One Italian Summer(47)

I don’t cook; I don’t decorate. I don’t know the right place to order flowers from in the Valley, because I always just called her. And now she’s gone and I can’t help but think, in this moment, that she left me unprepared.

“I’m sorry,” Adam says. “I know how hard this is for you.” He clears his throat. “When I was very young, my sister died. She was playing on the jungle gym at the park. She fell the wrong way, and she just never woke up.”

“Oh my god.”

“My mom was there.” Adam shakes his head. “Sometimes people ask me why I’m not married, and I think about Bianca, that was her name. That’s my first thought. Is that strange? I don’t even know why, exactly.”

“Because you don’t want to lose someone that close to you again.”

Adam shakes his head. “I think it’s more like…” He pauses, considering. “I don’t want to see anyone suffer. When I think about Bianca, I don’t think about me; I think about my mother. Watching her cry every year on the anniversary, on her birthday, at Christmas, every time anyone asked her how many children she had. It’s the suffering that scares me. The way I might feel about someone else’s losses.”

“It’s probably the worst thing,” I say. “Losing a child.”

Adam nods. “She never got over it. How could you?”

I think about how many times I’ve asked myself that. If I’ll ever feel normal again. If I’ll ever be okay. The answer has always been no, but being here now, I think that maybe there is space in that, too. That maybe the expanse of time without her isn’t a battlefield, but an empty lot. With some dirt, even. Undeveloped land. That maybe, given time, I get to choose.

We keep wandering, this time in silence. We wind through street after street. We stop at a small café with what looks like two stray dogs out front and order espressos. We drink them and carry on.

As we wander, I’m struck by something so simple. In the heated couple on the corner, in the women carrying their shopping home, in the children playing and screaming in the streets. Naples is a place of connection. Of community.

There is beauty to the run-down buildings, the laundry strung high overhead, the rhythm and drawl of daily life here. There is beauty, too, in the old Mediterranean architecture, buildings left over from centuries ago, before Naples became what it is today. There is beauty in the discrepancy—two things that seem oppositional, coming together.

New and old, rich and ruined, history in its entirety, here at once. It’s a place that was once glorious and carries the memory not as a chip, but a promise. Again, someday.

I take my camera out of my tote bag and hang it around my neck.

“That’s quite an instrument,” Adam says.

“Oh, thanks. It was a gift. There’s something about photography I love. A whole memory, caught in a moment.”

“That’s very well put.”

I snap a shot of a man in a full denim suit. He carries a wildflower and a plastic bag.

We wander for a few hours. The sun isn’t as strong in Naples as it is in Positano, and the overhead canopies of roof terraces and balconies provide us protection.

It’s after one by the time Adam suggests we go on a pizza crawl for lunch. “It’s what Naples is known for,” he says. “We should sample as much as we can. It’s my favorite thing to do here.”

I am once again reminded that my appetite has been reawakened in Italy. I’m almost never full now, and if I am, the hunger returns quickly.

“I’m in,” I say.

We head to Pizzeria Oliva, a place Adam loves in the Sanità neighborhood—a very working-class area. They make all kinds of pizzas—lemon zest with ricotta, basil, and pepper, and a classic Neapolitan. We also order a fried concoction with smoked mozzarella that is divine.

“This shouldn’t be legal,” I say to Adam after the first bite.

“Good, right?”

Adam grins at me as he watches me eat.

“Certifiable.”

From there we hit up another favorite of Adam’s—a small shop that is no more than a window stand about ten minutes walking from Oliva. Unlike the last place, this one is all traditional. We get a classic Margherita pizza, and then Adam motions for me to follow him down to the sidewalk. He takes a few paper napkins and lays them out, gesturing for me to sit. I do.

In the street there is pleasant commotion. A few teenage boys talk in fast Italian, kicking a soccer ball back and forth. Two women in their forties linger in front of an apartment entryway, gesturing with their hands. Bikers pass by. It’s peaceful, a word that, a few short hours ago, I’d never think I’d use to describe Naples. The day has ebbed.

“What do you think?” Adam asks me.

I take a big bite. Absurdly good. “Oh,” I say. “Heaven. How many more of these do we have?”

Adam shakes his head. “No, I mean about Naples. Are you glad we came?”

I look over at him. He’s folded a slice in half and eats from the bottom. Some grease drips onto the sidewalk below us.

I see us as if I am above us. I see a man and a woman, out on a pizza crawl, on vacation in Italy. Honeymooners, maybe. Two people celebrating the middle of their relationship. You’d never know we were practically strangers.