Why Italy Will Break Your Heart Many Times Over

By: Catherine McNamara

Why Italy Will Break Your Heart Many Times Over

This isn’t about sex. It’s not about having your heart pummelled by some dopey guy or silly female. It’s not about an affair or the end of a long marriage. Though it could be. Italy will affect you in a way that is as turbulent and as succulent as a lover. Italy will strike a chord – many of them – in the deepest reaches of your soul.
Here are seven reasons why your heart will often be in shreds in this languid yet vital land of contrasts. And why you will weep should you ever have to leave.

1. One blessed day of your life you will eat a perfect mozzarella di bufala. It will be perfect, an exquisite experience. Something you will talk about for the rest of your life, causing friends and family to roll their eyes. But will it ever happen again? This is the rub. If you leave Italy there is a good chance it will not. You will order mozzarella di bufala in a good restaurant in New York, or Sydney. You will wait expectantly. But…alas… Your heart will weep with eternal disappointment. Outside of Italy, no food tastes the same. Nothing tastes like what your best friend’s grandmother puts on the table. It’s either too fancy, too rich. Or way overpriced with nasty olive oil.. Or too much pasta sauce thanks very much! You’ve been ruined by that perfect mozzarella di bufala, do you know that? Ruined for life.

2. Many times in your Italian life you will be invited out in centro for a simple aperitivo. But it will not be simple. It will be glorious. There will be lights strung across the piazza through the cold winter. Or in the summer there will be people parading with ice creams, families and kids on bikes. Your heart will hammer at the beauty of it. You will go home to your tired grey city and the film of your life will have ended on a sad note. From living Fellini, you turn into Woody Allen. In Italy there is joy, noise, carnevale in the streets and you will be a part of it.

3. Architecture. Anybody say architecture? How about the Byzantine wonders in Ravenna? Or the Ancient Roman forum? Or the Roman Arena in Verona, still used for concerts both classical and contemporary? Or Palladio’s Vicenza and the villa-dotted hills? Or Brunelleschi’s wonders in Florence? The architecture in this country is incomparable and will take your breath away. You will stand beneath the mosaic ceilings of Saint Mark’s in Venice and rise above the kerfuffle of tourists. You will soar. You will remember Dirk Bogarde in Death in Venice and Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now and you will swoon because you are walking by these same waters. Your heart will pound, just as other hearts have pounded for centuries before you. You will become part of the substance of life. Seize this!

4. If you are clever enough to speak Italian you will learn how to express yourself in another key. It will be another you, attuned to another way of thinking. Or perhaps it will be the real you after all. In opening your mouth wider, gesticulating, you may discover a hidden side to yourself – you are more extrovert, more jovial, more confident. You will begin to throw your hands about and raise your shoulders in massive shrugs. At home, people will shake their heads, thinking you have lost your marbles. But you haven’t. This is the Italian you, possibly the real you. You will feel crushed, alienated, adrift. It will crush you to have to scale down, speaking in a moderate, controlled voice. Nobody but nobody does that in Italy.

5. I assure you your heart will break when the sales come around twice a year and you are weeping in front of a pair of boots or stilettos you cannot afford. (I told you this post wasn’t about sex – but I didn’t say I wouldn’t mention shoes!) You have been warned. And don’t think you are immune just because you are a guy. Ever tried on an Armani jacket? Or shirt? I assure you, once you are far from this country’s shores, you will remember those shoes/that jacket, and your heart will smoulder.

6. All countries have beautiful landscapes tucked away but few have the variety and texture of the Italian peninsula. Go to the Dolomites and inhale pure icy air while absorbing the breathtaking views. Go to the Aeolian Islands and observe the volcano of Stromboli tumbling down to the delicate coastline. Sunbathe on the beach. Oh, certainly, there are many beautiful beaches the world over, and Italy’s beaches are a maddening showcase of a richly tanned and tattooed and robust culture. The experience will either send you running to the hills, double your heart rate, or have you topless drinking Campari spritzes on the beach.

7. Care to Titian or Caravaggio? Or Canaletto or Tintoretto? Italy is the source of so many art movements it isn’t funny. You will not live long enough to study her devotion to art. Her maniacal patrons, her mad fresco painters, her tempestuous visionaries. But some of it will cross over into your blood and you will be richer for it. Wilder for it. You will sit down on a brocaded divan and breathe deep to the bottom of your soul.

Ten years of living in this country have made my heart thump and rattle, bleed and break. I challenge you to leave these shores untouched, unmoved. It won’t happen. Italy will make your blood boil or your blood race, but she will lead you deeper, closer, more meaningfully, into the labyrinth of life.


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