Beautiful Things

I was just thinking about Italy; the air, the sea, the country side, the beautiful villages. 

What fun I've had in Italy. How many times have I stood opened mouthed at the beauty? How much have I eaten there?

The sun is different around the Mediterranean, I can lay in it all day, the Greek Islands, in particular – fake tan for a few days on my sun deprived skin, followed by SPF30, of course. The air is lighter, the sun kinder, the air is fresher, the light softer. I go a golden brown, tanned like a, um, er, I’m struggling with a PC way to finish that analogy.

People have said that when I am tanned and dressed all in black, well, I have been much flattered and just a little embarrassed.

Any wonder why the Italians, as a whole race, are beautiful; sun, sky, food, beauty all around them. They live in paradise for anyone who hasn’t been to see for themselves. 

I remember the first time I visited Venice, as an impressionable 18 year old boy, I was convinced they were a genetically superior race. I lived a bit of a solo life travelling around by train with a back pack staying in youth hostels. Just picking up suggestions of destinations every day from other people I met and then just setting off to those places. I didn’t really know my arse from my elbow. I travelled alone. I spent most of my time on my own. And even with all those men around me, I didn’t hook up with anyone. I was a baby. Scared of nearly everything. Truly another life time ago.

I few years later, I bought a second hand 2CV with a girlfriend and we drove all around The Continent, extensively in Italy. That night we stayed in separate sex dorms in Venice. I was in a gigantic dorm room, where there were four of us right in the middle of an otherwise shut down bunk room, late in the season, the 3 other guys speaking French to each other, to which I drifted off to sleep with a view of the main canal from my top bunk bed. It is one of my very favourite memories ever. The purity of the beauty was just breath taking.

Then Matt and I spent 6 months there, driving a midnight blue Fiat Barchetta with a chrome luggage rack on the boot, tasting the local produce like I never thought I would. For six months, not long ago, Matt and I were tearing the place up. The Italian guys were drawn to us like I never expected them to be. One guy said it was the two of us in black swim trunks on the beach that caught his eye. “Aussie boys,” he repeated.

Lionel, the blond American boy with muscles on a GAP year we met in Rome, who fell in love with both of us and never wanted us to leave him. We spent weeks with him. Squeezing him into our little Fiat as well as us was a trip in itself. Somehow, he knew how to acquire pot, he had a knack for it, sniffing it out, seemingly, with little effort. The three of us got shitfaced in the Italian countryside, lying in the grass together under the Italian sun. When we left him, he got really drunk and cried. We got tearful letters form him saying his life had lost all meaning, and he didn’t know how he was going to go on. I told him to get an English Bulldog, to cheer himself up, and he got a puppy he called Enzo that he said always reminded him of us. I loved that.

Bolzano. Lake Como. Milan. Verona. Venice. Bologna. Florence. Possibly my favourite city in the world. Tuscany. Piza. And that tower. Incredible. Rome. Magnifique. Naples. That teenage stall holder, presumably bored, jerking off at his stall on the side of the road. Pompei. Sorento. Positano. Reggio Calabria. And it’s dark, swarthy men. 

On the beautiful beach at Capo Spartivento that 20 something fisherman, Antonio, who spoke no English but somehow knew, and knew what he wanted. He was particularly taken with Matt, like who wouldn’t be. I am. If I have this right, Matt was the first guy he'd kissed. The thee of us would sit on the beach late into the night. We taught him some English. Matt knew a little Italian. 

What was that nearby town that had a thriving tourist industry until the locals decided they didn’t like the tourists and they shot a few and the tourist stopped coming? What was the name of that town?

I have had a thing for Calabrian men ever since. I can spot one at a distance.