The first time I fell in love, I was eighteen, and naively swore that he was the person I was supposed to end up with. Before we dated, we were good friends, and I had told him about my dreams to spend a couple of years working and living overseas before my thirties. Perhaps it was premature of me to plan such big ideas, and with such an advanced timeline, but it was something I had known I wanted to do by age 14 (at this point, however, I was sure I was supposed to be in New York with the rest of the Gossip Girl cast). I never felt that I truly belonged to Australia, and never felt like I fully fit in–it always seemed that there was a piece of me somewhere overseas.
Two and a half years into dating, we were in the middle of Melbourne’s strict coronavirus lockdown and dealing with my Nonno’s declining health. I was connected via WhatsApp with his family overseas in Italy (zio and zia), and, when a video call brought us face-to-virtual-face, I felt a shift occur deep inside of me, clicking an element of my identity into place–as if a puzzle piece had been missing for the longest time and was finally located. Though all four of my Italian grandparents and parents had bestowed the language upon me from birth, the relatives that I spoke to were gracious with my excitement to speak to them and to meet sometime soon.
My Nonno passed away that June and left a sombre hole in our hearts. But in conjunction with his passing, my Nonna’s recounts and photographs, and my Dad’s stories of his adolescence and summers spent with cousins, friends, and relatives over there, I was eager to connect with this family and understand the blessing that was my Italian citizenship. A year later, I was presented with the opportunity to study in Italy for a couple of months. Before I knew it, I was scanning my Italian passport through Fiumicino and found myself with a university in Prato, Tuscany.
It was the second time I had been to Italy, but everything about this experience was different. My language was fluent, the culture and heritage that my immigrant grandparents nurtured had developed and was better understood, and as such, more prevalent in my external self. The customs and traditions that I had grown up with seemed to be in mass supply, and every person I met felt like somebody I already knew. When I wasn’t studying, I was either spending weekends with my cousins that lived in Rome, Frosinone, and Calabria or exploring cities like Lucca, Bologna, and Rimini with my university friends. With every day that I spent in Italy, the once-dormant Italian identity inside of me was now impossible to suppress, and I felt like I had finally found myself.
Within the span of a few weeks, I found a bouquet of love that I never knew existed–love in friendships that I’d made that became friendships for life. Love in the places that I visited and in the food that I ate. Love in the language that I spoke and the words that rolled off the tongues of handsome strangers. Love in the water that I swam in and the breezes that delicately touched my face. Love in the mesmerising art, and the literature, and the history, and the culture, and the heritage that was my birthright. Love in the family I had come to be so instantaneously and fiercely connected to. Love in the entirety of the country, really. I knew that Italy was my second (and favourite) home.
My boyfriend and I ended things a year later, when he realised that the dreams that I had described to him at eighteen were not temporary or wistful or fading, but more alive than ever. After four years together, he couldn’t understand the fact that I needed to spend time abroad for both my career ambitions and my cultural connections, and though I pleaded with him to join me for the experience–an adventure of travel and love–he wasn’t able to support me as I needed him to. When it came to planning our futures, it was apparent that our lives were no longer parallel; instead, a faded intersection, crossing at a common point and never to join again.
The trade of loves was one of the hardest points of my life, but, at the end of the day, it was my love for Italy that stayed constant, and the love that I received back burned brighter than any love I had seen before. I’d make that decision again in a heartbeat.
