first run in Italy

I'm an enthusiastic tourist, but I find traveling to be comparatively difficult. Tourism means going someplace without really leaving yourself and your habits behind--your comforts, your pleasures, your dislikes, even your curiosities. The other day my sister in law ask what I needed to pack to feel ready for Italy. My response, di corsa, was running shoes. I like to run in a new place and get to know its topography in the efficient way only running allows, and being ready to go somewhere means being ready to run. I'm never really ready, though, for travel per se but as I define it or simply idealize it, it's something you can never really be ready for -- travel visits you, leaves its mark on you in the form of surprises and shocks, good and bad. It's worth remembering that so many romance language words having to do with travel (hostel, hotel, host) come from the Latin hostis which means stranger but also enemy.

As I was running through Padua this morning I saw road signs point to Venice and Bologna; I wondered,for a moment, how easily I could run to either city and thought too how hard and difficult and dangerous getting to place to place must have been in the Middle Ages. Travel left people exposed and vulnerable. Papal agents arrested heretical intellectuals on the road to Padua.

Friendly tourism, and tourist friendly destinations, remove the hostility from the experience of being away from home, while tourists like myself find ourselves, upon reflection, taking measures to protect oursleves from inimical experience. Which is not always to be celebrated, and which is not the same thing as having a closed mind. The small ways in which Italy can baffle count among the ways in which it can prove hostile; its innumerable glories are often the friendliest and most well paved places on the planet.

If there's one arena of experience where travel and tourism converge it's in the most touristy place of all, the museum. I always find Giotto a shock, an artist who unsettles me almost completely in the religions expressions of his figures.