I’ve been to many places in my life, in some of them I lived for a longer period, in others I just spent some time. Here, I’ll list those that were more significant and changed my life in some way. These places contributed to make me what I am.
- Milan, Italy
My hometown. Odi et amo. Love and hate. But mostly hate. This is where I was born and spent the first 19 years of my life, went to school, had my first friendships, first jobs, first memories. Not the first loves, though. Milan is a big city, full of possibilities, but for reasons not completely clear even to me, I have always hated it, ever since I was a little girl I knew I would leave as soon as I finished school. I also had some good times there, met some of the most important people in my life. But mostly this is the place where I have the saddest memories, and somehow when I think about this city, those are the ones that come up again. The mind works in a strange way. But what can we do about it?
As soon as I finished high school I ran for the hills, but even though I wanted to cut ties and leave it all behind, take off once and for all, my path has been full of second thoughts, comebacks and new departures. The thing is, when you want to jump somewhere else, you need a solid base under your feet, otherwise you don’t go that far. Several times I told myself I should never go back there, but then, in the end, in moments of discouragement and confusion, it seemed the only place I could return to. Several times I tried to make peace with it, and the truth is, I don’t think I actually managed to do that, but maybe I realized that it’s okay, I need to stay away from it, but without the pretense of cutting it off forever, because after all, it’s part of me. And we don’t always have to love everything that is part of us.
- Scurano, Italy
Scurano is a very small village in the middle of the woods of the Parma Apennines. My grandfather was born here and lived here when I was a child. It’s the place I associate with the happy moments of my childhood. I used to spend here every summer and other vacations as well. Here I met one of my best friends ever, the sister I didn’t have, the person with whom I shared the magic of being a child. We both lived a little bit away from the central square, so we grew up together, she and I, we weren’t that much friends with the other kids, especially me, who was very shy. We used to watch our favorite movies, like On Guard, The Three Musketeers, and Cutthroat Island. We would create games that nobody else understood, like the cardboard television and its puppets. We would ride horses and walk in the woods.
As a child, I dreamed of moving here, but my parents never wanted to. My grandfather had a big stone house surrounded by greenery and lived with his animals, a dog and a cat. To me, this was the picture of happiness. When my grandfather died, the house began to take on a ghostly or somehow abandoned atmosphere. As I grew up, the village in general began to seem like a boring place, I would often go there looking for the idyll of a time that no longer existed without finding it. A bit like Proust in the Bois de Bologne. Once we leave a place, maybe it really is impossible to return to it, because we leave a chunk of our life there. But the beautiful thing is that throughout our lives we can find new places and new idylls. My friend got married and had three children. For a while, we lost each other, but since the pandemic, we have found each other again and our friendship is stronger than ever.
- Standorf, Germany
The summer of my 18th birthday I decided to take a trip alone to Germany. I had been studying the language for a year, so I wanted to spend some time there, but in a cheap, authentic way, without spending a lot of money on a study vacation or something like that. About my history with German and Germany, I will talk in another dedicated article. Right now I wanted to focus on the memory of that summer. I learned about a platform called WWOOF, a website through which you can find farm work opportunities around the world in exchange for room and board. Exactly what I was looking for! So, after a bit of research, I found a farm in the small town of Standorf, on the border of Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria. I found myself thrown into a place trapped in the past, where there was no signal for cell phones and you had to use the landline to talk to people. My days were simple with well-defined rhythms. In the morning I would get up early, feed the animals and water the garden, then make breakfast for everyone, and then each day there was a different task, such as picking hay balls with the tractor or making apple jelly. In the afternoons I was free and could explore the surrounding countryside by bike, often I would go for coffee in Weikersheim, the nearest town with some facilities, or I would read under a tree. In the evening I would feed the animals again and water the plants, then have dinner with the family and go to bed.
I was only there for about a month, but it felt like a much longer time. It was the first time I organized a trip on my own, the first time I found myself in a place where people spoke a language I didn’t quite understand yet, the first time I felt I had a real job, connected to the land, to what really matters. There I met and became friends with the ex-boyfriend of the daughter of the family I was working for, and for the first time in my life, I had a very strong connection with someone from a different reality than my own. He came to see me every night and we spent hours talking about us and our lives. He taught me how to drive a car on a rainy day through the fields. We would listen together to the strange records he had in the car, I remember one song in particular, it was called “What is Rock” if I’m not mistaken, but I wasn’t able to find it again. He lent me a box set with the entire Doors discography for when I was doing chores around the house. I especially liked the song Love Street. It was a half-hearted love, never lived out because I was young and insecure and didn’t think I deserved something good. I think I hurt him and I still feel sorry when I think about it. But he and that summer are among the happiest memories I cherish.
- Stirling, Scotland
When I was 21, after quitting my job as a waitress, I decided to set out again and hit the road. I’ve always had a fascination with Anglo-Saxon landscapes; my childhood dream was to attend an English college, something that never happened. That’s why I decided to go to Scotland. There, thanks to Workaway, I found a job as a volunteer in a hostel in the small town of Stirling. As soon as I landed in Ayr, I immediately felt a magical connection with the land, the landscapes, and the atmosphere I was breathing, just as soon as I entered the hostel I knew I had found what I was looking for. A family, a community. Some of the people I met during that time became very important in the years to come. Perhaps for the first time in my life, I understood what it meant to feel part of something, to feel happy, and at home, I knew how to find comfort even in sad times. I still hadn’t gone to college, but that was by far the most formative year of my life. With other hostel residents and guests from all over the world, I had inspiring conversations every day, about life, love, our emotions, our desires, our fears. Every day I would walk to Wallace Monument, I remember the greenery and the crisp air. It was a meditative moment.
For various vicissitudes, this idyll also ended. All the people I had there left, I had to quit my job at the hostel because of rifts with the manager, and so I found myself wondering if it made sense to stay. Today I tell myself it might have made sense, but I will never find out because I decided to leave. I thought I should start college and have a more normal life, according to society’s standards. I was very young and still had a lot of barriers to throw down, but deep down I knew I had found a golden nugget to put in my pocket.
- Barcelona, Spain
The relationship I had with Barcelona was very strange. I lived there for almost four years, and yet, now that I’ve left, it seems like everything went by in an instant. Here I experienced the pandemic and a great loneliness. Here I lived a pretty big heartbreak. At the same time, however, it’s a place where I met a lot of people and where a lot of “magical” things happened to me, like that night when I went out to take out the garbage and then found myself at the opera house, in the third row in the stalls. That’s where I discovered the power of my determination and discipline, as I managed to finish college remotely, studying on my own while giving online language classes.
But how did I get there? At 23, after a mistaken return to Milan, I needed to leave again. I had a friend from my Stirling days who lived there, and at that time I was dating a Spanish guy. So I thought I would go to Barcelona for a month and see what happened. I was studying in Milan, but I realized that I had been able to study even remotely and give my classes online. So without thinking too much about it, I decided to stay. I never thought that Barcelona was the place for me, but on the one hand, I just needed to get away, on the other hand, this city really has something magical about it, catching you and engulfing you like quicksand, but in my case it never really made me feel at home. Pandemic aside, it’s a city of parties and fun, full of people who are looking for something. But I always perceived it as a place where I couldn’t really fit in, my apartment never felt like home, people seemed friendly but elusive, I always had the constant feeling of running after something I couldn’t catch. So many times I thought about leaving before I really did because the quicksand was gripping my feet. But then, on a day in March, after emptying my room and selling all my belongings, I got on a high-speed train never to return.
- Chios, Greece
Along with Standorf and Stirling, Chios is another one of my happy memories, another reality where I felt at home and where I found what I have always been looking for: a community, the feeling of living in a village. But how did I get there? Let’s proceed step by step.
After finishing university a couple of years ago, I decided to take a nice vacation, I really needed it after Covid, dissertation, and company. I chose Portugal because everyone spoke well of it and it was cheap and close. I wanted it to be a trip without too many plans and structures, lived by the day. It was the first time I felt like I was really taking a breath after four years. At the hostel in Lisbon I met a person, and for some reason, I had the feeling that we wouldn’t separate for a while, even though he would soon be moving to another continent for work. He would stay in Europe for a couple of months, though, and I chose to spend them with him. We traveled together for a few weeks, then we parted, and when we met again he told me that he had found a job at the refugee camp in Chios. And so I decided to follow him, by then I had fallen in love. I remember the intensity of those days on that tiny island, tossed between my emotions, the beauty of the island, the sex, the pain of the separation that was coming closer. He was about to leave, so I left first.
But a couple of months later I decided to return and work in the refugee camp myself. I was never good at erasing people from my life and heart with a snap of my fingers. Even though he was gone I still needed to be there, to continue to experience that intensity, despite behind a veil of sadness. At the camp I had a simple life, teaching English to women and helping in the camp as much as I could. With my colleagues, we had a daily relationship, made up of small habits that had become familiar. The stories I listened to in the camp were often sad, difficult, but every day it was good to see the same faces, to feel that I was part of a small village, to find that belonging that in normal life I found very rarely. I felt useful and active, I felt meaning in what I was doing. We didn’t need much, just going to the restaurant and going swimming after work was enough. I left because the volunteer life isn’t sustainable in the long run, because I had unfinished business to finish in Spain and Italy, because maybe it was time to part with the memory of that person who had brought me there. I thought about it many times in this year and a half. Somehow I felt I had gone in the direction I wanted and then I turned around, and yet there were things I had to take care of. Chios was another piece of my puzzle. A very important piece. Surely there will be other pieces that will latch on to this experience. I’ve never liked the image of life as a road, a linear and logical path, I much prefer the image of a jigsaw puzzle, with different pieces we assemble in a sometimes random order, but which all together eventually create an image. That image is us.
I’m still looking for the next important place in my life, the place where perhaps if it’s the right one I’ll stop and build a house with the bricks I’ve collected around over the years. I’m sure I will know it when this place comes, but one should not create too many expectations. There was a teacher I had in high school who used to say that expectations are made to be disappointed. And although she was a bitch, she was exactly right about that. I’ve had a fairly nomadic couple of years, but I need some peace of mind now. We’ll see where the job I find will take me and where the people I meet will take me. We’ll see what the next piece of the puzzle will be.
