情迷锡耶纳

Ciao, Bella

After four trains and a wrong turn in Florence, I was in Siena, Italy, carrying too much luggage and struggling for words I didn’t know. It was November, and I was going by myself to a city with tones so unusually rich, a color is named for it.

The family I was to stay with, a relatively elderly mother and her twice-my-age son, didn’t speak a word of English and weren’t expected to. I was the one who was supposed to learn a language; I was to go to Italian class three hours a day for the next month. But the day I got there, all I knew was "Non parlo italiano," and I said it all the time.

The family was short with me at first, and I understood enough to figure out the words for "that’s the thing with Americans, they don’t know how to speak." But it would be they who would teach me most of the Italian I learned there—and a few added lessons along the way.

I went to Siena for a few good reasons. I left Chicago for a million more. I had just quit a job to go to graduate school, and the people there resented me for it. I had just quit a boyfriend. And I had quit an apartment where the landlord was a little too friendly. I was tired of quitting things; I was ready for big, shining starts.

I picked Italy for its art, and Siena was full of it. It was just so old. The town hall was built in the 12th century, and all the other buildings weren’t much younger. A thick high wall circled the town as if the whole thing had been thrown like a discus into the Tuscan hills. The Duomo was made of ancient striped marble, and St. Catherine’s skull was in a church named for her, where it’s been for 600 years. Everything was medieval and preserved, and nothing was like where I came from.

The first morning of class, my host-mother, Signora Franci, escorted me on the bus so I wouldn’t get lost. She was about 4-foot-11 to my 5-9 and she talked continually to me in Italian, though she knew I was still oblivious. She left me at the Dante Aleghieri language school with a tip-toed kiss and a "Ciao, bella." I could love a country where absolutely everyone called you beautiful.

My class was a stray collection of 21-year-old Australian girls. I took them on as my friends; we’d circle through the city after class every day, then sit in the town square, dodging pigeons and eating gelato.