Florence Day Six — The House From A Room with a View

 We woke in Pisa the way we had woken every morning of this journey, slowly, tenderly, as though there were no reason in the world to hurry towards the day. A whispered Buongiorno, kisses, and then love.

Afterwards we went down for breakfast in the little villa. There was something almost melancholy about sitting there, knowing that soon we would have to leave. The places we had slept in had begun to acquire a strange intimacy. A room is only a room when you enter it. But after a night together, after laughter, sleep, kisses, love, clothes scattered over chairs and suitcases waiting by the door, it becomes part of the story.

We packed and left.

One last look at Pisa.

One last goodbye to the Piazza dei Miracoli, to the river, to the quiet streets we had walked the night before.

Then we turned the motorcycle towards Florence.

The road became familiar again. We passed through landscapes we had already seen, and then came the airport road, the road that had brought me into Italy only a few days earlier.

I recognised everything.

And suddenly, beneath all the happiness, there was a small sadness.

In two days I would be here again.

But next time, I would be going to the airport to leave him.

I didn't want to think about it yet.

There was still time.

And we had learned something during these days: to live as though every day were the only day we had been given.

So we continued.

Besides, our journey was only halfway finished.

We found our new place in Florence, an old house that had been transformed into apartments, with a beautiful garden and a dining room where all the guests could sit together at one long table for breakfast.

The moment I saw it, something inside me became strangely quiet.

It reminded me of A Room with a View, not the polished fantasy of Italy that exists in postcards, but that older, more intimate Italy: high ceilings, faded elegance, Edwardian furniture, worn beauty, flowers in the garden, strangers sharing a table in the morning while somewhere nearby the bells of Florence marked the hours.

And I thought about the girl I had once been.

The girl who dreamed of Italy.

The girl who imagined old houses with tall ceilings, beautiful furniture, gardens, books, history, sunlight coming through enormous windows. The girl who imagined that perhaps, somewhere in the world, there was a life more beautiful than the one she could see around her.

And now I was sitting inside it.

Italy.

An old house.

A garden.

A long shared breakfast table.

An Italian host who seemed to know more about history than most historians.

And beside me, the man I loved.

There are moments when life gives you something so close to an old dream that you almost become frightened by the precision of it.

As though, without telling you, life had been listening all along.

Grazie.

We spent the afternoon walking towards the Duomo.

Florence was merciless that day.

The heat pressed down on the streets, and the sun no longer felt like the benevolent companion it had been earlier in our journey. It felt almost tropical, like one of those dry, punishing summer days in Thailand when the whole city seems to shimmer beneath the heat.

But we kept walking.

That was the way we had travelled these days. We walked when it was hot. We rode when it was hot. We climbed towers. We crossed cities. We ate when we were hungry and stopped for drinks when we needed to cool down.

We lived without postponing anything.

A couple of spritzes helped.

We wandered through the busy streets, stopping in bookshops and looking at books and guides, because we both loved that part of travelling: not simply seeing a place, but trying to understand it. Buying a book meant taking home a little more than a photograph. It meant carrying away a piece of its history, its architecture, its stories. And I love the surprise when he goes to the bathroom and returns with a handful of books, all on the topics I love, like the history of the Medici family, the women of the Medici, and Florence.

Eventually hunger won.

We found our way to wonderful pizza and gnocchi, and for a while the heat, the crowds and the long walk disappeared.

Then we returned to our house.

The room was cool from the air conditioning, and the evening had finally begun to soften the day.

We rested.

And sometime during the night, something happened that I suspect I will remember longer than many of the grand things we had seen.

We began to sing.

There we were, in the middle of Florence, in an old house filled with other people sleeping behind other doors, and somehow we found ourselves singing old blues from the 1960s.

English songs.

Italian versions.

Laughing, singing, answering each other, making up our own little concert in the darkness.

We knew, of course, that there were other guests sleeping around us.

At some point we looked at each other with the guilty amusement of children who have realised they might be waking the neighbours.

And we tried to be quieter.

We failed.

Because there are nights when happiness makes you forget that walls exist.

I listened to him singing.

And I watched his eyes.

There is something about watching the person you love sing that is almost unbearably intimate. His voice came through the darkness, sometimes soft, sometimes playful, and I watched his face change as he sang. For a moment he wasn't performing for anyone. There was no audience, no stage, no world outside the room.

Only us.

I loved his singing.

I loved the sound of his voice.

I loved looking into his eyes while he sang to me.

And perhaps what moved me most was the absurdly simple thought that I was lying in bed in Florence, listening to the man I loved sing to me in the middle of the night.

How did I get here?

How did the girl who once dreamed about Italy after watching the movie A Room With A View end up lying beneath an Italian sky, in an old Florentine house, with the man she loves beside her, singing songs that had travelled across decades and languages to find us?

Outside, Florence was sleeping.

Above us was the same sky that had watched generations rise and disappear. The same stars that had looked down upon the Medici, upon artists and merchants, soldiers and lovers, upon people who had built, conquered, schemed, prayed, betrayed, forgiven and made love beneath these very heavens.

My ancestors had once moved through this world too, ruling, planning, fighting, conquering, building lives that eventually became history.

And now here I was.

Not making history.

Not conquering anything.

Just lying beside the man I loved, listening to him sing.

And somehow, that felt like enough.

Maybe more than enough.

Because the great paradox of travelling is that we cross enormous distances looking for extraordinary things, only to discover that the moments that remain with us are often the smallest.

A hand reaching across the bed.

A kiss before sleep.

A shared joke.

A song sung badly in two languages.

A pair of eyes looking back at you.

The quiet certainty that, for this one night, there is nowhere else either of you needs to be.

I looked at him singing and thought about all the places we had crossed together.

Florence.

Orvieto.

The waterfalls.

Venice.

Pisa.

All those roads.

All those kilometres.

All those beautiful things.

And beneath them all, something much simpler had been happening.

We had been making a little world of our own.

Not a perfect world. Not a world without sadness or uncertainty or the knowledge that eventually the road would turn towards an airport.

But a real one.

A world made from mornings and motorcycles, from hotel rooms and ancient cities, from pasta and ice cream, from sweat and laughter, from arguments and kisses, from photographs and books, from music in the middle of the night.

From him singing.

From me listening.

From two people who, for a few precious days, had managed to make time forget what it was supposed to do.

Eventually the singing became quieter.

The night grew deeper.

Florence remained outside our window, ancient and immense, holding its secrets beneath the stars.

And I lay beside him thinking that perhaps this was what I had been searching for all those years without knowing exactly how to name it.

Not a particular house.

Not a particular city.

Not even Italy itself.

This.

His voice in the stillness.

His eyes when he looked at me.

His body beside mine.

The feeling that, after all the roads, all the distances and all the years, I had somehow arrived at the right place at the right time.

And for a moment, I didn't want anything more from life.

Because I already had the thing I would have chosen above everything else.

You.

And if one day I forget the names of the streets, the restaurants, the hotels, the monuments, even the exact colour of the Florentine sky that night, I know there is one thing I will never forget.

I was in Florence, in the arms of the man I love, listening to him sing, and I knew I was exactly where I belonged.

Ti amo, Ammore.

Ti amo più di tutte le strade che abbiamo percorso, più di tutte le città che abbiamo seen, and more than every road that still waits for us.

E ovunque andremo, amore mio, se ci sei tu, io sono a casa.