We’re back in New York, but we’ve left a part of us in Italy. Going through my photos and thinking about our trip feels a little like this scene around Constantine’s Colosso in fragments at the Capitoline Museums: bits and pieces indexing other bits and pieces, a mosaic of affect still in need of putting together.
It’s a good thing I have so many photos to go through. I’m going to need more time processing this experience. x
Our trip to Italy was a convergence of several “tracks,” for the lack of a better word, one of which being @christine.bingham.art’s ongoing (but almost finished) art book project.
We’d planned to visit Sant’Agnese in Agone to see Saint Agnes’s relics but learned months ago that it was closed for the foreseeable future; the Rector told me that it might not even reopen before Christmas. In what would become a theme on this journey, we pivoted, and I managed to find a rooftop cafe that overlooks the church’s famous dome so that Christine would have something more aesthetic than scaffolding to add to The Sainthood Project.
I really enjoyed being up here. The seagulls are very aggressive for scraps, but the staff provides you with a water pistol to shoo them away. I laughed so hard. x
Pivoting and being quick on our feet was definitely an important “hack” to enjoying our time in Italy. You know the old saying “when in Rome…”, right? We’d laugh to ourselves, saying it in our best Ron Burgundy voices. Another cliched fragment that helps is “best laid plans…”
But no, I don’t want my hyper-focus on train troubles and closed crypts in my posts to overshadow the pivot’s positive dimensions; I tend to over-plan my vacations as a way to cope with anxiety, and while I always leave a margin for error, I know that it’s actually good for the soul to leave space for more than just that.
That’s one of my biggest takeaways from this trip so far; there’s more to contingency than “error.” Italy’s good at instilling that thought in a place that’s a little more deeply embedded in your nervous system. x