IX.viii. Ambitions

"My travels in Italy make me be more original, more ‘myself’. I am learning to
look for happiness intelligently."
- Stendhal

It wasn't without ambition that I had my friends visit, for I had taken it upon myself to convey to them, even in the most fragmentary, summary of ways, the wonder that I felt in the face of history's creative masterpieces. I had long since decided that what I have to share with the world isn't easy to convey, isn't particularly proletarian or immediately useful, but remains important, and can still serve to change humanity, albeit in a small, arcane, and counter-intuitive way.
    My friends are not ordinary people, because we had long since abandoned the idea of associating with normalcy. This is not to say, by any means, that I chose them, or that they chose me. Rather, we became friends, some through the unique odyssey of high school, others in later years, by shared experience and a certain collective aversion to plainness. We are a circle, a kind of informal, unannounced, but still plainly existent order that has become one of the chief pillars my life. I wouldn't tell a single one to his or her face, but they are the heroes that inhabit the fantastical theatre that consciousness has created around me.
    The way I wanted to explain Italy's wonder to my spring visitors is a microcosm of what I want to show the world, to make people aware of the greatness that has preceded them and throw into doubt this stable confidence in the present. No easy task even for my inner circle, those people I feel such a connection with as to assume that we must share at least some part of the same psyche.
    The month of May, then, was a key moment of opportunity in my youthful life. Beyond art, or maybe bound up together with it, I wanted to show the highs and lows of culture that make life in Bologna worth living. "This is the land of plenty," I couldn't help repeating as we strolled through the vegetable markets alive with spring colour and then stopped to look at the immense variety of fish, still squirming, freshly plucked from the Adriatic. I also insisted on a detour through the insalubrious Via Petroni, the chaotic clothing market, and the areas of the city notorious for the line of grime, a pronounced, consistent, and unexplained black smudge visible at about knee level on the sides of buildings. We even stopped for the requisite aperitivo, which eventually became a free dinner, at the Café dei Commercianti, where we saw former prime minister and European Commissioner Romano Prodi swiftly walk past surrounded by a large posse of suited men.
    I organized two trips into Tuscany for my friends, one to Pisa and Lucca, and the other to Florence. Our two groups met up on a Monday morning train from Florence to Pisa, somewhat a somewhat unremarkable setting for such a reunion. Two days later we were in Florence together, jumping unpredictably from the least serious of chatter to earnest sightseeing. I couldn't help divulging just some of the twaddle my studies had taught me.
    "The technology to replicate this six hundred year old feat, to cast such huge doors in one piece, does not exist today."
    "Pisano was the first artistic personality of the modern world."
    "Savonarola turned the most sophisticated place in the west into a fundamentalist theocracy overnight."
    The platitudes kept flowing from my lips. I found that my desire to be didactic was often foiled by my, by our, tendencies to act outrageously funny when in a group. It had been, after all, a long eight months of living in different yet parallel worlds. Having collided together in central Italy, the old and new were having a ball.