01/03/23
Shortly after I wrote these tips for solo travelers last year, I learned another important piece of travel advice for those going it alone: Know when to call it quits.
Last summer, my three-week live-work stint in Sicily was supposed to culminate in a 9-day vacation/whiplash tour of Italy with stops in Naples, Positano, Florence and Rome. But relationship trouble had been brewing back home all summer and by the time I headed to Italy’s mainland, I was nursing a badly broken heart.
I had gone out of my way to pack light for that month-plus in Europe. I was so proud that I’d brought nothing but a carry-on containing “5 easy pieces,” as a friend of mine had dubbed the capsule wardrobe I created for myself. I’d move through my total of 5 stops unencumbered, with such ease!
But by that third week in July, checked bag or not, I was physically heavy. Movement at all felt insurmountable.
I made it to Naples, where I dragged myself through a day trip to Pompeii, only to fight tears all day and not care one lick what the tour guide was saying. I didn’t want to cast that veil of sadness over all my would-be memories of Florence and Rome, too. I imagined that every time I saw an image of Florence or Rome in the future, I’d only remember how broken I’d felt when I was in those places. So I packed it in. Changed my ticket. And went home.
And I am so glad that I did.
It would have been completely within my nature to have said, No, Sonya. Be strong. You can do this. Don’t let a man ruin your trip. But, in fact, by going home, I didn’t let him ruin my trip.
I didn’t have any room in my heart for the expansive joy that travel brings me.
Now, five months later, I am back in Italy to complete that leg of the trip that I didn’t do back in July. And the first source of travel joy for me was the simple feeling of empowerment I got from coming back here to do this.
When I travel, the most joyful moments are usually small, unremarkable ones. The ones I can’t photograph. Sure, standing face to face (or more like face to kneecap) with Michaelangelo’s David was a weighty moment, but the one I’ll remember most will be this one: striding across the Piazza del Duomo at 8am, before it filled with tourists, precisely when the church bells started to ring. At this moment, the bells weren’t a spectacle for outsiders (except for me), but just the sound of the start of another day in Florence. All around me, individuals (not families on vacation or tour groups following a flag-carrying guide) moved in different directions across the piazza to start each of their days — untold different days, many of them probably mundane like my own days often are back home.
And I had been allowed a window into it. I was somehow (miraculously, it seemed!) permitted to observe a few bits of their morning routines. They drink tiny espressos quickly and standing at café counters rather than carrying large lidded paper cups with cardboard sleeves through their entire commute; drivers maneuver cars through tiny passages with no apparent rage at the pedestrians who choose to walk in the middle of the street rather than along sidewalks that are barely wider than an American curb; street peddlers glance up at the cross atop the basilica and make the sign of it across themselves, kissing a thumbnail before they set up their mobile souvenir shops for the day. All of this is backed by the church bells.
I can’t say why this moment — more than the Botticelli paintings, the Colosseum, David, and the Vatican — moved me so much, but it was here on the piazza that I was overcome with that expansive joy. And gratitude. To be alive, to have been given a life at all, to live in this world, and to get to see so much of it.
