I’ve set about constructing a bohemian disposition. Call it a midlife crisis if you must.
The blog Appalachian Dolce Vita investigates and documents this inclination. You get to watch in bemusement as I work it out. The more I write about my mundane habits, the more I feel emboldened to embrace eccentricity, even in such simple daily tasks as feeding myself. I’ll review books and music from time to time. When I travel, I’ll reflect on the experience here and share photos. Remember when we used to do that on Facebook? Mostly, the blog documents my lifelong pursuit of making a sweet life in a hardscrabble college town.
The blog title and its backstory needs explaining. La dolce vita, ‘the sweet life,” holds more meaning than the title of Federico Fellini’s 1960 film. I’ve come to appreciate that Italians take pride in heedlessly embracing finer and often unconventionally beautiful pleasures. I thought that this was a gross generalization, something that Italians push to keep the tourists coming. Then I gave it a try myself.
I arrived in Trieste and its smaller sister city of Muggia, the furthest to the north and east one can go in Italy, after I had exhausted myself and a group of fourteen students with a frenetic tour of Florence and Rome. We saw it all. The onslaught of priceless Madonnas, the grueling exits through so many gift shops, the cheap paninis and gelatos, the lines of boorish tourists, all had turned me into a surly and exhausted mess. Travel-born world weariness and blasé attitude are difficult to shake once they set in.
I parted ways with the students and made my way north to Muggia, where the single best hostess in all of Italy agreed to pick me up at the the train station and take me back to her three-room, nondescript B&B above city’s center. Why travel to Muggia and Trieste? I hoped to put some distance between myself and the hoards of tourists who have overrun the peninsula. Trieste, the Habsburg foothold on the Adriatic Sea, is a refined city that boasts not one singular site that would draw in tourists. I was seeking obscurity, not a bucket list checkoff. In the short ride back to her place, the woman must have sensed my weariness. I had been away from my home, my son, and my dogs for too long. Every culture I’ve come to know has a word for homesickness. The Italian word is “nostalgico.” “I’ll show you Muggia. Leave it to me,” she promised. It turned into the sweetest few days of my life.
I call the story “The Angel of Muggia.” The next day she made a perfect spinach and cheese omelet for breakfast. The day after that, I slept in and found a plate of horse, ham, cheese, and bread perfectly set for me alone. She accompanied me to an Italian archaeologist’s presentation and tour of Muggia’s small 9th century church and whispered the fascinating translation. Frankly, it was oddly sexy to have a young woman whisper claims about Norman architecture and Byzantine influences into my ear. She recommended several walks around the peninsula and met me later that evening to show me around an autumn festival Muggia. I pushed my way through the crowd and ordered two mulled wines and a bag of roasted chestnuts in bad Italian, making the servers laugh at my overly earnest attempt to pass myself off as an Italian. I will never pass as Italian. We finished the day with a late dinner at the restaurant where her mother, a chef, prepared the single best plate of seafood risotto I ever ate and served it with the best liter of Prosecco I ever drank. Yes, I swooned and set aside my nostalgico.
I’ve come to understand that claiming “Dolce Vita” as a philosophy of life gives me licence to linger over the beauty of it all: a too-young and pretty woman with time and attention to spare, the splendor of the Adriatic landscape, finely prepared food, and the loopy feeling of indulging in that second glass of Prosecco. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was self-indulgent because I did it all with modest means. Rather, I indulged in the elegance of simplicity done well. It is my belief that the same indulgence can be had in Appalachia. I intend to prove it.
Appalachian Dolce Vita 