19/09/2019:

Today is a significant day. It is exactly twenty years, (ignoring time differences) that I first left Australia to go overseas – specifically, to Italy. It was a school trip, and I travelled with seven of my classmates, all of us girls aged 16 or 17, and our two Italian teachers, Mr Civetta and Ms Russo. I had a shiny new passport – my first one – a handful of traveller’s cheques and my dad’s Olympus camera with about ten spare rolls of film. I’d only ever flown once or twice before, domestic flights, so stepping on to a Boeing 747 with its four enormous engines and the extra level sticking up at the front, I felt a great sense of newness and adventure.  There was no school uniform in my bag, only  my own clothes, a notebook, my Italian dictionary and a printed out copy of our itinerary, which I had memorised. I was filled with excitement and anticipation.

For the eight of us, even the plane journey was exciting. It was before airlines had screens for every seat, instead there was one giant screen on the front wall of each section, and little ones on the side. Everyone had their own headphones, the really old kind that had three prongs and only sometimes worked. Because everyone had to watch the same thing, we saw a lot of family friendly movies, and I remember a lot of episodes of Mr Bean. Even getting your food on a tray is a novelty when you’re 16 and on your first international flight – and we even had metal knives and forks then.

At one point, when it was dark and we must have been somewhere over the sub-continent, Mr Civetta sweet talked one of the crew – I have no idea how – and they let us go up into the cockpit in pairs. To get there, we had to go through the sticking up section at the front where the first class passengers were reclining in endless space – I even remember seeing  a boy younger than us with enormous headphones and playing a game on some kind of laptop or console – which back then was something I’d only ever seen in movies. However, that was nothing to the sight waiting for us from the cockpit, and for a second I felt as though we were floating between worlds. Far below us, a smooth blanket of cloud blocked the earth from view and above us a ceiling of clouds hid the stars, but ahead the sky was dark and clear. Far in the distance, I saw a bolt of lightning streak from the clouds above to the ones below – it was one of the most beautiful sights I’d ever seen. We sat and watched for a couple of minutes as the various buttons and dials blinked and glowed in the in the darkened cockpit, before tip-toeing back to our seats.

When we arrived in Italy the wonders continued. We wandered through the non-existent customs at Mestre airport and onto a water taxi, which took us around the lagoon and into Venice. I remember staring in awe as we approached this miraculous city from the harbour, all of us standing up in the boat with the wind in our hair and water spraying our faces. We found our way to the Piazza San Marco, where it immediately started pouring with rain, so we ran through the streets of Venice trying to find our hotel, dragging our cases behind us (in my case literally – I had an old one of my dad’s that didn’t have wheels. Mr Civetta ended up taking off his belt and tying it round the handle so I could pull it along). The hotel – when we finally found it – was called ‘Albergo San Zulian’, and it was small and quaint – the kind with florally wallpapers and baroque light fittings everywhere. It was a bit eclectic too – mine was a room for four and one of the single beds had a bedhead which had clearly belonged to a bigger one at some point, but it had been chopped off about two-thirds of the way along so it would fit against the wall. (As a side note, I have since been back to that hotel and was very disappointed to find it had been renovated and now had a modern reception area with glass windows all around it. I also discovered that it really is just around the corner from the Piazza San Marco – I have no idea how it took us so long to find that first time. But then, this was in the days before Google maps.)

Well, it was wonderful. Each morning a buxom Italian woman would bring breakfast up to our room on a big tray. We tried croissants with Nutella for the first time. Thanks to jet lag, or perhaps it was the lovely exhaust-free air of Venice, I slept like a log. On the first ay, we set the alarm to just before seven so we could listen to the bells of St Mark’s ringing in the morning. On the second morning we set the alarms to just after seven to see if the bells would wake us up, and we slept straight through. Our friends in the other room left their windows open to listen to the city at night, and one of them was bitten by a mosquito on the eyelid. It was a precious and remarkable time.

We had televisions in our room – another novelty – but the only channel we understood was the music channel and it seemed that every time we turned it on there would be Christina Aguilera singing ‘Genie in a Bottle’. There was another, very catchy Italian song that was obviously in the charts at the time, and it was called ’50 Special’, by a band called Luna Pop – it was all about driving out on your Vespa on a sunny Sunday with a pretty girl on the back, which held a certain appeal for us teenage girls. As far as I know they never had another hit (unlike Christina Aguilera) but to this day if I hear either of those songs, it takes me back to those two weeks and having the television on in our hotel rooms.

We did a lot of exploring of the city as well, though I won’t go into too much detail here. We marvelled at the undulating and extravagant tiled floor of the Basilica, we tip-toed across the Bridge of Sighs, sparing a thought for the poor souls who’s final journey it marked. We fed the pigeons in the square (you were allowed to then) and returned in the evening to listen to the musicians battle for supremacy, with one starting up the moment the other had finished, but neither ever interrupting. We took a boat tour out to the island of Murano and gawked at the glass makers, we took day trips out to Verona and Padua and ate a proper margherita pizza for the first time. On the first night, most of us managed almost half a pizza, by the end of our trip our plates would be clean.

Even the sounds were new and different. There was no motor traffic, no horns honking, no tyres screeching, no engine hums. Instead, we heard the lapping of water at the edge of the canals, the boat horns honking from the distant harbour, bicycles whizzing over the cobblestones and the sonorous bellows of “Attenzione!” every few minutes as merchants and delivery boys navigated the narrow streets with their carts and wheelbarrows.

From Venice we travelled to Florence, where it was all about shopping and night life. I think all of us took home something made of leather, and most of us went into a night club for the first time. It was nothing for our parents to worry about, at least – I think there were about three other people in there and we were more excited by the light-up floor than we were about mingling. We kept to ourselves and laughed at Mr Civetta doing silly dance moves. We climbed to the top of the dome of the Basilica, which I know now was designed by Brunellesci, who modelled it on the Pantheon in Rome – although even if I had known then I wouldn’t have appreciated it. I was more intrigued by the rickety staircases and narrow passages that we had to squeeze through to get to the top, and I kept imagining the monks in Renaissance times clambering up here with their long habits and flickery torches, and wondering if they ever tripped over.

We saw all the essential sites and took trips out to Siena and Pisa, but what I loved most about Florence was wandering around at night, through cobbled streets and wide squares, where locals and tourists sat outside restaurants eating and drinking into the late hours, young people gathered on steps and around fountains and statues chatting as only Italians can, and the open squares where buskers plied their trades and hawkers tried to sell silly trinkets, mostly the kind that flash and go a long way up into the air. I discovered that Vespas and scooters make a very distinctive sound as they zoom over cobblestones.  I’m pleased to say that these things haven’t changed.

Rome was similarly exciting and different. We toured the Colosseum, threw coins into the Trevi Fountain – to ensure our return to Rome – and climbed the Spanish Steps. On the day we were to tour the Vatican museums, we arrived to find the doors closed and only one security officer – probably a member of the Swiss Guard – in sight. He directed us around to St Peter’s Square, where we found an enormous crowd, apparently waiting for something. At the top of the square we could see, just, a small podium with a green awning over it. On the front of the Basilica hung six giant banners, each with an image of a person. Mr Civetta went to find out what was going on and discovered the pope was going to be saying a mass in the square for the Beatification of the six figures – soon to be saints. Souvenir booklets were handed out to everyone in the crowd and we sat while Pope John Paul II said mass in St Peter’s Square. We didn’t understand any of it, but that didn’t prevent us from appreciating it was a pretty special moment. I still have my booklet somewhere.

While we were staying in Rome Mr Civetta took us on a three-hour train ride south to the town of Benevento, his birthplace. That was probably the most surreal day of the whole trip, as we were made welcome by his family and given lunch, we visited a school and joined a class where Mr Civetta gave a lesson on Australian history, went to a place called Leper’s Bridge – apparently called that because Lepers at one time had lived in a colony under the bridge and locals had given them food by lowering a bucket down from the bridge. I’ll never forget walking down one street past a school and suddenly there was a scrum of boys leaning out every window shouting and pointing at us. We were such a novelty that we appeared a week later in their local newspaper.

It may not surprise you to hear that I was very sad to finish the trip and go home. While the others were expressing sentiments like ‘it’s been fun but it’ll be good to get home’, my thoughts were more along the lines of ‘I don’t want to go home – I want to go back to Venice’. It had all been amazing – the new sights and sounds, the pizzas and the many, many gelatis. Exuberant Italian men, whose behaviour frequently reduced us to fits of giggles – one of them actually chased my friend Sarah halfway through a Florentine market, begging her to take her sunglasses off and show him her eyes, but she was the one who’d been bitten on the eyelid so she refused, to his great indignation. I had never laughed so much, or felt so free of judgement, as I did on that two-week trip. I dreaded the thought of returning home, to rules and rigidity, of being told what to wear and when to speak, to assignments and revision and being judged by my peers. I wanted to keep travelling – I wanted to be free.

Twenty years on, I have not lost my desire to travel. I still love to explore new places and yearn for that sense of adventure. I have seen a lot of the world, and there is a lot still left to see. But it is always Italy – and especially Venice – that tempts me back. I think my sense of adventure was already there, when I first stepped onto that Boeing 747 with the sticky-up bit at the front, and first had a gelato in a plastic cup. But if the spark was there, it was that trip that kindled it, that set the match and nurtured the flame.

I’m still in touch with one or two of the girls I travelled with on that trip, and thanks to the wonders of Facebook I even know what some of them are doing. Some of them, I know, have returned to Europe and to Italy since then. Most of them have settled down and have families now. As for me, I don’t think I will ever stop travelling. The world still has so many secrets to share, and I feel the need to dig them up and then share them in turn. But I’ll always go back to Italy, which feels just as much like home for me as, well, home – as it has for twenty years now. So, grazie, Italia. Alla prossima volta.