My parents split up when I was 17. I was 6,000 miles away at boarding school. When summer break came I returned to the realization that I no longer had a home. Fast-forward 7 years and I am living in Florence, Italy. My family is Italian – Sicilian actually – and I’d dreamt for years of seeing the old country. Maybe my yearning was a misguided attempt to discover a home, a safe place, I no longer felt I had. Back then I didn’t know that home is a place inside you more than anything else. Like the kingdom of heaven, or Mecca, or if you believe the mystics, the whole universe. I was too young and cocksure for any of that. So I was a man without a home. Florence felt like a place I could make home. I loved the architecture and the knowledge that I was walking the same streets that Michelangelo and Dante’s feet had graced. The stones of which, were older than my country. I quickly made friends with the other students. My girlfriend, Summer did not. When we had first arrived I had strongly believed that she and I would one day have a home of our own. But the longer we stayed the more I wondered. My new friends and I explored the city every day and quickly became regulars at gelaterias, restaurants, and bars all over town. Soon we would get a free bottle of wine just for walking in the door. At the end of the summer quarter my cousin, Jackie, flew out to travel with us. We had planned a two-week trip so she could see as much of Italy as possible. Our trip would culminate with five days in Sicily. Summer and my roommate and good friend, Jay, would be joining us. We showed Jackie as much of Florence as we could in three days and then left for Rome. Several drunken nights and hungover days of tourism resulted and then we headed south. In Naples, Summer and I got in a fight over how excited I was to spend time with Jackie. She was intimidated by anyone that gave me a glimpse at life outside of her. The spellbinding grip she’d had on me since the first moment I had seen her was beginning to loosen and with it my ties to my perfectly planned life. We made an uneasy peace before we jumped on the night train to Sicily. Sleep eluded me. Partly because of the drunken Neapolitans screaming out the windows at every passing town, somewhat because I contemplated a lifetime with the sleeping beauty next to me, but mostly because I was nervous. I had no idea what to expect. Would Sicily be like the movies? I hoped it was something similar to what I saw in The Godfather. No matter how many times my dad sighed and talked about the absolutely debilitating grip that power takes over our souls while we watched them, there was still a part of me that glorified the life those movies depict. I silently laughed as I thought about the times, as a kid, when I had gotten in trouble for refusing to rat out my friends. At dawn, I felt the train being disconnected as sections were being loaded on the boat. I excitedly woke everyone and we left our cabin to go up to the top deck. We started making friends immediately and soon one of the guys our age had bought us some arrancini for breakfast. I sunk my teeth into the fried balls of cheese, risotto and sauce and loved them immediately. Marcos told us that he was Sicilian and Spanish and was going to medical school in Spain. He was meeting his family at their resort home on some small islands off of the coast of Sicily. I fired question after question at him about what to expect. Fortunately he was a gracious host and never seemed annoyed. It didn’t matter that the boat docks in Catania and my family called the tiny town of Lentini, 30 kilometers south, home. When I saw the first speck of land ahead of us. I grew silent, a rare state for me. I felt a strange yet familiar feeling. A rightness. Not like being right in an argument, but that things were right. The way they should. I was exactly where I was supposed to be. I was home. I am sure that my feelings that day can be passed off as someone longing for something and finally attaining it. Maybe a linking between my personal history and family history. That may tell part of the story but there is more. Travel penetrates places within our souls that would otherwise be unassailable to us. Opens us, if we let it. Illustrates our connectedness to those of other cultures. Pulls the individuality that we of western cultures so highly regard straight out of us and reminds us that we are all the same. Our guttural utterances may not carry the same syntax, but the smiles, anger, love, fear, trust, brokenness, lust, and divinity behind them bear the same weight. It took traveling to Sicily for me to find that openness. The heaviness of family history is what finally pried the lid off of my emotional jar. It made me realize that I loved this beautiful girl but she was not the one for me. Helped me understand that there was no room in my life for anyone that wanted to change me. Showed me that if we look within, those open, safe spaces are there. Always available if we will only take the risk to release to them. Maybe we do not have to travel to find them, but I have found that it certainly helps.
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