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It was my parents' first vacation in more than 20 years; it had been so long that my mother forgot how to plan trips. My dad vied to change the number of days we would stay. In the photos, he looks angry about the work he's missing (what if there's too much expensive taste and not enough money?), and my mother finally looks relaxed from her more than 20 years of too much work. My sister and I smile with abandon (we've never had jobs). At the Duomo, my dad manages to stand behind my sister when we take pictures; the top few inches of his slightly balding head are visible. He assures us that he was smiling, that we couldn't see his smile because his face was hidden. He closes his eyes at the pool on the lake, but he's worrying about the bills. We get back; he grumbles about the money he didn't make while we were gone.
We're sitting at a table in the restaurant the concierge recommended. The uneven brick walls are dotted with holes like Swiss cheese. Fat candles fill the holes with light that makes me feel warm, even though my goosebumps would claim otherwise. Geraniums, the real national flower, hang in planters from the doorjambs. The boar that my dad orders doesn't taste like chicken, but like beef. For dessert, we order tiramisu, which makes up for the 5-hour drive from Milan and the obscene amount of pictures that we took of my sister and me. My dad's coffee comes in a teacup from a doll's tea set. I'm not sure that he slept that night, but I am sure that he learned to order caffe americano.
In every city we visit, we go shopping. In Florence, my sister tries on a necklace at a store too many footsteps from the Ponte Vecchio. In Venice we go from store to store on the Rialto while she tries on countless gold chains. Finally she finds one that she likes, and we pull out the plastic. We pass the street vendors—Asian, African, Arab—who try to sell us the same Prada and Gucci backpacks and purses. The pretend-to-walk-away tactic works on them, later in the day, as we make our way through San Marco's Square. My sister acquires a new backpack. On our way back to the Hotel San Gallo (with air conditioning) my mother suddenly says, "Wait, did we get Marissa anything?" I did take a lovely picture of the sky that day.
In Venice, it turns out that the student age limit is 29, so we get a discount
on our museum tickets. We visit the palace of the Doge. On the top
floor, almost every room seems to be part of what is supposed to be
the Doge's apartment. A few floors down, every room is almost certainly
a dungeon that is relieved that the screams have ceased. By the time
that the uscita signs stop lying and finally lead us to the
bookshop, we've had quite enough dungeons.
On the way to Milan, we stop by Verona for an hour. We, the ice cream connoisseurs, buy the requisite gelati at a shop lit like a gold perfume box, then traipse along toward the house that has been revived as the Capulets's house. We pass Via Shakespeare but don't point excitedly at the residential area it borders. A local asks us in a cigarette-enhanced voice if we're lost, and he, limping strangely, leads us to Juliet's tomb. When we finally find the house of the Capulets, back where we passed it when we were going to the market, the house is crowded with children out of school, and the walls are crowded with graffiti. As we reach the bronze statue of Juliet, we try to ignore the German men who smile for the camera with their hands on Juliet's left breast.
After walking more than a dozen blocks from our hotel in Milan, we get to the Duomo and its requisite shopping area. I step back toward the glass dome whose designer fell off it and died, and my mother takes a photo. As I walk back, I hear somebody mumble something, and I turn around. The cheery, rotund old man offering me birdseed for the pigeons in Venice is gone. A young man in a dirt-colored coat holds out birdseed in a grimy hand. His thin face has seen better days, and his eyes stare harder than a neighbor through the holes in her hedge. The Milanese pigeons, begging for the birdseed, break the silence before I back away.
A tour bus stops at La Scala, and the tour guide steps out. The tourists spill
out onto the corner of the sidewalk. For five minutes the tour guide
talks about the building, and then the tourists rush toward the bookstore.
We buy tickets for the last night of Dialogues des Carmelites
when the box office opens, from a man who seats us in the first box
on the first floor in the velvet-and-gilt Coliseum. That night we
can see the pit orchestra, and the singers are ten feet away. We can
see when the pianist looks up from her stupor to play a chord, and
when one of the flutists nearly falls over in his seat. We can see
the young man in the black suit bringing his unfashionably brown-haired
date to the pit during the intermission as he gestures grandly. We
can see the old, old man with the young lady in the rainbow-sequined
tube tank whose roots stick out of her scalp as much as her collarbone
does out of her chest. We can see the thick gold chain around her
neck that reads, I am not his daughter.
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