Mi manca l’Italia (I miss Italy). I say this to my husband, Mark, accompanied with a sigh. What am I missing? The food and wine? Certo. The people? Ovviamente. But mi manca I’Italia is code for something else.
Mark came into my life following the deaths of our first spouses. When we met, flames flickered, then blazed. Submerged for years, my existence exploded. I felt a release, one I couldn’t name until we traveled to the Amalfi Coast.
But first, a year before our marriage, Mark and I joined my parents and sisters visiting the holy trinity of tourist stops in Italy. Other than my father, we were on our first pilgrimage from Ohio to the ancestral land. Our days were thick with Vatican tours and throngs of people milling about the Duomo in Florence. I herded family members along Venetian canals and threw bags out by 7 a.m. wake up calls. On that trip, I really did miss–didn’t get a taste of–the Italy I had so longed to find.
But the following year, we exchanged wedding vows, and Mark surprised me with a trip to Amalfi for our honeymoon. That Italy reflected an exploration within, of seeing ourselves mirrored in the surface of the Mediterranean as we sipped Prosecco and swam in the sea.
We ticked off the obligatory stop in Ravello for ceramics. We patronized paper shops in Amalfi and rode a bus that swerved along the coastal edges to Positano. In one shop, I spotted a pair of heels dotted with sequins. With the little Italian I knew–C’è l’hai nella mia taglia? (Do you have these in my size?)–I became Cenerentola (Cinderella).
I wanted it all. Before the clock struck again.
Something had awakened in me. Of no longer caring. Of someone ravishing my body in the same way I drank down the region’s limoncello—slow and easy, the sweet on my tongue burying the bitterness I had held on to for what life had taken away.
Our suite at the hotel was set into the mountainside, overlooking an endless blue that matched my husband’s eyes. To arrive at our room, one had to pass through lemon groves, tasting the tango between citrus and salt. We scooped fruit off the ground and squeezed pulp into our prosecco glasses. We pressed their halves into our bodies and licked their juices off our tan and still taut stomachs. Every touch of my husband’s hand prickled my skin as I stood in the opening of the French doors. I bared it all.
Life passed by. My parents died. Trips to Italy included our children. We traipsed across Cinque Terre and the Ligurian Coast. And we returned once more.
Driving to Abruzzo on a pilgrimage to my mother’s family’s hometown of Spoltore, the miles fell away behind me–miles my grandmother Raffaela once traversed across the Grand Maiella to Napoli with my mother in her womb, to sail to America. Miles that separated me from Ohio, elongating a body reaching for more.
Mi manca l’Italia. What do I mean? I miss that young woman on her honeymoon who, a year later, would come home to a stepdaughter battling depression, a sister fighting ghosts in a bottle, a father diagnosed with Parkinson’s and a mother dancing with dementia. I miss that woman who stood, pale breasts pointed at the breeze where the mist from rocks below sprayed her body with the healing salts of the sea. Mi manca l’Italia means I still want to be that woman, like my grandmother, who risks it all.
