An Artist in Italy (Part 2)

Pacentro, Italy

I was talking to someone the other day and mentioned I’d just gotten back from visiting Italy, and he then asked me about the crowds. “It’s so touristy!” he said. “I want to go somewhere less crowded”. I get that, but the problem is not that there are too many tourists in Italy. The problem is that all the tourists are looking at the same instagram feeds while planning their itinerary.

One awesome thing I tried when planning my itinerary was how to work around the “Instagram affect”. So I googled “Less visited parts of Italy”. I discovered one of the least visited regions (by American tourists) is the region just east of Rome: the region of Abruzzo. So I checked it out. It looked beautiful — Lots of cool hilltop towns and lots and lots of mountains begging to be hiked and explored. So then I googled “most interesting places to see in Abruzzo”. And that sort of planning made for a wonderful time for us. Planning the itinerary this way, we discovered one of my very favorite towns (perched on a mountainside) called Pacentro. It was a friendly place for tourists, but not overrun by tourists at all. I heard no English conversation at all. If there were visitors, they were mostly Italian.

The problem is not that there are too many tourists. The problem is that the tourists are all looking at the same Instagram feeds while planning their itinerary.

This town is ancient, with narrow, stone streets winding their way up the mountainside to the castle. In the old part of town (where we stayed), there were no cars allowed on the streets (hard to fit a car on a 6’ wide “street”!) Joy and I loved this place. In the morning, we’d open the windows and hear the jovial conversation of neighbors. When we’d come back in the evening, we’d grab something to cook at the local (very small) grocery store and then go back home and cook dinner. But then — in Italy, after dinner there is a ritual: the passeggiata. This is when the whole town walks around and meets their friends at one of the cafe’s for a coffee or a glass of wine. Joy and I walked across town to the small park overlooking a large valley below, and then slowly made our way back home, passing the main piazza filled with people sitting, chatting, and laughing quietly. Understand, this is not a nightly “party”. They’re not at all being loud. They’re just all seemingly enjoying each other. In Pacentro, I heard no TV on at all. As an American, if I were home at 8:00 PM, I’d be watching Netflix. Instead, these people were sitting around the fountain in the piazza, sitting on doorsteps, sitting in outdoor cafe’s — all just spending time with each other. This seemed really beautiful to me. I’m an introvert, but even I could recognize the beauty in this ritual. I loved Pacentro.

So the first and one of the most important lessons on trip planning was this: find the most beautiful of the less visited areas of wherever you’re traveling to. Planning like that scored big time for Joy and I. The last week of our trip, we threw out all this reasoning and lived to regret it big time. More on that next.

An Artist in Italy (Part 1)

This is one of the photos currently becoming a painting! I took it on an amazing hike we took just east of Pacentro, Italy.

Five years ago, I visited Italy, and ever since, I’ve been trying to figure out how and when we could get back there. Italy is not for everyone, but it’s definitely for me. Upon returning from Italy in 2017, I begin learning Italian. I was serious. I began discretely passing on little news articles to Joy about Italian villages offering homes for 1 euro. Joy has become very good at rolling her eyes.

Despite the realization I would never relocate to a hilltop village in Italy, Joy and I were finally able to visit again in early September of this year. Upon arriving in Rome, we headed directly east to Abruzzo, and then south into Puglia. Oh, Italy did it’s work on me, and I’m so glad. I’ll never really be the same.

If you’re still reading this, you might have realized that this blog post has little to do directly with “art”, but my experience there had a lot to do with creativity and life in general, and that all informs the artwork I do. I feel the need to write down my thoughts. So if you’re reading this, be aware this is going to be more of a journal entry than a typical blog post.

So, here we go:

What I learned from Italy, Part 1

First of all, and probably most importantly, Italy completely confronts my tendency to feel like I’m in control of my life. In Italy, Italy controls your life. From the first moments after picking up our rental car and wondering how the heck to get out of the airport (the signage was not AT ALL clear on this), the American in me threatened to bristle and think “well why don’t they have better signage???” (i.e. “why don’t they do things like Americans?”)

Literally, countless times every day, Joy and I were confronted with the fact that life is just really approached differently in Italy than in the United States and that is exactly why I wanted to visit this place again. I can’t tell you how emotionally healthy it felt to just take a deep breathe, sigh, and say (over and over again like a mantra), “I want to do this or that, but…we’ll see.” You’d have to know me to understand that that just is not me. My kids would probably all agree I have a Type A personality (which is why I need to visit places like Italy). See, in Italy, all my plans had to be held very loosely in order to enjoy the place at all. I had every day pretty much all planned out, but Italy dictated that I hold those plans in an open palm, and to be open to practically anything changing those plans. At that point, I was confronted with a choice: I could either really dig in my heals and fight it and wish I’d gone to Germany or England instead, OR give into it and roll with it, letting Italy shape me like I was a lump of clay on a potters wheel and Italy was the potter. I chose the latter and I’m so glad I did.

Italy was absolutely exhausting and absolutely wonderful. I probably almost died there, and unrelated to that, I took home a souvenir that made me more sick than I ever remember being in my life. But I’m ready to go back. I love that place and have lots of stories and reflections I want to share.

Next time.