spent a couple of days at my friend Emanuele’s house learning dishes from his father who is a chef in a local restaurant. He taught me some very, very simple dishes so that I would have no trouble making them for friends in Bologna or with ingredients in the U.S. I ate a great deal of food while watching the poor soccer players running all over the place in the Holland Uruguay game. At the end of the game I was also exhausted but for different reasons.

I will miss the Italians I’ve met here in Italy. During my courses in Bologna, I have met students from Sardinia, Sicilia, Puglia, Calabria, Emilia Romagna, and basically all over the boot that is this country. For the most part they have been nice and patient with my language skills. Last week I had dinner with friends from the Paleontology excursion I went to in southern Germany in a little garden close to campus. We filled the table with food and sat around drinking and laughing until the garden closed. I brought a radio and the music drifted up into the night mingling with the sound of our voices. At least five times bottles were spilled because my friends talk recklessly with their hands, and I had a great long conversation with my friend Vincenzo that I do not remember. After dinner we ponderously made our way to Piazza Verdi and sat listening to the opera music that always plays from the theater and watching the people.

I will miss making my moka in the morning in my apartment. I have gotten used to making coffee on a gas stove with this little metal device, and I fill it up with water and coffee and put the flame under it every morning. I will feel very different trying to adapt back to American coffee and will probably bring this moka with me for the rest of my life.

I will miss the red tiled roofs of this country and the views from the balconies. I will miss the courtyards on the inside of the buildings and le due torri. I will miss the biblioteca Sala Borsa where I have gone every week to get CDs and DVDs in Italian. I will miss the Mercato delle Erbe where I buy fruit and vegetables at ridiculously low prices. I will miss the stone and cobble streets that are so hard to bike on, the reading Dante at my desk with the sound of children from the school drifting through the window, the support I get from Italians when I struggle to express myself, the circling of a town on my map after I have travelled there, having my lessons in ancient classrooms where they have been held for hundreds of years, theWINE oh the wine I will miss so much, the days spent in the sun at the Giardina Margherita where flights of birds seem to take my troubles to far off places, the dinners that last until midnight, having my hair cut by my second floor neighbor, slurping my coffee in the morning as I watch the sunrise, yelling at the TV screen with my roommates when a player of Juventus botches a goal, the architecture and sculpture and laughter and the list goes on and on and on.

But if it lasted forever it would not be as beautiful. Goodbye Italy, Hello Africa.