Italy 2: Our Souls Carry Our Heritage

We have a five hour layover in Detroit. This is it, though—this is the gate that will put me on the actual plane to Rome.

Two Italian ladies sit across from us, the mother silver-haired and her daughter a lovely white-blonde. They’re slender and regal, and dressed elegantly. They lean, heads close, and eye all the other passengers, their faces serious.

“See that?” Michelle whispers to me, “The way they’re sitting, the way they’re looking? That is so Italian. You’ll see that look all the time. I even asked about it on one of my trips. Those women are probably not even annoyed or anything, they just have that look. You will never know if they’re actually judging you or if you just feel like it because you feel so American next to them.”

The mother and daughter leave, and are replaced by a darker Italian woman. She smiles at me warmly.

I’m already seeing some of the many faces of Italy.

Another passenger sits next to Michelle and they begin to chat. Like Michelle, she is an American with Italian heritage, and like Michelle, she has been to Italy multiple times. Their conversation centers on the pull of heritage.

“I was telling them,” Michelle says, waving at me and at Petra’s bag—Petra’s off walking the terminal, getting some movement in before the long plane ride—“that the first time I went to Italy and got to the village where my family was from, I sobbed.”

“Me too! That’s exactly what happened the first time I went.”

 “And my husband,” Michelle says, “who didn’t even really want to go, when I took him to his village, tears poured down his face.”

They trade a look of deep understanding.

“It’s in our cells,” Michelle says. “They recognize the land they come from. Our souls carry our heritage.”

Rainbow across the AppeninesPhoto credit: Petra Laster Photography

I shift on the black airport seat, looking over Michelle’s shoulder at the two of them, wishing I had Italy in my blood, wishing I had a village there, waiting for me. I’ve felt a piece of what they speak of, at Celtic festivals when listening to live pipe-and-drum bands, the Scottish part of me waking to the call of the bagpipes and filling me like a balloon blown too full, ready to burst with the pressure.

What will I feel when I step into Italy, this country I’ve dreamed of for so long? Will I have any connection, really? I have no claim on this land. I listen to the music, I learn of the history, I study the language—but I have never even spoken Italian with a real person before, and in all the many, many generations filled in on my family tree, there is no Italian to be found. Will this place welcome me, let me feel its magic? Or will I just observe as if over someone’s shoulder, and see the magic in their faces, as I do with these women now?

This is my biggest fear for this trip.

Italy: In the Beginning

In spring of 2017, my friend Michelle posted that she was holding a contest, and the winner would get to go to Italy with her. I entered and won, and the trip happened in April of 2018. It was the trip of a lifetime, and while I can't give everyone the same experience, I can at least share mine.

The writing is all mine, but many of the pictures were done by Petra, a fabulous photographer who was also part of the trip. Please note the credit below any photos, and feel free to check out her other photos on her website.


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The trip has finally begun—I am through the gate and on the first airplane, the one that will take us from Philadelphia to Detroit.

I have a window seat, and I look out at the gray—gray tarmac, gray sky, gray airport walls. The baggage carts huddle near the plane as though for protection from the elements. The blue canvas sides have come loose on one, and they billow out, curling dramatically like the cape of an old movie villain.

The orange cones have seen better days. Three of them are almost as black as they are orange. I understand the cones, the baggage cart. I feel these days like my protective sides have come loose, like my soul has seen long days out in the elements.

For weeks people have been asking me if I was excited about Italy, and I would smile and gush, “Yes, I am SO excited!” because that’s what they expected. But it’s hard to feel excited about something that doesn’t seem real, and when you are so focused on making it to the next appointment, getting through bedtime with the kids—again—and checking boxes on a to-do list that includes four part-time jobs plus family and friends, a list that you will never be good enough or strong enough or organized enough or any kind of “enough” to complete—when you are there, in that place, an event that is weeks, even days ahead is too abstract to generate an emotion like excitement.

But today, in the car on the two-hour drive to the airport, Michelle talked about her family, her villages. She told us about her great grandfather, who was left on a foundling wheel, a place where desperate mothers could safely abandon their babies to the care of the church. She told us about the castle in Macchia d’Isernia, and the barons who ruled there. She spoke of the towns, how they are situated in the hills of the southern Appenine mountains, and of the route we will take through those mountains and up along the eastern coast and then to Venice, to Florence, to Rome—

And I am excited. Suddenly, overwhelmingly, with all the emotion I couldn’t summon for the last several months, I am excited.

I have been dreaming of this since I bought the palm-sized painted Venetian mask at Busch Gardens when I was ten.

Since I read the Stravaganza series by Mary Hoffman when I was fifteen.

Since I watched Enchanted April with my mom when I was seventeen.

Since I sat on the swings with Mandi and dreamed of Venice during our Freshman year of college.

I am going to Italy.

I am going to Italy.

I am so excited.

Photo Credit: Petra Laster Photography