Bring it on, Stendhal

Dear Readers,

Thank you for your continued readership, in these the waning days of Letters from Florence. My mind orbits around U.S. immigration documents and the wrapping up of the Italian phase of four peripatetic humans much like the earth turns around the sun: imperceptibly yet ploddingly relentless. It also, inevitably, circles around memories good and not-so-good, and--apparently unlike the grim majority of Italian politicians--looks to the future.

How does one wrap up 12 years of a life abroad, uprooting children to boot? One just rolls up one's sleeves and does it, I imagine.

I am sad to say that the Bürgermeister will get my house, even though he already has a largish home, another rental property, access to a beach house and two other dismal nuggets of real estate here on this benighted patch of my in-laws' earth. No, I am not happy about this. I wanted one of my young nephews to buy our cozy little casa--perhaps Daniele, who's nearly 30, with a fiancée and a decent job, who still sleeps in the upper bunk in the cramped room he shares with his younger brother and sister. But none of the younger generation stepped forward, nor did their parents for them. As often seems to happen in Italy, the incumbent old dude with the wheelbarrow full of money and his fingers in all kinds of crostata holds sway and youth is elbowed aside, forced to sleep precariously on the narrow twin bed of opportunity.

I'm also thinking about my next blogging enterprise, other writing projects, and the ways in which I might continue my own dogged brand of cultural contemplation in the land of my birth, with these rather bemused Midwestern eyes that have for a time gazed upon the enchanting and confounding Italian landscape.

My room with a view
 

Speaking of landscapes and gazing, my bedroom overlooks a nun's convent (their cells, actually), a fact which has proven absolutely worthless in terms of inspiring me to anything resembling saintly behavior. My kitchen window, on the other hand, overlooks that part of the FIL's garden which he apparently regards as his plein air pissoir. Now that I've always found very inspiring--it's why I write this blog, after all.

But I wonder: to what heights of repulsion and wonder will America inspire me?

Will I be afflicted by a kind of reverse Stendhal syndrome, where instead of swooning over Botticelli's nymphs I'll faint dead away at seeing the People of Walmart in the--ahem--flesh?


Well, it being America and all, there's probably a pill for that.

Campobello