Lombardy — Returning To Italy (Finally!) In A COVID-era Travelscape

Milan, September 10th, 2021 — started my Italy-return with a flight to Milan: a stepping stone to Sicily. Until I landed, I didn’t think I’d actually get back to Italy. After canceled flight after canceled flight (and nearly two years later), I finally made it back, and this is my first journal entry from that triumphant return, one that encapsulates an overwhelming sensation of relief.

I’ve never liked Milan, but being back here feels like getting coffee with a friend with whom I fell out of touch. Time has replaced her flaws with an elusive, nostalgic glow, softening rough edges just enough to bestow upon her something akin to magic. Magic, because being with her contradicts the rules of time, bringing into the present something that existed in the past, in memory, in nearly two years of reflecting on what was supposed-to-be. Magic that manifests by bleeding what once-was into the potential of what now could-be.

Granted, it’s a planned coffee date, but one you don't believe will happen until it does, because how can someone who exists in memory be put before you now, when her edges have softened but yours have hardened and reformed, still yours but almost indistinguishable from who you were the last time you met? Edges you forget belong to you the moment you set foot on familiar ground, sliding back into old habits, wanted conversations, beloved idiosyncrasies that come back harshly but naturally, in the form of strengths you forgot you had. Because while COVID-19 has exercised certain muscles — resilience, self-understanding, compassion, patience — it’s weakened others: independence, curiosity, control. 

Perhaps my idea of magic is nothing more than exhaustion or relief from the fact that I’m here in the first place after two years of setbacks: rejected Visas, failed funding, canceled flights, COVID, closed borders, health barriers, more canceled flights, rewritten plans, a lack of closure. A waiting game. Reverberation after reverberation.

It’s funny how time can make such a difference. In 2019, I was on these same streets with my mom, preparing for a beginning, and now I’m here, again, preparing for an ending or, rather, a bookending. Back then, immediately out of college, being here felt like a precursor to the rest of my life. I had plans to live abroad and stay abroad and start projects contingent on place. 

But place was pulled from me, something I’ve struggled to make peace with, even now. I’ve adapted the best I can, and returning here feels like something between parentheses — not real enough to stand as its own sentence, not unreal enough to be excluded entirely. A thought, that if it continues long enough, could make me forget it wasn’t my point in the first place, because after pages and pages, the first parenthesis disappears, freeing the fragment to exist as its own sentence.

The changes are more obvious in the little things. I get tired easily, I don’t have the stamina for crowds and long days and overlapping stimuli the way I did before the years of reclusivity and isolation. I don’t think this is a negative, but rather a larger realization that my traveling, just like my life, isn’t about checking off milestones. Not once did I think of tourist checkmarks when I was home and restructuring my plans. Instead, I thought about the little moments: the savored meals and the long walks with no agenda, the street musicians with smiles infinitely larger than the narrow alleyways and the small children yelling in Italian at a vocabulary much more advanced than the language I’ve forgotten in the in-between.

So I don’t mind when I’m too tired to research the best restaurants in the city or traverse more than a few feet from my dusty budget hotel room. I go to dinner at the first place I find and it’s fine, it’s decent enough food, and though somewhat touristy, echoing with more French and English than Italian, I don’t mind, because after so long of being in a homogenous place with homogenous people, even sitting in a tourist trap feels authentic. In this mid-COVID world, I don’t mind being around tourists, I don’t mind stalling my search for “authentic Italy” to sit in a restaurant with foreigners because they, like me, are here and that makes them worthwhile. There’s a resilience among travelers right now, like everyone is in awe of having the chance to roam this country, and it’s interesting to think that my neighbors eating their overpriced carbonara have made it here the same way I have. We’ve all made it here in spite of — or even because of — everything the past year-and-a-half has forced us to endure.