This is part 2 of a recent trip to Italy. To read part 1 click HERE.

I had my first real heartbreak in Firenze (Florence) in 1962, before many of you were born.

I was on a student tour of Europe—from Scandinavia down to Italy—and our guide in Firenze was a charming and playful guy in his early thirties, Giancarlo Massetti. In Firenze, where he lived, he took me and other young women from the tour to the San Marco Bar, where he and his friends would hang out and park their motorcycles in a long row.

Still a major means of transportation

All his friends were attractive and vivacious, but one, Roberto, had the face and deep-set eyes of a statue of one of the gods. My friend, Barbara, told another woman on the tour, Lucy, to put on her glasses so she could see this guy. “I can see him,” she responded.

To my surprise, Roberto asked me to go for a walk with him, taking my arm as he led me past a few of his friends. When we returned to the bar, he kissed me and said, “I won’t be in Firenze tomorrow, I have to go to Lucca. Could I see you the day after that?”

Of course, I said. I day-dreamed about him all the next day as we toured the Uffizi gallery and stared at Botticelli’s painting, The Birth of Venus.

When I returned to our hotel, there was a card from Roberto postmarked from Lucca that said, in Italian, “Thinking of you. I see you tomorrow.”

The following evening, he picked me up at our hotel, we walked to a small restaurant nearby, and then he showed me some of his favorite spots in the city and we wandered back to the hotel. At one point he asked me, staring with those large eyes, “Hai conosciuto un uomo?” Have you known a man?

I shook my head, no. He smiled and pulled me closer.

He kissed me goodnight, saying, “I’ll be happy when I see you again,”and I floated up the stairs to my room, passing two of the other women on the tour, Lucy and Jan, sitting on the stairwell. We exchanged smiles and I continued happily to bed.

The next day, I learned that after dropping me off, Roberto had taken Lucy off on his motorcycle and they hadn’t returned till dawn

The worst thing was: everybody on the tour knew this, and would tease me, “Hey, Sara, Where’s Roberto?”

The next night, I stayed back at the hotel by myself, sitting by a window that looked out on a dreary air shaft, feeling foolish and humiliated.

Fortunately, the tour ended a few days later and I avoided Lucy or shot her unkind looks.

After the tour, I began my internship with Mondadori, the publisher in Milano, and in November, I took the train to Firenze to visit our guide, Giancarlo. I was wearing a cranberry-colored wool suit with a belt around the waist that I’d bought in the first department store to open in Milano, Rinascente, and felt I looked more European than American.

“You look so beautiful,” Giancarlo said when he met me at the train station. He took me to the San Marco Bar and the gang was all there. I was sitting in the middle of a group of them when Roberto spotted me and walked over.

“You remember me?” he said in Italian.

I stared at him, then said, in Italian, “Debrai?”  Should I?

He took this in. “You’re right,” he said, with a glum look.

I returned to Milano and a day later, received a letter from Roberto.  I asked my boss at the publishing company to translate it for me, as it was hard to read the handwriting. Glancing at it, my boss shook his head. “This guy has no class and less education.” At one point in his letter, Roberto had written, “Put a large stone on what happened before. Come to Firenze a new time. Take the sad away from my heart. Ciao bella.” (Bye, beautiful)

I wasn’t even tempted to write back; but I enjoyed the idea of him checking his mail for a response.

 

That was six decades ago, and none of the heartache and shame I’d felt have remained in my body. I couldn’t find them when I looked, and I was free to enjoy the splendors of Italy, especially Firenze, with my children and grandchildren.

Veal, the Way it Should Be

One of the highlights of our trip was visiting Pompei. I generally don’t enjoy walking through ruins, but this was extraordinary. The city had been destroyed almost two thousand years ago, on August 24, ’79 AD. The nearby volcano, Mt. Vesuvius, had exploded, releasing a hundred thousand times the energy of the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That’s right—two atomic bombs. A stream of poisonous gas, rock and ash rose ten miles into the air—ten miles!—and crashed down on Pompei, burying every human instantaneously.

The buried ruins of Pompei were not discovered, however, until almost two thousand years later, in 1738. Teams of scientists and historians came from all over Europe to excavate the city, a project which is said to have initiated the modern science of archeology. They found no physical traces—no bones, skin, or hair—of the estimated 2000 people buried in Pompei. All they found were hollow indentations of human forms in beds and on chairs.

In the following decades, archeologists made casts of the bodies by pouring cement into the hollows where bodies had been. The casts included people in bed, at tables or near large indoor baths decorated with friezes that illustrated stories of the gods.

Concrete figure created from imprint left on a bed

The size and splendor of some of the homes was startling. One, built around 200 B.C., and named the “House of the Fawn” by those who excavated it, had two living rooms, four dining rooms, two gardens, a banquet hall, a large mosaic of Alexander the Great, and several school-rooms for children.

Our kids paid close attention when our guide dropped to her knees and looked in their eyes, describing what it was like to be children living there, two thousand years ago. But then Siena and Emma would dash off to run, jump and race around the columns in the outdoor squares.

In Rome, Fay and Andrew had found an English-speaking day camp—to teach Italian kids to speak English—and arranged for the girls to attend it for a week. I wondered how they’d do, suddenly immersed in a crowd of Italian kids.

Siena first day of camp, sizing it up

But they took to it immediately, ran and played with the pack, and brought home drawings and crafts they’d made.

A week after arriving in Rome, I was ready to go home, jostling my way through the crowds at the Rome airport.

Toast to the Trip

Now, it’s one month later, and I’m longing to go back.