Robert Grafsgaard
Robert Grafsgaard
Monmouth College
Participant in the 2010 ACM Student Symposium on Off-Campus Study
Images from Italy
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At left: Video of Robert Grafsgaard's presentation at the Symposium.
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Images from Italy
by Robert Grafsgaard
Copyright 2010 by Robert Grafsgaard. Used with permission.
Hurried through the hills of collapsed escalators, I dragged in double-clutched claws my Sisyphean rolling boulder suitcase into the graffitoed on-rail office of a genial gypsy with begging accordion and open palms. I found it impossible, after arriving at the hidden hostel and soaking up the sweating sun in a single-sheeted, jet-lagged sleep, to do quite as the Romans do, wandering now through one of the many districts bursting with banks and cafés, for the Romans simply were not there. These industrious inheritors of Roman resolve, I was later informed, had fled the brick oven streets of the city to get in touch with their rustic roots among gnarled olive trunks and webs of tangled grapevines. My Italian, that is to say my ability to place a unique Mediterranean accentuation on such classic essentials as "pizza" and "buongiorno", being about as robust and palatable as an alleyway Birra Moretti, I sweated myself through the threshold of my first prezzo fisso, congealing at a small table to be ambushed by a sidelong stare and unexplained appetizers. After a three-course meal of ambiguous price and an ambiguous exchange with the centurion at the cash register concerning a three-course bill, I perspired with my traveling accomplice to get more acquainted with the owners of the haphazard hostel and to plan our next couple days in Rome until our rail trip to Florence, where we would soon chaotically congregate in ceremonious intervals with the rest of our comrades and hunters of culture, to prepare for the subsequent safari. Yet still in Rome, the hostel in question consisted of an empty room in the apartment of an American ex-patriotess who originated from among the skywayed, skyward cityscape of Minneapolis/St. Paul, the Twin Cities from which I also sprung. Her husband, born and forever Italian, spoke to me of valium and flights across the ocean. In gestures and meandering English cut by a questioning cadence, he recounted his many opiate-aided expeditions to the Twin Cities, which he referred to always as a single entity, fabled as Avalon and oracular as Oz.
Had this been my first finite stay in the eternal city, dropped ankle deep in that toe and heel country, I do not know what my response to the first frantic impulse of travel and terra (mostly) incognita would have been. Instead were memories, anticipation, familiarity, for it was the pervasive memories of my previous experience while on a family vacation to Italy a few years prior that urged me to revisit the country. It was on this vacation that I gained my first international experience (as a native Minnesotan, of course, I know better than to count Canada); I crossed the Grand Canal on the traghetto as it shoved itself against the marble banks in Venice; I was shoved off slender sidewalks by the fashionable in Florence; and I shoved my grandpa gray headlong into shutting subway trains in Rome. It was not until after internally navigating the great and terrible machine of the Leonardo da Vinci Airport like a mouse rushing through the rusting gears of a grandfather clock, waiting to fly off from this brief fortnight trip that I realized that it was entirely impossible for one to leave Italy feeling indefinitely satisfied. Arrived back home, in stories and reflections, I felt as if I had traveled only along the zipper track in that high boot of Italy. So among the cobbles, softened across centuries, and cool in the shadows of rouge-tiled roofs, there I left my promise of return.
But that is not what you came to listen about. You want to know of the introspection, the sacrifice, the internal journey of the heart. In truth, I am not yet fully accomplished. I'm still turning it over in my mind. A wise man once spoke yesterday of how we can only view our lives in posterity, these collected images that one day will make up the totality of our lives; it is only then that we can see and appreciate things as they were truly. So, let me share with you a few of the images of Italy which I have kept with me:
In a low-roofed sunlit alley, gathered like geese around breadcrumbs, a group of old Italian men stand conversing, ruffling their feathers for attention. As a straniero walks by, they silence almost at once. The man furthest out in the empty street nods, and gestures: "Buona sera."
Across the throng of tourists tossing coins for safe return at the Trevi Fountain, limitless locks are clasped around the rusting bars of an iron fence, a symbol of a young Italian couple's eternal love, their keys swallowed up by the eternal city. When the locks become too numerous, a dutiful shear-bearing Italian cuts them off one by one.
Watching the news at the dinner table, a woman starts to cry as she curses under her breath. She hates this city, this country, these politics. She loves her city, her country, her family.
Watching the tourists wander by from a street side café, a young man touches espresso to his lips for the first time. At that very moment the astral bodies whirling in their way about the heavens align, an ever-reaching Adam touches the eternal finger of God, and somewhere in a studio apartment beyond time and mortal toils, a barista sprouts wings and ascends to his reward.
And now, because I am still for the next few weeks a diligent classicist, and because it is a widely accepted fact that everything that is said in Latin sounds profound, I conclude:
Roma, Florentia, quicquid vostri iam imis mihi iaceat intus,
Sic iam iam altis in moenibus vestris manet pectus.
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Photos and the contents and materials in this presentation may not be reproduced or used in any way without the express, written consent of the presenter.