When the plane wheels brushed the surface of the runway for the last time, and the wings of the aircraft caught the first currents of the wind, I felt a lump rise in my throat.

And I swallowed it whole. Because this was my last time on earth before Rome, and while I did not chronicle my life in terms of before and after Rome, I somehow knew that this would be a major turning point for me.

Of course I was nervous as hell, mostly that I wouldn't be able to communicate with someone and that I wouldn't be able to find a  pharmacy - farmacia  - that sold deodorant. I'd left mine at home and had been traveling for 24 hours.​

But no adventure would be complete without a tiny bit of fear. Just enough fear to get you off your seat, out of the comfort of your own living room and out into the great, wide, scary  world. 

Just enough fear to smile broadly at the smallest joys, to thank strangers profusely and count your blessings when you check to see if your passport is safely stowed away in your money bag for the hundredth time that day.

The rising is the fear flying up and out of your mind, swerving in and out of fluffy cumulus clouds and through your ears. 

All you can do is jump on for the ride. Taste the unknown -at once unfamiliar and tantalizing. It's the addrenulum of change that keeps us rolling. And now Rome  awaits. 

I did what I often do when entering new situations. I looked around, observed, said little and showed even less emotion.

The unfamiliar isn't scary when you're looking at it straight in the eye from the vantage point of your breakfast table.

The clinking of china resonated throughout the room. It was real china, and even if the coffee came from an instant coffee machine, it tasted delicious. Flavorful. Piping hot; just how I like it. 

​Maybe the sun will rise today, maybe it won't and it will rain. I half wonder and half don't care at all. The weather and people alike do as they want and we are left to watch them both with amusement and a little bit of fear.

​I know so little. about this land, Italy. The internet is a treasure trove of information but sometimes is also a desert devoid of knowledge, like water. Who knows how to find either source (rhetorical question). 

I Google search frantically: "Places to visit in Rome", "Areas of interests in Rome", "Best coffee shops in Rome". Valid searches, all of them, but they reveal the limits of their imagination. One has to let go and just roam. Not that you want to get lost, per say (or maybe you do), but to find the tibits of rich knowledge that construct the very fabric of a culture. 

I'm rambling, and my cappuccino is almost finished. Foam sticks to the edges of a tiny, glass cup. I always wondered why the cups are white when they get so dirty from the coffee. And white plates, too. All too pretty and dus​

I've walked every day until I can walk no more. Feet aching, thighs burning, my phone barely touched. 

It's half intentional, half unintentional, my minimal use of my smartphone. I can't talk, text or use the web without connecting to WiFi. So I walk instead. Get lost. Stare at buildings and in windows and people. I unabashedly people watch. How funny, I wasn't like that before. 

​And the pictures, they are still coming more slowly then  anticipated. I don't feel that burning need to capture every nook and cranny of a home or a square. The hunger comes with familiarity with the landscape.

For now, I become acquainted with the woman that is Rome. I get to know her children, her lovers, her casual friends and circle of admirers. Maybe this is a slow beginning of a friendship, but no one is counting the days to the completion of the relationship.

I feel like I'm living suspended between the reality of my home for two months and the reality of the home I left behind. My future is still cloudy: at once unclear and crystallizing. 

My confidence grows. I begin to open my tongue and taste the words of everyday Italy: buongiorno, buonasera, buonanotte, si, no, grazie, prego and voglio (I want), Roma...They taste sweet, like a sweet wine that's been warmed under a summer sun. Fresh. Lingering. 

Walking into every church brings up feelings of sorrow in my throat. I didn't expect this.

Death. Tombs in walls. Crypts. The connection to the loss I have experienced is ironic, but unintentional. 

My heart is drawn in to the music vibrating off of marble and varnished wood and my face, music that rises like the incense's mist that I don't see. Mass is not in session. But still I can smell a tangent hint of it in the air, and it lingers like a memory both sweet and sorrowful.

Because Tata and Papi are smiling at the nativity. I see Tata's lips - carefully covered with a layer of pink lipstick - part, and her eyes beam as only hers could behind gold-framed glasses. 

​I see Papi take his restless hands out of key-jangling, M&M-filled pockets and cross them in front of his Mariners windbreaker.

Head bowed, hat off, I see him pause before every alter.

​The Madonna at each church beckons to me to rest at her feet. Not as a Pilgrim, but as a child. I have found a safe place.

Be at peace.

​I can't read the plaques and signs but I can light a tea candle and say a prayer, or place a euro coin in the offering slot, as if to do so will bring me closer to God.

​I didn't come here for God. He doesn't live in the church. The people do.

Lucca, Tuscany region of Italy 

​Being in an area where the WiFi is spotty at best and you have to pay extra for data has forced me to evaluate how dependent I am on a tiny, electronic device called the smartphone. Do I truly need it? Can the locals - people - help me navigate instead of a GPS machine? 

​It's tempting to use the data. The addiction to staying "connected" to the rest of the world is real, coming at the cost of failing to connect on a simple, human level with the people and culture of Italy. 

So I make myself stow my phone away in my purse and take out a pen and paper. Maybe to write or observe is still a form of isolation. Is writing a lame attempt at engagement while still failing to talk, to make eye contact? 

With eyes more often up then down, I make interesting observations about cultural norms in Lucca. I wonder what the element of trust is in this walled city. As open as I wish to think I or the U.S. is, there is not this type of honor system present in any transaction that I had previously witnessed. Are Italians in Lucca as a whole more honest, or am I just pessimistic,stingy and continuously doubting the ability of man to be trustworthy? 

​It is hard for me, I have realized, to understand a society or culture without first completely dismantling a very natural and very human, initial reaction: to use my cultural framework to evaluate,judge and perceive. And it is incredibly exhausting to have to take fifteen minutes rather then five to look at a place and try to understand it's patterns of behavior, use of space or cultural norms. 

​This journey accross the world is as much about discovering myself as it is about

An oasis of light, music, coffee and books spilled into the street of a quiet, Tuscan town in the gray light of a January afternoon.

The light was coming from a four-story, yellow building that opened into a one-way street. Luccalibri Di Ciancarella Talitha is easily accessible to the drivers who park their vehicles in the parking areas bordering each side of the street and the pedestrians on the opposite side of the road, many of whom were taking the path running parallel to the city’s wall to navigate their way around the town.

The warmth that enveloped me as I entered the shop was followed by a moment of surprise. After studying abroad in Rome, Italy for about a month, I had grown used to the Italian method of drinking coffee: go to the bar, order your espresso, drink it standing up and leave promptly.

While a part of me appreciated the process of learning another way to enjoy the ritual of drinking coffee, another part of me missed the comfort of the American café, filled with tables and chairs that beckoned you to sit and relax, or bring a laptop and get some work done while enjoying your beverage.                                    

But Luccalibri – which, interpreted, means “Luccabooks” – was unique in that while it offered the traditional, Italian coffee experience, it also provided a space for people to come together and engage for extended lengths of time. 

The quiet swinging of the door opening preluded the entrance of

customers of various ages and in various modes of dress, many in groups or in pairs of two. Some sat in tucked-away corners under a window covered in black

grillwork. Women knitted in a cluster, talking in low voices.

An inaudible mummer filled the space that was half coffee shop and half bookstore.

The steady heat of music vibrated off wood: wood floors and bookshelves, wood transformed into paper and paper into pages and pages into stories.

Walking over the light wood floors, I approached a glass case containing a small

collection of pastries: butter cookies and biscotti, carefully arranged. The dark eyes and almost-there smile of the barista greeted me almost immediately.

I heard “Ciao” spoken more often than “Buonosera”, which is a more casual way of saying “Hello” in Italian, like the English word “Hi”. Perhaps the word choice indicated a greater level of familiarity and a potential relationship between the barista and the customer. The word was spoken differently than it is in Rome, with a wider “a” and a drawn-out “o”.

The barista moved fast and softly, seeming to know your questions before you asked them – he responded to my unspoken query by telling me, “You can pay afterward” – and weaved deftly behind the bar, among the tables and couches and the customers reading, scrolling on their cellphones or talking in clusters and pairs of two.

“Arrividerci”, the customers said often after they greet the barista, ordering their espresso or buying a book from the bookstore. The greeting means “See you later” in Italian, a term most often used when saying goodbye to someone you will see again soon.

I brought my cappuccino in its small, white Illy mug to the bookstore side of the shop and sipped it among the volumes on politics, cooking and children’s stories.

While the book section on the left side of the shop was well stocked, the space remained empty of people. Instead, patrons congregated among the books and wicker chairs on the right side of building. Shifting slowly, with hands held close together, they engaged in conversation.

It was now five o’clock in the evening and people were saying, “Buonosera” in greeting. The sound of voices and the murmur of movement grew and

I've been living in Rome for a little over a month now, and my time here so far has added hundreds of photographs to my phone's storage. Family, friends and random strangers can view images of Rome's most notable places and spaces on my Instagram page. 

But over the last couple weeks, I've been spending some time thinking about how my photographs of Rome influence how others are seeing this city. 

Images are powerful, and a quick Google search of "Rome" will bring up all the stereotypical photos that tourists and excited study-abroad students like myself eat up. But these images are not going to help someone understand a little of the personality and nuanced dynamics of Rome and Roman culture. 

What are aspects of Roman life and everyday culture? A couple thoughts pop in my head: waiting for buses that are more often late then punctual; hawkers selling everything from rings to selfie sticks to phone adapters. Fire dancers at night at Piazza Navona. Jaywalking and standing at bars, sipping cappuccinos in the morning and strong espresso in the late afternoon. Teenagers gathered closely around the edges of monuments centered in piazzas around the city. 

​As a photographer, do I see the stereotypes? Why am I seeing them? I wonder if I look for them deliberately or if it is an unconscious move to document the obvious. And what scares me the most is that the images I am sharing are reinforcing stereotypes.  

February 23, 2018

​

Stripes like bars line the shirts of the gondola drivers, who stand with incredible balance at the rear of the boats. They guide the narrow, slight vessels through alternately reflective and murky waters. An occasional foot is lifted against a stone ledge extending into the canal from a building, and they push against the structure’s lower walls, causing the gondola to slide away from the rough, stone edges and into the middle causeway of the canel. 

The water is like a person: complex being whose mood changes and whose face makes little attempt to hide its emotions. Each canal that curls around Venezia's many islands has its own expression: illuminative and reflective, murkey and smokey, a mirror for the sky above and the life around. They are shallow beds of liquid which allow you to glimpse a shadow of their floors. 

Sounds are at once everywhere and nowhere. Early morning stillness pervades the spaces, where even the gondola drivers are not shouting and talking to one another. There is a scuffle of feet on the smooth, stone walkways littered with a rainbow of confetti left over from the previous night's Carnival revelry. 

Vegetable vendors are calling out prices from their boats moored to streets. And as the morning wakens, the throngs of people crossing narrow bridges and alleyways grows thicker: a mass of faces and masks and occasional luggages rumbling over stone ridges. 

​See the sun rising over the tips of a bridge ahead. 

Buongiorno, Venezia. 

March 5, 2018 

​

You can’t completely leave a place when the place has not left you.

Not a metamorphism, not quite a transformation. The impact is subtle, translucent. It dwells in the fuzzy world of feelings, emotions, perspectives, inner urges and moods.

Once you enter the place, the place enters you.

At last, my eyes shut for eight hours each night and I wake with a spring in my step, my brain quieted and my body at rest.

But these are physical, physiological changes that can be seen and felt more sharply and explained more clearly.

The ones that dwell in the subconscious are easily as influential, but we discredit them because they do not have the guts to come out in the open.

We’re too afraid to open the door to our inner fears and longings and let them out in the open of who we are.

Without even realizing it, I allowed myself to open those doors, and – over the last few months – I’ve become better acquainted with both myself and the world.

 Maybe it’s been Rome, but I’m pretty sure that it’s a combination of