Siena

On a narrow street tucked behind the piazza Italians sing and dance and joy flies about. Siena, signature in its tranquility, is having a contrada moment, as one of the city’s 17 towns – they’re families, more so – hosts a dinner for local and international students, the pride of la Civetta (the Owl contrada) written in wide smiles and deep-dive helpings of polenta. It’s Saturday night, and a residential block has become a party: long tables defy the tilt and twist of the street, spanning my sight up left, where a speaker is a background singer to the jolly crowd, and down right and all around, where young people are gathered for the Italian centerpiece.

Two men of la Civetta stand at the head of the table, dishing the first course, cooked in family kitchens that reach back generations, with a passion that welcomes our group and warms the heart. We’re passing bowls of polenta down the table until they’re out of sight, and the Sienese are exchanging an energetic Italian that you’ll never tire of listening to. Its verbal distance is no barrier thanks to the gesticulations, changes of pitch, belly-laughs, demonstrations on how to mix the food before eating, and – aspetta, we’re out of polenta! A self-important wave summons more as a wine bottle runs dry. We’re quick to make sure that’s replaced, too. And we feel a part of something here in Siena, the Tuscan city we were lucky to call casa over the past month and a half.

Our group of twenty-two students arrived here at the end of January as strangers to each other and to Italy, but today we are friends to both. As the spread of the coronavirus has stoked health concerns around the world, most of our group has departed Siena, the place we found favorite osterias, formed bonds with shopkeepers and students of the city, and the place we made home. Our strong and smart group, brought together with laughter and connection and conversation during our time in Siena, has disbanded, and that hurts.

I write from the air, suspended between two places that both feel like home. I’m bound for home, of course, but Siena had been home and was by every expectation going to be home until May. I’ve just seen my second Roman sunset from a tarmac I never imagined myself towing. The view, bittersweet for its finality and its beauty, came after a bus ride from the terminal to an aircraft I never imagined myself boarding.

Both the bus ride and the sunset brought me back to places on which I’d prefer to reflect to the dimness of departure, the shadow of this shock.

On the Roman Borghese our group of eight travelers to the Eternal City are perched on a grassy ledge, buoyed by a feeling of success – we had seen and done all we had set out to – but beat from the journey. Backpacks become cushions, and with a lean backward, perspectives shift from the gardens below to the dynamic sky above, a gentle blue replacing a deep green. My mind is too busy to spell me for the sleep my body needs, so I turn to music and embrace the active stream of thought. Billy Joel sounds – now I’m thinking of home – as the melody of laughter from my right plays underneath. My eyes close intermittently, each time opening to the birth of a new sky, clouds thinner, sketches of pink approaching from the background. After an hour or so, the sky has taken on the pink-orange color as its whole outfit. My first Roman sunset.

In a quiet moment like this I feel a sated calm come over us. A wordless ease. A silent cohesion. Each falls into his own place, perhaps thinking of home, of past or future. Then there are the fast moments, the rush to catch a bus or a class, the far-too-early AirBnb checkout, or the uproarious staging of a baseball diamond on the piazza after all the lights of the city have flickered off, bar one blue strip above. You don’t forget these moments, the slow or the fast. In the quieted bus, its passengers either in thoughts or dreams, on a ride from a balsamic vinegar farmhouse in Modena toward Bologna Centrale, and in the worry-free kneading of egg and flour into fresh pici in a cooking class overlooking vineyards, energy high in the evaluation of friends’ handiwork, there are hopeful and good gazes at life that just don’t leave you.

I’m travelling from the terminal to a small German plane on the tarmac in Frankfurt, bound for Florence, where this journey will all begin. It’s the first time I’ve taken such a ride across the tarmac. It is a stunningly long drive. The tarmac is like an industrial desert, stretching indefinitely in search of this vehicle tasked with delivering me to my dream destination. I don’t claim to be a stress-free traveler, or a stress-free person, but, perhaps having in 24 hours already fallen under the charm of movement, I peer out the window on this short flight, gliding over snow-topped Alps, not with an eccentric anxiousness or a worried nervousness but with a confident peace. Siena, Italy awaits.

At a pace just besting those of bus doors on the Frankfurt tarmac, automatic sliders split for entry into Florence’s airport a few hours later.

“Ciao”— “Benvenuto” – “Piacere” – maybe three of the first words I hear, or say, as Matilde from IES Abroad Siena welcomes me to the program and to Italy. I sit in one of the 15 or so seats the airport has, and I talk with new classmates, soon to be friends. Each files in with a name, university, home state or city, and we take a first, small stride toward the kind of community we will build in a month and a half.

None of us have a clue of how good it will be.

We’ll share meals and wine bottles and laughter and stories. When it’s time to say goodbye, we’ll even shed a few tears. Easy coffee chats in the IES Abroad Center, simple strolls across the piazza, neck craning to add a new piece for mental storage each day, will be regularities.

The piazza, La Piazza del Campo, reveals more of itself each day. The universal meeting spot for all things – gelato, a beer, in recent days, a farewell. All of Siena’s arteries are pumped by the beat of it, pinned at its deepest point by the tower. Il Torre clasps all of Siena, holding the city and its people in her palm, drawing eyes from the tranquil piazza to her certain stance.

We were lucky to be a few of those people, the twenty-two of us, who called Siena casa, who skipped across that stage – piazza and tower, Italy in full form – most of our days in the past month and a half.

I’ve shared only a few moments here intentionally in the present tense, because that is how I continue to perceive them. They are written in us and between us as stories, and stories do not die. Stories persist where our studies in Siena cannot. These moments add to the chemistry of our young adult experience, and of life experience, a potent happening of people’s goodness, of people coming together. There were meals and moments that continue to live, connections across language and country code, lessons of a day valuated at a lifetime’s worth.

The last three days have been turbulent, and I won’t rush to say the next three, and beyond, will not be the same. But above the Atlantic Ocean, I know the bell in il Torre just chimed back at home for the new hour. Siena lies at rest. I’ll miss the sight of that bell from the corner of my bedroom window, where I could see the slightest movement of its swing in the centuries-old tower. I’ll miss Buongiorno in the mornings and afternoons, Buonasera in the evenings, Ciao at all times. I’ll miss it all, but I’ve arrived at a confident peace in knowing it cannot be taken away from me.

For it lives on in each of us.

The final ray of sunlight from a downing sun seen from the tarmac has long been left behind, the sky now having faded from the spectrum of color to a solid black. Rounding the final lap of this journey, I can’t get its brilliance off my mind, a singular, straight line piercing a darkening sky as we ran from it in our ascent toward the clouds, over the ocean. This plane will land, and the same sun will shine, that same ray showing itself in a different way.

A chapter of this story is carved as in the marble of our studied Renaissance sculptures, standing in meaning as the word Ciao means “hello” and “goodbye,” and as the sun rises for the morning and sets for the evening.

The first load of laundry is now emitting some humidity from a drying rack, and 10 days in Siena are now firmly in the realm of memory. Yet this semester is all future. 10 days in the charm of this city, under the certainty of its centuries-old structures and millennia-old history, and 10 days of material outsizing the space of a single blog, and all that’s left is promise.

Promise for more memories, sights, smells, and tastes. There’s the visceral wonder—the momentary joy, an unmovable image—and the lessons learned, the growth in coming to know new people and building community and that in meeting outsiders, people of a different soil and language, yet discovering we are inside of the very same world. Our unity as human beings may be found in the data or the surveys, but it may best be felt in these encounters on meandering streets belonging to a different national banner. You’ll find that, over all of us, the same sun rises and falls. The same moon shines at dusk.

To reflect on a week-and-a-half is to first arrive on bus doors opening, mind rushing but processing at a jet-lagged pace, and city walls soaring. We are in our new home, its brick face jarringly new to us, and it’s time to board a taxi toward casa because Siena’s streets cannot accommodate the proportions of a bus. Into the taxi we go. Our first sights of the city are the glances of a tired traveler through a backseat window. But they are sights with a stain, the macchiato in one’s caffé, a mark on the memory that refuses to fade.

We’re zipping and curving, riding hills as they rise and dip, taking unexpected turns on street names resembling poetry. Via San Pietro. Via di Porta Giustizia. Via di Silocotto. Casato di Sotto, our new block for the next few months.

If all the momentum priming a semester abroad carried the forward energy of a steam engine, we are now hurled into lightspeed, transported amid buildings far older than the Italian state which stamped my visa. Each building, I’ve learned, tells about its moment in history from the make of its façade. The result is something of a paradox: the disorder of the past, creating varied colors and textures, builds the brilliant scheme of a Siena reaching toward aesthetic perfection.

Meeting the challenge of Siena’s streets with rigor, our driver delivers us from the claustrophobic elegance of a cobblestone path into the expanse of La Piazza del Campo, an ellipse of fine brickwork, sun beating, il Torre immediately stealing my gaze above eye level. It’s an ocean of masonry, spelling the web of arterial streets with a calm center, a pumping heart where all meet as one. At this moment, it has not occurred to me that I will be traversing this place as I do a crosswalk on Fordham Road, a battleground of vehicles trying to best one another in the Bronx, each agreeing to a ceasefire while the signal invites us pedestrians to work toward our destination.

Instead of contending with eight lanes of traffic, I found myself wandering Siena on a desire to get lost, to achieve nothing, a few days after arrival. And so I did, achieving nothing and getting lost for a bit as I walked some city streets, each one leading me to a new fork, where I invariably made a choice without any real deliberation. I loved every moment of it. Anonymous, I was an earnest observer. Perhaps a true traveler.

The length of our stay here, between 12 and 15 weeks, is long so as to diminish the power of a day. The cushion of the weeks ahead can give a comfort both wonderful and still unsettling to me. For this semester should never camouflage into those past and future; never should it fall into the motions of typical college life. This semester ought to stand alone, in short. In saying this I mean not to imply pressure on enjoying every moment—an impossibility!—or seeing every gem of Europe or even Tuscany—also an imagination!—or to smile at each turn, be thrilled by every new sight. It is to say that each day should be appreciated, taken individually as a wonder instead of as a part of a longer stay, and all our days in Siena should be understood as one of a limited number. Rather than a pressure to feel anything—for our emotions may be indeterminable—I am initiating a pressure to realize.

To realize where I am, every day, and to stop and say, “Look at this,” often and intently.

Look at this.

In the mundaneness of laundry cycles or the headrush of booking a weekend trip to Rome, my two present tasks, I am cognizant that I will say goodbye to this petite washing machine in a few months, and, when reality tumbles into the frame of life, I won’t be able to peek at history by way of open Fridays and cheap bus tickets.

So I’ll hum to the churn of the washer, book this bus ticket, and go to the Eternal City. At every chance, I’ll let air flow into my lungs for a few beats, exhale, and continue striving for full days in Siena and abroad.