Italy and the Meaning of Life

The places we go change who we are.

Show a dog something that runs, and he’s going to chase it. There are men who cannot see a mountain without needing to know what lies behind it. Yesterday, we booked our flight back to Canada, and all I can do with that is write it down.

I still believe in it.

Somewhere above the forest in the Western wild, there is a yellowing scrap of paper with my handwriting on it. My sin, the big one, the mistake I made and wrote down and redeemed, pursued by the memory of that ribbon of cheap paper and the words tattooed across it. It’s written right there on the plane ticket, hidden in the QR code and the mysterious gibberish stamped across the bottom edge. It’s waiting for me, there in Vancouver. It’s been waiting forever.

This is not a sentence. At least, it shouldn’t be. Once, we dreamed of this return, the drizzly city between the mountains and the sea that remains, for all I’ve seen in this world, one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever lived. It’s not that Vancouver is a bad place. It’s not that I don’t think I can be happy there, or that I haven’t been happy there before. Until two years ago, the happiest days of my life were spent in the wide, orderly streets under those cloud-crowned mountains.

But that was before all this. Before the southern sunburned the hairs on my arms yellow and the skin on my forehead brown. Before the murmuring Mediterranean seeped into my blood. Before I ever really tasted a tomato or an apricot. It’s not the ragazzi kicking the ball against the wall downstairs that keeps me awake at night. It’s the thought that I almost reached that high and glittering prize, but my nerve failed at the end.

I would have it like this forever. The view you get from seven floors up in a town with no building taller than this. Watching the weather come in over the same volcanic hills Hannibal’s elephants traversed. The noise. The relentless sun. The donkey braying from the farm across the street as the sun sits on the shoulder of Vesuvius. Who could want anything more? Delineated by habit and custom, each day here is much like the last, and the last was perfect.

The sun shines every day, and ripe fruit hangs from the trees, and the boys in the car park below play the same games I played twenty years ago, and that’s the only kind of immortality that interests me.

But change, growth and decay, tonic and dominant — this is the essence of all beauty. If this place hadn’t taught me that much, I might never have left at all. Nowhere else I’ve been is alive like this. You can track the slow heartbeat of each sun-warmed stone. The towers and temples and palaces that crumble and shatter from the bright life within them, and the weeds that sprout in the ruins to shelter scurrying lizards.

It wasn’t until I came to Italy and lived here for a while that I learned there are different levels of life, and that there could be a place on earth that I would feel life more keenly than anywhere else. It’s not a question of pleasure, although few people on earth are better at pleasure than Italians. It has more to do with the sense of time that comes from a hot sun and an ancient culture. In a landscape dotted with ruins from two millennia ago, what’s the rush? It trains you to think differently. It teaches you to understand that all you are is the sum of your experiences in any given moment. Freed of past and future, all that’s left is to simply exist. And in that eternal moment, there is nothing left but joy.

And I should leave all this to make money?

We are tied to Vancouver in so many ways. I still have that condo, appreciating voodoo value while it rots in the rain. We never planned to stay away this long. Our affairs are not in order. But the sun in Italy smiles, and the warm breeze whispers that I shouldn’t worry, ever, because none of this means anything anyway. The meaning of life is simply to live, and nowhere I’ve been in a wandering life are people better at simply living than they are in Italy.

This story is published in Writers on the Run. If you’re interested in submitting your travel stories please visit our submission guidelines.