After two days of constant stomach butterflies to finish 2 months and 25 days of her absence, I was able to meet my girlfriend Melissa in Florence. The Great Jan Gadeyne’s Roman History class that usually captures 100% of my most nerd-focused attention was for once not enjoyable, and I spent the time bouncing my knee, my mind wandering about seeing her instead of what it would be like to have walked the paths of the Palatine 2,000 years ago. But the time passed and I eventually made it northwards to the city of the High Renaissance.
I pulled into the Firenze Santa Maria Novella station and power-walked to the Duomo calling Melissa as I walked. I thought she would be close but it took her about 15 minutes to get there, leaving me squirming with anticipation on the steps thinking every person was her. Finally, she came squealing across the square and we had a meeting to put old movies to shame. It dawned on me while I was waiting on the steps that I was just completely dreaming and that this wasn’t really happening. I was proven wrong as we collided on the steps of the greatest church of the Italian Renaissance.
It turned out that our friend Abby had gotten a few too many free bottles of wine at their hostel and had gone to sleep by 10:30 so just the two of us walked and talked all night long. We got kebabs and ate them on the steps of Santa Croce while some Italian youths played soccer in the stone piazza that was ten short hours away from being packed with the chaos of daylight commerce. While we were sitting there, a man stumbled up to the foot of the steps and looked at three empty beer bottles that had been abandoned on three consecutive steps. After a second, he reached for the second one, which at a second glance had about two finger-widths of beer left, and picked it up. Yes, about ten steps later, he put it to his lips and tossed it back without regard to Italian classiness. Our friend of the stairs had no worries about being without his sacred bella figura as he zigzagged into the night.
We then wandered back to a park not far from the hostel and added another bench to our collection. We talked there, in the cold, until about 3:30, finally heading back for a few hours of sleep.
The next day, we conquered the stubborn ATM’s that had been overly prevalent and miserly the night before, allowing me to bail Melissa out of being stuck in a foreign country with no money and a frozen ATM card, which I was relieved to be able to do. We then got pasta for breakfast and Abby had her first blood orange. Its hard to qualify what we did that day beyond just walking around a great city, stopping in an occasional church with each successive rain storm, and beginning to fill in the last three months of each others’ lives, with which we are usually so familiar.
I left late that afternoon after another lunch of pasta with plans for the girls to meet me at Roma Termini the next night. On the train I called Melissa and gave her a plan to be a failsafe in case something went wrong when they got to Rome. I was the only one with their hostel information so if my phone died or there was a badly timed transportation strike, they would still be able to reach me. For something to be further detailed in another entry, I am very glad I made this call. For friends as guests in my adoptive home country, I wouldn’t have liked them spending a night effectively alone without being able to reach me.
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