Gioia della vita....Eight Days Of Feeling Italian

Summer has always been the most inspirational season for me. It's that time of the year when you make plans to blow everyone away the first day of school, with your new Converse sneakers and skater skirt and the makeup you bought at Sephora's and the tan you got while lounging around the pool, always hoping for the boy playing Volleyball (or....some sort of game that involves a ball) in the water to notice you in time for you to have a quick summer fling 'cause it would be a good story to tell. Summer means not eating out of boredom but nice meals in chic dresses at night; it means balancing on the small line between beach hair and dreadlocks but not caring; looking like an apple glazed in sun lotion but having a healthy glow at all times; see, there's no bad things happening in summer, and I feel like the sun makes me so light and healthy and the warm breeze hugging my body and the hot stones between my fingers when I'm at the beach are just so real, in the most satisfying way.

Sounds pretty desirable, doesn't it? So this year, my loveliest friend and I have chosen to go to Italy; to a small town named Santa Marinella, just outside Rome, to be exact. We arrived after a flight on which we've probably painfully entertained the people three rows around us with our overly excited chatter (we can't help it, we're just not blessed with a ladylike, low laughter) and a short train scare ( because obviously the employees of Trenitalia had to speak up for their rights by putting down work just the one day we come to this country and have us seriously consider sleeping at the Trastevere train station, as if we didn't spend half our lives stuck at stations), walked three blocks only guided by me memorizing what I'd seen on Google maps....And there we were!

Tried to not get people in and that's the best I did with that

The door we blissfully skipped in and out of all week

As were about fifty other people, on the piazza (I just found out I spelled that wrong on approx. five postcards, oh well) lying between four streets of slightly run down but impossibly European stone houses. They were sitting on the steps, at the green and yellow tables of the lit-up restaurant, on the benches under the glow of the old-fashioned street lamps....Running after their children, babies as well, all up and wide-eyed at ten o'clock at night, or singing "I will always love you" very enthustiastically, and very out of tune, with the karaoke set-up by a small cafe right on the corner, and everyone was talking to somebody, and my friend and I were walking through all of this, mouthes hanging open as we took in the vividness of the scene we stumbled into - then, somebody talked to us. It was our landlady, who showed us into one of the stone buildings, up two flights of stairs (I almost died tugging my bag up there), and into a thoroughly cute living room. Most of the furniture might be Ikea, but Ikea is great, because everything in there was white and wooden and minimal and we could drop our bags right in the middle of the room to catch our breath and for our landlady, a sweet gal named Georgia, to guide us through the apartment. She turned on the gas stove for a second, and we'd nod, 'cause it seemed simple enough even though none of us ever uses a gas anything. Once she was gone, we did what everyone (I suppose?) does when they move into a perfect little space - hysterically laugh and tell each other how great it is, and how you're not tired at all, which is notably enough since you'd collapse into bed after being awake for that long at any other given day, and then we got into shaggy sundresses to match our undone hair (and face) and ran out to get right in the middle of the fun that seemed to go down at the piazza (just to warn you, I'll be talking about that piazza a lot). We sat in front of a new looking bar with the umm poetic name "Jekyll&Hyde - Healthy and Cocktail" (a look in the menu gives reason to assume the "Healthy" equals the salad choices in opposition to the Cocktails speaking for themselves) and ordered, wait for it, two Cokes. Aren't we sophisticated yet? However, it was worth the eight Euros we spent on that (though we didn't do it again - I mean, four Euros for a kids sized bottle of Coke!). An hour or so, we happily sat there soaking in the fact that we were really, absolutely there.

Our street, aka Hotspot of Santa Marinella

Does that count as a first day? I'd say it does. Don't worry, there's so much more to come.

Turning off the lights in Italy for now - mind the bugs!

Love,

Rosy Smith