Cliches

       Since my first payment on this trip, I have watched every movie that I could find that involves Italy in some way. I had to make a stretch most of the time (Goodfellas counts right? Right?), but what more recent films about Italy have shown about Italy has departed from the Italians depict temselves.
       In Under the Tuscan Sun and Eat, Pray, Love (which has a lot of Neil Young songs on it's soundtrack for some reason), Italy is shown as this paradise for cuckqueaned divorcees. It's shown as this place filled with potential romance, classic art, and dark-haired, brooding men with hearts of gold, except for Julia Roberts who has to go to Bali to meet a Spaniard and fall in love there. As someone who is not divorced and is not looking for sense of identity in the middle of my life, I won't have to worry abut my writing falling in the mire of Mediterranean man's seductive gaze--even though it may be more profitable if that did happen.
      Another cliche would be that European culture is more genuine and less shallow than that of America. This is found in a lot of travel writing, but that may be due to some sort of pretentiousness found in the author. I have no idea about the existential superiority of Italy compared to the United States in terms of culture, but I assume that there are just as many shallow tourist traps and shyster dens in Italy as there is everywhere else in the world. I will keep an open mind, but I imagine great, unique experiences will be just as hard to find in Italy as they are to find in the US.

Italian Expectations

     I doubt Italy will be like the Fellini films I've watched over the years. As much as I would love to run into Guido Anselmi walking around Rome searching for inspiration or come across Gustav Von Aschenbach pining for love in Venice, I know that this will probably not happen.
     On some internal level, I wouldn't want Italy be like that. I don't want the place I am visiting to be like anything I have ever seen before. I don't want to see the inside of  Holiday Inn or smell the greased paper scent of a Burger King in the next five weeks.I have no bias towards these places while I'm home--I almost have to be--but I can see them while I am home.
     Coming from a place surrounded by the new and empty, I would like to inhabit a space where the buildings are older than anyone I've known and ruins preserved better than the cracked and mangled pavement in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot.
     So I may have the same feeling of regret and disappointment that Twain felt. And I'm going to stay far away from Pisa, because if I see tourists making doing the same joke pose of propping up the Leaning Tower, I will probably have an aneurism. I will try and search for what Spalding Gray called "a perfect moment" that will sum up this trip.