Voglio (I want)

When I'm in Italy I want to wear high heels.

I don’t know why, I don’t wear them here in the US. (Right. Everyone knows I wear flip-flops, don’t they?) I don’t even want to wear high heels here. I fall when I wear high heels, even standing still. But when I am sitting at a café in an ancient piazza, with a bell tower and a splashing fountain and a guy washing his shirt in that fountain and a black-haired, sunglassed woman with red lips strides by confidently--and quickly--in heels, I think to myself, “Maybe I should get a pair of those.”

That’s what being in Italy does to you. It makes you want things. For example, Angelo and I were home a little over 24 hours and we were already looking at houses on the real estate website in his hometown. There is only the one company; it’s a very small town. We think we want to find a small apartment so we can have a place to go back to every year. See? Now I want to go back to Italy every year because once every couple of years isn’t enough.

Here are some other things being in Italy made me want: 

  I want to eat food like this every day.

I want to walk down the street as an old couple next to the Naples waterfront where the tourists and townspeople are still partying at 11pm and sit at a café with Angelo and have a Prosecco. 

(He’ll have an espresso. Someone has to get us back home.) 

   I want a local bookstore with a bar inside.

  I want a bottle of wine that costs $1.70. 

   I want a view like this out my bedroom window.

You have to grow up in Italy, I think, to wear heels there. They have cobblestone streets with dangerously wide spaces in between the cobbles. I watch in wonder as women walk by talking on phones, lighting cigarettes, chatting with friends and they don’t fall down. Ever. I think it’s in the blood. I am positive that if I put on a pair of shoes with a higher elevation than an eighth of an inch, I’d be face down before I took two steps. So, wearing heels isn’t in the cards for me. But all those other things? I think I can manage them.