Tu Vuo' Fa' l'Italiano

🗓 posted Jun 12, 2025 by Josh Erb
🔢 1402 words
🏷
a dispatch from: Florence, Italy

I've been focused on some other work recently. Mostly continuing to query for my finished novel manuscript and feeling my way through a second manuscript that's entirely different. It's new and exciting, there's no pressure to think about selling it yet. I'm having fun!

Last month I also managed to place my first piece of writing that wasn't a personal essay. Please excuse this shameless plug, but it was fun to write satire and have other people like it enough to give me a bit of money and share it with the world.

But this week I have been sick. Head and body aches had me in bed watching old Adam Sandler movies — genuinely surprised at the run of hits he had in the 90s — and using my brain as little as possible. Today I'm back on my feet, but not feeling up for anything too strenuous, hence blogging about some recent travel.

Last month we spent two weeks in Italy. We were there primarily to attend the wedding of some good friends[1], but we also took some time to visit parts of the country we hadn't been to or seen before. Over the course of our two weeks we went from Rome to Florence, before ending the trip zipping around the Tuscan countryside in a little blue rental car.

Extremities of Time and Place

As I mentioned in a previous post, this trip to Italy was our first time outside of India in around 9 months. That's enough time to adjust to the daily life, to develop expectations around social interactions, and to be — and I mean this literally — acclimatized. So it's not surprising that the experience of traveling and arriving in Italy was a fairly jarring one.

Let's start with the external. We were totally unprepared for the weather. I had brought one sweater with me, expecting that I'd need to use it one or two times, but both Rome and then Florence, to a greater extent, were cold enough that I ended up wearing it every day of the trip.[2] I had worried, and this trip confirms it, that my time in Mumbai has made me incapable of enjoying any temperature below 75° F. But also, it was nice not to be drenched in sweat immediately whenever I stepped outside.

Traveling with a toddler, I had also been worried that the jet lag would be tough. But as it turns out, the time difference between Mumbai and Rome is only 3.5 hours. Roughly the same as a trip between New York and San Francisco. I don't recommend 12 hours of travel with a small person who just wants to run around and can't be reasoned with. But I was pleasantly surprised that all of us, toddler included, only felt the effects of jet lag for the first two days.

Our flight plan had us hopping over the Alps on our way to

The World Through Stendhal's Eyes

This was my first time to these parts of Italy. Previously, I'd been to some northern cities[3], and I hadn't been too impressed. But that was long ago and I was a different, younger man. This time, Italy certainly made an impression.

Here's what I'll say, in India when you're out and about, the scenes are chaotic and overwhelming. There's no place for your eyes to rest. It's noisy, hot, and sticky most of the year and dumping rain on you for the rest of it. It is, despite the very real privileges we enjoy here, a tough place to live. So it goes without saying that the short drive from the airport in Rome to the apartment we had rented was overwhelming. The city is beautiful and clean, a living monument to its own history. A history that predates the European discovery of the continent I grew up on, 2 of the 3 dominant monotheistic religions, and the English language (in all its forms).

Fontana di Trevi, only visible briefly before 8am after which it is consumed by a mass of human bodies.

The view of Rome from Terrazza del Pincio.

Inside the Colosseum

Workers for a sense of scale.

Some columns in the Roman Forum.

We did a Vatican tour with a stroller. Honestly, wouldn't recommend it.

The effect compounded when we took the high speed train North to Florence. Florence is perhaps one of the most beautiful cities I have ever been to. Although, traveling with a toddler, we had to resign ourselves to skip the art museums and only do one to two things per day. So, it's funny to say, but our experience in Florence revolved mostly around which public parks we would visit each morning before nap time.

The best view we got of Duomo di Firenze was a rooftop cafe above a shopping center.

Duomo di Firenze from street level.

Looking at central Florence from a nearby hilltop. (This little hike broke our stroller).

Everyone talks about Michaelangelo's David, but not enough people talk about Giambologna's Heracles and Nessus.

Of course, in all these cities we were surrounded by hordes of tourists. Florence was maybe the worst of all, due to its well established reputation as the fertile ground whence sprang the Renaissance. And I used the word "surrounded," but of course we ourselves were tourists and a part of the same hungry beast choking the streets of the historic city. Despite myself, I couldn't help but be reminded of David Foster Wallace on the subject:

To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing. [source]

We spent the last few days of out time in the country on a bucolic "agriturismo"[4] where we watched our son play barefoot in the grass. We sat comfortably in the shade of olive trees and watched as pillowy, unhurried clouds crept across a clear blue sky. Writing this now, I'm jealous of myself and ashamed that I didn't appreciate it more in the moment.

The view of Tuscany from one of the places we stayed.

The Turbulence of Reentry

So now we're back in Mumbai. We flew out of Florence in the early morning and it was another perfect day. 75° F with no humidity. When we landed in Mumbai 12 hours later[5], we landed in a thunderstorm and our bags were sticky with humidity when we collected them.

It was hard to come back knowing that we probably won't see Italy again for a long, long time. Going from 9 months of India to Italy definitely sharpened the contrast and made Italy feel even more idyllic than it might have if we had come from a different context.

But time moves forward, despite our protests. We're back in Mumbai now, the pangs of nostalgia growing less pronounced with each day that's placed between us and Italy. In less than a week, the monsoon is likely to begin and we'll be hunkered down looking at pictures from this trip, daydreaming about the possibility of another.

  1. Congrats again, Subhan & J.P.!

  2. I am very thankful to the vacation stays we rented for having laundry machines.

  3. If your interested in a very old, very quickly written blog about this from when I was 19, you can find it here.

  4. In English, this could be translated to "farm stay," as it's essentially a working farm that has some rooms for visitors, but the Italian version is so much more than what that translation implies.

  5. There are no regular direct flights between Italy and Rome so despite the proximity, the travel days were quite long.

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