I started a new book project this week! After working on the first book for so long, it’s exhilarating and terrifying to start over with a blank slate – and a blank page. My next book is set in Italy, a beautiful and terrifying country in which I had the pleasure of spending my junior year of college, circa 2003-2004. I can say “pleasure” in retrospect, but at the time, I had conflicting feelings. On one hand, I had so many amazing adventures, dated a nice Italian fellow, and drank a lot of reasonably priced wine. On the other, I saw some of the most alarming racism and xenophobia I’d ever experienced in my sheltered little existence. In sum, there was a lot to process.

I think the new book calls for a return visit to Bella Italia, specifically Bologna, which I’m determined to experience with more joy and less self-consciousness the next time around. I’m an adult now; you can’t phase me, tall, hot, judgmental Italian ladies.

Anyway, in other research, I’m going through old journals, emails and any other little shreds of evidence of my time there. I am not the world’s best journal keeper, but I always give it an honest try, particularly when I travel. And I love re-reading them later. As I’m reading them, I always wish I’d written more, that I was a better and more consistent record-keeper. Maybe one day. One of my lovely writing teachers, Ann McLaughlin, has kept meticulous journals most of her life (she’s in her 80s now). She showed one of her childhood journals to the class once, and it was amazing and a little creepy to behold, like opening up a time capsule from the 1940s. Also she just had this really creepily neat child handwriting. I don’t totally trust people with really nice handwriting.

The journal I kept immediately before and during my time in Bologna is pitifully incomplete, and falls completely off the wagon after I met the boy (typical!). It also consists entirely of random bullet-pointed observations. But I’m so glad it exists! I have almost no memory of any of these moments, until I read them, and it all comes rushing back. Here are some of my favorite (and most random) passages:

8/31/03

Last night a man asked me for a “cartolino,” but I didn’t understand the word for “joint” and offered him my map.

9/1/03

Italian women have a way of looking that I guess I must adopt if I’m ever to blend in. It’s a glance that starts at the shoes. It’s quick as well, but not in that “I must avoid staring” sort of way, but in a much prouder “this is as much time as it takes to size you up” type of deal. Yes, starts at the shoes and eventually moves up. And you have to love it, in a way, this reassessment of what is valuable. Is it that a pretty face doesn’t matter, or that they’re so used to it? Or that, it’s your face, what can you really do about it? But shoes … those are something sacred, over which we have total control, and thus total responsibility.

9/8/03

I saw the Arno! That’s big time. Not Nile big time, but still…

It’s raining, so I thought I’d have a relaxing cup of hot coffee, but I need to be careful and remember that Italian coffee just hurts your stomach and makes you feel a little psychic.

9/15/03

The weekend in Cinque Terre was amazing! We arrived somewhere, took a boat somewhere else, ate some things, climbed others, took a bus up some very precarious road to somewhere else again. Ate something. Drank a lot of stuff. Had a nighttime swim in the Mediterranean! Lost my glasses, again damnit, but they were the old ones. I seriously need help, though. Next day, hiked to various other places, took one train for the second to last. Ate periodic things. Alex enjoyed a nice Corona on the last couple trails. Marveled at the wonder of it all. Ate more things, made of delicious, delicious gelato. Took a train somewhere else. Had [er, an upset stomach] in a terribly unattractive old European style WC, a la tiled hole in the floor. And finally back home. Che bellissima!

I guess we found the Italian dollar store, but it’s called the “85 cent shop.” Did I already write this? No, sweet.

12/15/03

“Feels like a midget is hanging’ from my necklace.” – Ludacris

“Lend me some sugar; I am your neighbor.” – Outkast

1/23/04

“Questo solo capi. Di essere caduto nella tenebra. E nell’instante in cui seppe, cesso di sapere. – Jack London” (Epigraph from “Io non ho paura” by Niccolò Ammaniti)

Translation: “That much he knew. He had fallen into darkness. And at the instant he knew, he ceased to know.”