A four-letter Italian word for goodbye...

...reminds me of talking to the cab driver on the way to the airport. I waited for him outside the Collegio until 5:15 am, after a long conversation (in Italian!) with the sleepy dispatcher. When I climbed in I realized he was playing a Spanish song. I thought, this is my last chance to speak Italian for a few months, if not years. So I launched right in.
"Puo capire lo spagnolo?" I asked. (Do you understand Spanish?) He said sort of. I started translating the Spanish song into Italian, piece by piece. "The wounds of love..." The cabbie - who must have been 80 years old - threw me a worried look.
"Wounds caused by a boy?" he asked.
"Yes, yes, of course a boy," I said, excited that he was getting into it. "You know those things between a man and a woman," I translated the next part, since I wasn't sure how to say 'relationship.'
"How old are you, 18?" he asked. I took it as a compliment, usually people think I'm younger.
"No, no, I'm 20," I told him. He swerved to avoid a cat in the road. I went on with the song. "Why has this man told me these things that are not true? All I wanted was his love." There was a long, appreciative pause when I finished my heartfelt translation. He turned his full attention to me.
"You are young, you know," he said with a sigh. "Life is full of pain, yes, but you have your entire life ahead of you for pain."
And that's when I realized that he thought I'd been talking about myself.

That was my last conversation in Italian, which means it's time to wrap this blog up.

On that memorable night in Venice (five whole weeks ago!), someone asked me how many times I'd been to Italy. I told the barful of men "E mia prima volta." They laughed and told me that "mia prima volta" means "my first time" and usually only refers to one thing. After that, "mia prima volta" became a joke in our group of friends. Every time one of us did something we'd never done before, we said "oh, prima volta." Last summer, like this summer, I made it my goal to do something every day I'd never done before. My favorite memories of Italy are almost all "prima voltas," and I realize, looking back, why this game appeals to me so much. In the United States, I live cautiously. I don't follow unfamiliar men to sleazy clubs or bathe in public fountains or hook myself to belay ropes and sail down cliffs. But I wonder, sometimes, what I'm missing. Most of the things I did in Italy (not the things I saw, the things I did) were frightening, and I'm sure things could have gone badly. But they didn't. I didn't get assaulted, diseased, or killed. Instead, I found out what I'd been missing.