About 15 years ago, while on a semester abroad in London, five friends and I decided to take a 12-day trip to Italy. It seemed like the most reasonable way for six people with no money and limited life experience to spend their fall break.
We did little in the way of planning, other than to book a €1 flight to Milan and look, however briefly, at a map to gauge the city’s proximity to Rome. We burned the rest of our energy figuring out how to get to Gatwick airport for our 5:30 a.m. flight without using public transportation, which was not available that early in the morning, or a private taxi, which we could not afford at any time of the day or night.
We gave almost no thought at all as to what we were going to do once we reached Milan. At the time, I distinctly remember thinking this was not only perfectly fine, but advantageous. Somewhere along the way, one of us was told that “the best deals” were brokered upon arrival, which was an idea that we then repeated often and with great enthusiasm to one another. Traveling in a pack of six, we believed, would only work in our favour. It seems counterintuitive today, but I guess that logic holds up. If half a dozen people have to camp out a train station floor, it’s the making of a good story. Do it alone and it’s just vagrancy.
The leader of our group was a guy named Tariq. He got the job mostly because he owned a PalmPilot. It was 2003 and this was exactly the sort of cutting edge technology that we needed to neutralize our procrastination.
“OK,” Tariq said as he stood outside the terminal in Milan, tapping on his screen with a plastic stylus. “We’re going to take a bus to the city, get off in the middle, walk to the train station and then catch an overnight train to Rome.”
What Tariq lacked in specifics, he made up for with conviction.
“Which bus?” I asked.
Tariq pointed down the street to bus that was approaching the terminal. “That one,” he said.
“How do we know that’s the right bus?” I asked.
“Well we don’t,” he answered. “We don’t really know where we’re going, so what’s the difference?”
There’s actually quite a bit of difference – or at least that’s what I would say today. But back then, I didn’t have much choice but to go along with it. After all, I had arrived without a plan of my own and I couldn’t even begin to make one up on the fly. Even if I did, I was likely to be overruled. I didn’t even own a cell phone.
Luckily, we were traveling during low season in a post 9/11 world. The streets of Rome were mostly empty, as were the hotels, bars and restaurants. This was bad news for the travel and hospitality industry, but an incredible stroke of luck for us. In fact, it was the only way we ever could have managed to finagle our way into a private train cabin in Milan and score a pair of 3-star hotel rooms once we stumbled into Rome the following morning.
I don’t remember what we did that first day in town besides go to McDonald’s for breakfast and eat at a Chinese restaurant by the train station for dinner. In between, a child pickpocketed Tariq’s passport, which he got back on account of Tariq being smarter and stronger than an 8-year-old. If my memory serves, it was Halloween and four members of our group went out that evening in search of a costume party, despite Rome being in the holiest city in the world. I chose to stay back at the hotel, where I proceeded to have a panic attack in a bathtub. This tour of Italy was feeling very, very wrong.
If you take issue with what we ate in Rome, wait until you hear what we did. In a word, nothing. Don’t get me wrong, we went to all the famous sites – the Colosseum, the Sistine Chapel, the Forum – we just didn’t go inside. We couldn’t afford to. Admission was always upwards of €10, and our budget barely cracked 30/day, including accommodation. Gelato, on the other hand, was about a dollar. So, more often than not, our version of sightseeing involved buying a cup of ice cream and then taking a lap around the perimeter of whatever famous attraction we should have been visiting.
I know that sounds like a big mistake, but trust me when I say we weren’t the only ones making it. I can still remember standing outside the Colosseum with my friend Mona, ice cream cone in hand, asking her if she wanted to go inside. A very lazy debate about whether or not we should fork over the equivalent of $15 to tour one of the most iconic structures in the world ensued. Then, as if on cue, two other twenty-something American tourists walked out and stopped right next to us. They were male and, in an effort to impress us, offered us a review of the place.
“Don’t bother,” on spat, barely able to contain his disgust. “You can see it just as well from out here.”
“So not worth it,” the other agreed.
And that is the story of two American idiots who went to see the Colosseum and two even bigger American idiots who didn’t.
So I never went inside the Colosseum. But, I did make it to Pompeii. I have Tariq to thank for that. He put us on a series of trains and ferries early one morning and insisted on bankrolling for the whole thing since I was the only member of the group who agreed to join him.
A site visit to one of the world’s most famous natural disasters is perhaps not the best idea for someone who already had one panic attack on the trip, but I considered it better than the alternative, which was touring Vatican City with the rest of the group. If I was going to spend a day memorializing human suffering, I’d prefer there was a volcano involved.
My friends and I were in Italy for almost two weeks. We traveled from Milan to Rome to Florence to Venice and then back to Milan. For each leg of the trip, we showed up at the train station without tickets and arrived in the new cities without room reservations. Somehow, we never hit a snag. I got used to Tariq asking, “What’s the worst that can happen?” and, in time, stopped answering with a laundry list of examples. Turns out, our pack didn’t have much to worry about – not during low season in 2003 at least.
That’s not to say we didn’t cause our fair share of trouble. In Florence, three members of our group had the bright idea to break into the hotel kitchen for a midnight snack. They got caught almost immediately, which I don’t think happened because they were being loud in the basement so much as it was finally quiet upstairs. Thankfully, the receptionist responded not by throwing us all out, but by giving them a bagful of bread and cheese and other assorted snacks to take to their room. It was a kindness one of them repaid by dropping a packet of jelly on the steps and then accidentally stomping on it with a pair of Timberland boots.
Meanwhile, in Venice, Tariq and I got fined for riding the water taxis without a valid ticket. I was both unconcerned and unrepentant until I heard the inspector use a word that sounded an awful lot like “police,” at which point I coughed up €40 and offered a middle-aged man a knockoff Diesel watch to cover the rest of the fine. He declined and Tariq had to pay the balance on my behalf.
On the morning of our flight back to Milan, we overslept, waking up mere minutes before our train was to depart. All six of us threw clothes and books into whatever bags were available, tossed 50 bucks on the reception desk on our way out the front door and tore through the streets of Venice like a pack of wild animals with suitcases. Actually, come to think of it, that was pretty much the norm for us.
Ciao, Italy. Veni, vidi, vici and all that.
When I look back on that trip, I often say that I “did Italy all wrong.” I missed out on the food and avoided the art and ignored the history. It’s true that my friends and I did the best we could with what limited resources we had, but that’s not much consolation today. Our best didn’t turn out to be very good.
Now, as I’m preparing to visit Italy again, I find myself very concerned with “doing it right.” For weeks, I’ve been looking forward to eating fresh fish and black ink pasta and washing it down with a bottle of local wine. I have train tickets purchased in advance, hotel reservations booked and a “skip the line” pass to the Colosseum. I might have been to Italy once before but this time will be different because I’m going “as an adult.”
Johann is coming along, which will help advance that narrative. He is very much interested in adult things, such as ancient walls. When I asked him why, he offered an extremely detailed explanation that involved the Latin word for concrete. Luckily, he’s interested in other things too, such as fountains, the most famous of which he offered to list in chronological order along with the names of the Roman emperors responsible for their construction. Before he could even get started, I held up one hand and told him to save it. “I would rather be surprised,” is how I put it. I would also rather only have to hear it once. As far as age-appropriate travel activities goes, it seems to me that the pendulum may have swung too far.
The more I remember my first trip to Italy, the more I come to appreciate it. One of the best things I learned while spending a semester abroad was that doing things a different way is not the same as doing them incorrectly. My first tour of Italy wasn’t “all wrong” so much as young and fast and cheap. Absurd as it seems now to go to bars and clubs instead of churches and museums, eat ice cream for lunch and skip wine tasting in Tuscany, I’m glad we did it the way we did. History and art and culture will always be around, but I only had the chance to see Italy as a young, broke, clueless 20-something once.
Carpe diem might be a great motto for travellers far and wide. But there’s certainly nothing wrong with a little carpe noctem.
You just made me wonder what happened to my sense of spontaneity and adventure. 20 years ago, I spent 8 months backpacking round Asia without planning or booking anything, plus I’ve had several trips to Europe the same. It was brilliant and I wouldn’t do it now.
Maybe I should. I want that sense of adventure back. Carpe noctem, indeed.
I agree. There was something really fun about the “old” backpacking ways. But I think times have changed. With the internet, it’s so easy to find a cheap room AND be able to read the reviews. In a way, you’d be silly not to take advantage of those sites and online train/bus tickets, museum reservations, etc. But I also think there’s an upside to an open schedule. I’ve been getting in the habit of booking my travel in stages – so that I have a place to land the first day and a rough idea of where I’ll be for the first few. But then after that I’m leaving things a little more open so that I can move on if I want or stay longer if I love it… that’s actually how I ended up getting to Montenegro (from Serbia) and Albania (from Croatia) and Israel (from Cyprus). There was never anything wrong with the original destination, I was just feeling like some fresh scenery. I’m glad I had the flexibility. New Zealand is a place that I will give myself plenty of time and flexibility when I return :)
something tells me planned spontaneity just doesn’t work. If ever there was an oxymoron, ‘planned spontaneity” is it.