I suffered Italy withdrawal in the mornings and not every morning. The worst was the second morning home, when I went to get groceries at a jetlaggedly early hour and found myself tearing up next to the display of balsamic vinegar. “I was there,” I thought to myself. “And now I’m not.” I held the tears back but I stopped to buy a pair of cappuccinos on the way home and burst into tears and laughter as I handed one to my husband. “A nun made it,” I sobbed. “She insisted I bring it to you.”

Odd images popped into my mind in the mornings – the red rectangular button you press on a Florentine bus to let the driver know you want to get off at the next stop. “If I know how to do that,” I reasoned with myself. “I should be there, shouldn’t I?”

I feared that showing people my photos and telling the stories of where we went would circumscribe my memories, that soon I will remember only the story I have told people. I want to remember the random things – that the man who sold me mimosas was from Bangladesh and had no idea why he was selling them; the McDonalds in Rome; the woman on the Spanish Steps whining into her cell phone about Dad, using words like pissed and peeved while she stood in the midst of beauty and history; the con artists whose portraits and purses were displayed on bed sheets so they could quickly be picked up whenever the police in their Armani suits came looking for them; the police who smoked, faces tilted to the sun, on duty; the enormous gnarled worm of a tree in the nuns’ garden, held up with iron posts and fences – it was wisteria, the gardener told me. I have no photo of this tree – this forty foot dead-looking tree, brown and twisted and apparently dead, that ran parallel to the garden path. The quick green lizards I saw: one in the Florence garden, and one on the patio stones in Parma. The prostitutes, blue-black skin, their little charcoal fires at the side of the road; how I began to read the thriller book that night that started with the idea that there was no cure for jet lag like a paid blow job; I suddenly had a deep fear of crime, of being mistaken for a prostitute, of being attacked while we slept. The little fires and the chairs they waited on in the midst of an idyllic countryside – that’s what did me in. It seemed utterly unsafe and utterly incongruous. I asked a lot of questions about the prostitutes – the relationships between them; how someone would decide which one to choose; where the best curves of the road were and how you got the best real estate; whether they actually were safe; what alternatives were they escaping from; who benefited from them being there; was there any joy; could they see the landscape; where was home and where had home been. I wanted to smooth out the edges, the complications. Parma doesn’t like prostitution so this was why they were where they were; the chalky white soil of Parma; how funny it was that we were in the country, two kilometres from a suddenly appearing small town, a suburb disconnected from a city; the fluorescent lights of the trattoria, the shy ignoring of us by the proprietor of the same trattoria who checked on every table but ours, who pretended we weren’t there, who was so evidently shy of us because he spoke no word of English; his slim daughter, black bra under white blouse, graceful and eagerly intelligent, whose English was slightly better than our Italian; the way signs on the highway near Pisa gave not one second of warning – it was the only place we ever ever got lost, and we got lost three times, having to drive long distances out of our way when we made a wrong split-second decision; our maps had routes but no highway numbers on them at all; it was navigating by instinct and the sun.