Five Fountains and a Doorway

I like to give myself assignments – they help provide focus, a sense of purpose. I still have a hard time simply allowing myself to be and enjoy, and maybe somehow having homework assuages the guilt I feel about a rarefied lifestyle that frequently involves wandering foreign cities, swimming in exotic waters and imbibing decadent food and beverages sold in currencies with much higher value than the dollar. I maintain that these spoils are my house mortgage, my flat screen t.v., my twins in an ergonomic carriage, my debt-free existence. I suppose we all make our choices. It’s interesting to mingle with people whose lives I can only assume are quite different from my own – to imagine their blissful or miserable marriages, the affairs they might have with their surgeons, how they might empty or fill the spaces in their heads and hearts and wallets, how they might either never vacation or do nothing but vacation. I like to imagine how other people have meandered these streets, marveled at these ruins and creations, sipped Campari and soda in this or that piazza -- and to wonder what they thought about, what they felt, who they were talking with, whether they were happy, whether they had dreams.

Over the past five years, one of my oldest and dearest friends and I have met annually in Paris to reassess our lives, buy lingerie, drink wine and tell stories. Last summer we decided our 2011 trip would be a return to the country where we met, and to a city that neither of us knew well. I’d made a few trips to Rome during my year in Italy – once to see a Balthus retrospective, once to see a New York rockstar who had stirred my heart in a Communist youth club in Florence, and once to see a Giacometti exhibit. After not hearing about Rome being a big cultural destination for years, all of a sudden these past few months it’s seemed like everyone is flocking to Rome. I’ve wondered if the impulse is connected to the crumbling U.S. empire and our need to understand the history of another fallen empire. Who knows. In any case, we set our sights southward and adjusted our vision to Rome’s earthy amber-hued glow.

Italians are generally a bit warmer than the French. . . or maybe it's just that I feel more comfortable stumbling along through life among them using my stale Italian mixed with a bit of Spanish – being mistaken consistently for a Spaniard or Argentine -- than with French, which I never could pronounce or feel confident speaking. I prefer the roughness and audacity of Romans to the metrosexuality, unironic red pants and sweaters tied round the neck of the Costa Smerelda -- where I landed in Sardegna yesterday. I was picked up by my homeboy Doug to drive yet further north to Santa Teresa Gallura -- which has humble charms beyond those of some of its yacht-tastic neighbors to the south. I feel aligned with the Romans – their lack of subtlety, their unabashed flirtatiousness, their commitment to artichokes. They also mostly have brown eyes, which I find easiest to trust.

There have been other Hilary-Nupu international summits that have yielded a more complicated agenda than the kind that was this year’s result. This year was simple, simplicity being one of the hardest things for a couple of nerdy over-achievers to embrace. Buoyed by the F-train best-seller by Elizabeth Gilbert and decades of young romantics wandering the asymmetrical streets and alleyways of Rome searching for joy, clarity and elevation, we had an obvious frame of reference from which we might approach our journey. But rather than emerging with a couple new pairs of shoes and a list of essential things I need to do more of or do better in order to justify my existence -- a type of list I might have made in the past, -- I am instead engaging the wisdom of the many fountains we posed before, whose music soothed our ears, who reminded us to be more like water: flowing, moving around and over and under and through every obstacle. . . being soft but powerful, contained when necessary, always irrepressible.