Without Reservations (34 page)

Although I do not believe in love at first sight—not with a man, anyway—I do believe it’s possible to fall instantly in love with a place. As soon as Marta and I emerged from the narrow lane and entered Ravello’s pristine town square, I felt the
zing
of Cupid’s arrow hitting my heart. I was smitten instantly. But why Ravello? I wondered. Why didn’t I fall for sparkling Amalfi or dazzling Positano? For some reason I found myself comparing the three towns to men. If Amalfi were a man, I thought, he’d be dressed by Calvin Klein and reading Tom Clancy. Positano would wear Armani and carry a book by John Le Carré. But if Ravello were a man—ah, Ravello!—he would be in chinos and a fresh white oxford shirt with no tie, buried in a book by Graham Greene.

After spending the morning touring one of Ravello’s spectacular cliffside villas, the entire group gathered for lunch. We met at Salvatore’s, a family-run trattoria overlooking the Gulf of Salerno. For me it was a good-bye luncheon; after returning to Rome that night I would be leaving the group.

We ate outside on a vine-covered terrace that jutted out over the cliff’s edge, above the blue basin of the sea; it was like being suspended in midair. Since Salvatore and members of his family cooked each dish from scratch, there was time between courses to enjoy a brief stroll through the nearby cypress trees, or change tables to catch up with the others, or, best of all, to simply sit breathing in the lemon-scented mountain air as it moved through the lemon groves and down the hillside to us.

I looked around at the faces that over the past weeks had become familiar to me.
La famiglia
, I thought. Family. I knew, of course, that most of the faces, and the names that went with them, would fade quickly once normal life took over again. But in a way we had briefly,
very
briefly, been a family. And who’s to say that just because something lasts only a short time, it has little value?

By the end of the afternoon, as we trudged back to the bus waiting to take us to Rome, it came to me, the reason I’d fallen for this village. Unlike the spun-sugar appeal of other Amalfi towns, Ravello personified simple elegance. It had the kind of austere beauty found in Shaker furniture. A classic example of this was the pristine white church in the town square, its only ornamentation a pair of bronze doors and four ancient columns. As the others walked ahead, I ducked into the church.

It was cool inside. The walls were a blinding white, embedded with delicate traces of frescoes. I stood for a while, then moved to the altar and bowed my head. There, alone in the silent church, I whispered the names of those gone from me:
Father. Mother. Grandmother. Jean. Marion. Ducky. Max. David.

In my life, I loved them all.

T
hree days after arriving in Rome I had my first real brush with danger. Until then I’d encountered only the routine mini-scares faced by most tourists. Yes, there was the evening in Paris when I was window-shopping along a quiet street near St. Sulpice and a burly man approached me, demanding I give him money. He took off, however, when several people emerged from the door of a nearby café. And there was that Sunday in London when two menacing young men circled me while I waited to change trains in an out-of-the-way Underground station. But then the train came and I jumped on, leaving them behind.

The incident in Rome was different. For one thing, I already had negative feelings about the city. Although I knew it to be a premature and unfair judgment, Rome struck me as frenetic and indifferent, a place where everyone seemed unfriendly, hassled, and in a hurry. Where was that warm, laid-back attitude that prevailed in the other Italian cities I’d visited? Not here.

Here, I seldom walked along a street without someone bumping into me or rudely pushing their way ahead of me. Here, I walked in a tense, alert state, always on the lookout for the noisy, polluting motorbikes whose drivers seemed to extract pleasure from terrorizing pedestrians.

Noisy, polluted, indifferent, crowded: this was my impression of Rome.

I knew it was a superficial one; I knew that if I dived deeper into
the real city beneath the tourist attractions, my view of Rome would change. But I had no desire to ingratiate myself with the city, as I had done in the past with Paris or Milan or Venice. I had made a feeble attempt the day before, crossing over the Tiber River to visit the old Trastevere district where, despite rampant gentrification, the authentic Rome was said to reside still. And it was true.

In Trastevere I wandered through a maze of narrow streets and alleys, walking occasionally beneath a canopy of wash hung out between buildings to dry. Although I’d been told to look out for purse-snatchers in Trastevere, I was quite at ease walking by myself through the area. This was a real neighborhood, one where mothers walked with children to and from the market and shopkeepers stood at their doors calling out to passers-by. At times I had an eerie feeling that somehow I’d wandered onto the set of a Sophia Loren movie.

Of course, it had its beauty spots, too. I was particularly drawn to the lovely Piazza di Santa Maria in Trastevere, which I wandered into quite by chance. With its elegant raised fountain and charming sidewalk cafés, the square was an oasis of pleasant neighborhood bustle—minus the motor scooters. I had an iced coffee, and then headed across the piazza to the twelfth-century church of Santa Maria in Trastevere. I was unprepared for the majesty of the church’s interior: its enormous, glowing nave and gigantic columns were as beautiful as any I’d seen.

Still, as pleasant as my visit to Trastevere was, it was not enough to change my mind about Rome. I remained a stranger, wandering through a city as indifferent to me as I was to it.

It didn’t matter that deep down I recognized my disenchantment with Rome for what it was: an attempt to deny that I was homesick. It was much easier to blame Rome than to deal with my longing for the comfort of routine. I yearned to have lunch with my
friends at the paper; to dig in my garden and feel the damp earth between my fingers; to hear the sound of neighbors calling in their dogs late at night; to shop at the neighborhood market, where everybody knows my name; and to lie in bed, waiting for the soft thud that signals the arrival of my cat.

To counteract such feelings, I devised a plan. During my short stay in Rome—a week’s stopover, really, before working my way north to Tuscany and the Veneto—I would seek out all things familiar. Meaning: I ate at English tearooms, visited John Keats’s house at the bottom of the Spanish Steps, went to lectures given in English at a nearby school, and saw the original English-speaking version of
Roman Holiday
with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. One day I even had a Big Mac and french fries at McDonald’s, something I never did at home.

As silly as it was,
le plan d’Angleterre
—as I came to call it—actually worked. My homesickness or anxiety or whatever it was began to dissipate and my curiosity returned. At last Rome beckoned. And I responded. So I set out to do what I always do in a strange city: walk and walk and walk. I even responded to the Romans, chatting with the clerks in bookshops and with espresso-drinkers in the stand-up coffee bars.

My flirtation with Rome, however, proved to be a brief one. It ended abruptly two days later on a busy, fashionable street near my hotel on the Via Sistina.

After spending the morning and early afternoon visiting art galleries on the Via Margutta, I decided to walk over to a coffee bar I liked: the Antico Caffè Greco. Something of an institution in
Rome, the 200-year-old café was a hangout for writers and artists, as well as a rest stop for wealthy shoppers on the Via Condotti. I’d discovered the café on my first day in Rome and liked it instantly. It was a great place to sit and observe the Italian scene. Soon I was going there almost every day; sometimes for a quick espresso at the stand-up bar, sometimes to linger over a cappuccino.

Standing next to me at the bar on this particular day was a man I recognized as a café regular. He had the look of an artist about him, I thought, studying his scruffy corduroy jacket, uncombed hair, and gaunt face. But then again, for all I knew, he could be an eccentric billionaire, the Howard Hughes of Italy.

I drank my espresso and left, planning to walk directly back to my hotel. To my surprise the streets outside were pleasantly un-crowded. I looked at my watch. It was a little before three. The shops, closed down for the traditional long lunch break, would not reopen for another hour. The perfect time, I decided, to explore this fashionable district; to window-shop and read the menus posted outside restaurants and duck into the occasional bookstore or gallery still open.

It was on the Via Borgognona, near the bottom of the Spanish Steps, that I first sensed someone was following me. I began paying attention to a tall man dressed in a corduroy jacket and pants who, I noticed, stopped whenever I stopped and started walking again when I did.

Was he following me? I wondered. Or was it just my imagination? But after two blocks of being trailed in this way I was sure his presence was no accident. When he began closing the distance between us I saw it was the man I’d noticed in the café. Suddenly I was afraid. Then another man, a stocky fellow in dark pants and a checkered shirt, approached me from the opposite direction.

I knew then I had not imagined myself to be in danger; I
was
in
danger. I’m going to be mugged, I thought, my heart pounding; or worse. I tightened my grip on my handbag, braced myself, and looked around for help—a person or an open door or even a motor scooter that I could stop. I saw nothing and no one. I cursed myself for not being more vigilant. At that moment the tall man brushed up against me, grabbing my arm. Without hesitating I broke into a run and started screaming for help.