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.