Last autumn, in the midst of a life crisis, I ran away to Italy. While I rode trains, planes, and automobiles, I also wrote about my experience. It’s been sitting in my Google Drive for exactly 365 days, collecting virtual dust, so here's the introduction.
Author’s Note:
You won't reach the final page of this memoir and learn how I “found myself,” manifested a villa in Tuscany, or married a charming Italian man with a Vespa and a philosophy degree.
I went to Italy because I was lost.
Eight years of teaching had burned me from both ends, and one ordinary Tuesday I realized I didn’t recognize the life I was living. So I wrapped up the school year in May and never looked back. I set out for adventure, carrying 30 pounds of art supplies, hardly enough underwear, a fading sense of direction, a standby ticket to Milan I wasn’t even sure I’d get on, and the belief that maybe Italy—land of Caravaggio, crumbling churches, and too many types of pasta—might know something about life that I didn’t.
No plan. Seven weeks. Twelve cities. 342,422 steps. Two languages. Two euros. Two hundred espresso. One maxed-out credit card.
And sushi was what broke me. Not quitting my job. Not the language barrier or being alone for over a month. It was seaweed salad at 10 p.m. in Verona. But we’ll get there, eventually.
This writing isn’t a guide to reinvention. It’s a record of what happens when life falls apart, and instead of holding it together, you board a plane.
It’s about sleeping in pink princess rooms in historic villas, and three days later peeling back hostel sheets to check for bedbugs. It’s meeting strangers who feel like home and eating tagliatelle alone in crowded restaurants. It’s walking fourteen miles in sandals that were never meant for a half-marathon. It’s beauty that makes your ribs ache. Loneliness that sits beside you like a travel companion. The quiet magic of birdsong and church bells. Old men named Carlo and sunsets that make you forget your bank account is overdrawn.
It’s about being thirty and believing Italy would answer the question I couldn’t stop asking: What am I doing with my life?
There was a lot of eating. No grand romances. And definitely no praying (though I might have found religion over a certain tiramisu in Florence). You won’t find answers here, or a neat arc where I return home with a three-step plan for living your best life. What you will find is a glimpse of what it means to be human: to be confused, to be alone, to be curious and bored and tired and broke. To seek meaning and find poetry, blistered feet, unexpected friendships, and new favorite songs.
I left for Italy thinking I would come back transformed.
I came back more confused than ever. But also softer, more awake, and more willing to belong to my life, even when it makes no sense.
And it gave me stories and set my soul on fire. That’s what this prose is: a collection of beautiful, frustrating, tender, ridiculous moments that made me feel alive. A love letter to art, to espresso, to mistakes. A chance to share Italy's simplicity, the depth of its culture, and the unglamorous reality of solo travel.
Maybe you’ll laugh with me. Maybe you’ll cry. Maybe you’ll book a flight. Or maybe you’ll just use my whirlwind of a life as a distraction from your own.
If you’re here for certainty, I certainly don’t have it.
But if you’re here for honesty—for the mess, the wonder, and the aching middle: Benvenuto.