Before starting out...

I'm going to Italy with a suitcase full of clothes, but no cell phone or laptop. I'm already feeling naked. Will this put me in touch with history? Ariella says I'm going to Italy to "drink and fuck." But really, I'm doing it for the history. Here's what I've heard of Italy's checkered past.

Imagine it's a Sunday morning in 1327. All Italy's eligible singles are packed into the Church of St. Claire. Francis Petrarch looks up from the service and catches a glimpse of Laura ___. She's only 19, but she's already married to another man. He doesn't know her name, her age, her marital status, but he's instantly in love. Over the next fifty years he writes her hundreds of sonnets, many composed after her death in 1348. Along the way he gives birth to an art form (the word 'sonnet' roughly translated means 'please sleep with me, strange woman.') Which means that Shakespeare, Marlowe, and hundreds of shady men in dark nightclubs have been following in Petrarch's footsteps (some without even realizing it.)

The Catholic church has a lot to do with Italian history. Erica Jong said, "Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights, Italy gets the Catholic church." She also said, "Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man." I've met men who felt guilty, so it's quite possible the church isn't a circus after all. This trip will be my research.

And finally: they drink coffee out of glasses. Glasses made of glass. This happens a lot in Europe, I'm told. But as many Americans tell me every weekend when I work the Saturday night shift at Ambrosia, it doesn't happen in America. In fact, coffee in glasses is un-American. Unpatriotic. Subversive, unsupportive and liberal. Hello, I tell them, at least I'm not burning flags on the lawn. What's the difference, they want to know. (All right, so maybe I'm exaggerating...)

They have statues of male genitalia everywhere. So says my friend Tara. But maybe she was exaggerating.

So it looks like I have my trip planned out for me.

I'll be staying in the North of Italy, at the Collegio.