Firenze, what can I say?  Heartbroken and homesick for you, my tears flow like your sweetest wines and words of inspiration on Dante’s rock.  The things your streets have taught me are things I will never forget or be able to explain to many people.  I never had so many powerful life lessons in one place.

 

Our first night strolling out as a group, I refused to rub the boar’s nose.  I can be intractably stubborn when I’m just that convinced of something: you make your own luck.  As far as making my own luck— in Firenze, I nailed it.  I lost makeup, clothes, my iPad, all my purchases from the Uffizi, my digital video camera, and my debit card.  ALL the pictures I took are gone.  I was late.  I was lost (really rather often).  I ended up not getting to do many of the things I wanted to do like climb the Duomo and tour the Boboli Gardens.

 

How can anyone have such bad luck??  The answer is simple.  You don’t refuse to do things in Italy.  You take every opportunity to learn or experience local culture.  I should have paid homage to the boar on night one!  I cast my own maluche.

 

Bad luck was only bad luck.  It didn’t get the best of me.  One of the first things I was told after falling down the rabbit hole was: sometimes you have to get lost in order to find yourself.  I felt like maybe I could overcome my past and the decades I spent truly lost.  Internalized, those words prepared me for the challenge; I would be a world traveler and navigate the cities alone. This set me up for another powerful lesson: sometimes you have to lose everything you don’t need to appreciate what you do.

 

I was in the company of amazing people and given the opportunity to truly connect and rely upon them.  The friends I made here (friends I didn’t even want to make, truth be told) were worth more than a million iPads and I wouldn’t have talked to a single one of them, had I spent every night chatting on Discord with my best friend.

 

The saddest thing I saw happen in Firenze was on our passagiato after dinner out.  A string quartet was playing and everyone stopped to listen.  A nearby vendor selling bracelets was drunk and shouting obscenities at the musicians and the crowd.  Most people ignored it.  It wouldn’t be the first or the last time someone got drunk and made a scene here.  Some believed he was upset because the quartet was absorbing any money he might have made that night.  Some thought they heard him crying out that so much bad mojo might jinx the boar.

 

In Firenze, you are not just tolerated.  Whatever you are is celebrated or taken with a level of acceptance we don’t have in the States.  No one shamed this man for his behavior.  One woman tried to comfort him and when this was unsuccessful- they let him be where he was.

 

At the end of the performance, with tears in his eyes, he approached the quartet and placed a simple cloth bracelet in the coffer.  He was defeated.  Knowing he gave up devastated me.  He left with nothing.  We will never know what torment that night of hunger or sobriety felt like; life is hard.

 

One lesson learned here is: people are fighting battles we know nothing about.  Be kind.  I not only felt for him, I was him.  It was the same day I realized I probably wouldn’t be able to come back to school in the fall.  Was it time to throw a bracelet in the coffer and let it all go?  Everything is symbolic for me and I saw this as a sign all was lost.  It was a hard night for me too.

 

The next afternoon, crossing the Ponte Vecchio for the last time after class— back to the only home I ever felt was mine— I saw him.  He was there in the same spot, smiling ear to ear and working the crowd to sell his bracelets, his own coffer full.

 

I knew than that the message really was: don’t ever give up.  Lose the battle today and show up again tomorrow to fight the war.

 

A man coming in the opposite direction in the same walk was smiling and laughing.  “Hakuna Matata!” he shouted and sang.  I stopped to talk to him because I could tell he was authentic and here to support his family.  We talked for a few minutes about our lives.  I had very few Euros with me but he gave me 3 bracelets for a few coins and told me not to worry— everything would be okay.  “Hakuna matata!”  His name was Mustafa.  Only in Firenze?

 

Like many connections on this trip, I’ll never understand it.  I was still smiling over seeing the distraught vendor from the night before show up to reclaim his dignity.  Mustafa had no idea I needed to hear it would be okay.  Yet there we were, and he was telling me it would be fine.

 

Firenze, your intuition scares me.  You see things you probably shouldn’t and know things I haven’t told you.  I’ll never understand how I learned exactly what I needed to in this time I spent in Italy and especially Firenze.

 

My heart has found a home in you.  I know I will be back sooner than it feels but it is hard to be patient.  As the bus pulls away I’m breaking— and the only solace I carry are the memories we made and the knowledge I gained listening closely and watching with eyes wide open.  If I can’t get back to you somehow, I will suffer for the rest of my life just for having seen your beauty and walked in your ways.  Arrivaderci!