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You are here: Backpacker Resources > Travel Books > Travel Book for August 2010

Travel Book for August 2010

Amore and Amaretti by Victoria Cosford

• Book One
• 1982‐1986
• Florence, Isle of Elba, Perugia

Quando si ama, anche i sassi diventono stelle
When you’re in love, even pebbles become stars

One Florentine Friday night, a man with a tea towel tossed over one shoulder unclasps his watch and places it at the end of the table I share with twenty international students. This is how it begins, in a restaurant in a cellar. We belong to the Michelangelo Institute, where we are studying the language and culture of Italy; every Friday night we unwind over dinner in a typical Tuscan trattoria.

When I think about the small incidental objects that had the power to transform my life, I always return to that watch. Over the years, it became magnified in my mind, effulgent with significance. Its territorial presence on the table of his restaurant means that Gianfranco can come and go with ease, with a sort of claim on the two foreign women it lies closest to, my sister and me. Toward the end of the evening, there he is sitting with us, conversing in a clumsy cocktail of languages over wine.

Gianfranco is a country boy from a village in Umbria whose Italian is loose, lazy and colloquial, whose French is meagre though elegant, whose Dutch, owing to a ten-month-long marriage to a Dutch woman, is fluent, but whose English is sparse. We understand each other magnificently.

He smokes Marlboros and wears expensive gold jewellery and tight jeans; there is a Swaggish indifference to him to which I am drawn, so that by the end of the night, when somehow we have ended up at a bar at Piazzale Michelangelo, I am already a little in love. He is dancing on the mirrored floor with my sister and I am dancing with Roberto, the apprentice chef, who is asking me to translate into Italian the words of a Chicago song, which I do badly. Gianfranco brings me a glass of Cointreau with ice in it, and we sit down together with our knees touching. Roberto and my sister seem to melt away.

I had been in Italy for several weeks. I had already fallen in love with the country, the people, Florence, the director of the Institute. A degree in languages at university had led me indirectly here via jobs in advertising and nursing, a lonely year in London growing fat as a live-in barmaid, and the breakup of a relationship, grown too cosy, too lazy, with a gentle man named Tony whom I no longer loved.

Tony had arrived in London before me and met me at the airport, as arranged. In our six months apart, while he did the overland Magic Bus trip and I saved up, I had already changed, so that when I put my arms around his cheap new leather coat I felt that I was embracing a brother, not a lover. His decision to return to Australia was met with relief on my part; my adventurous life had only just begun. I found a job at the Museum Tavern opposite the British Museum and moved into a small room upstairs, where I worked my way through War and Peace on evenings off after solitary excursions to other pubs to sit over glasses of South African wine and dry-roasted peanuts.

My younger sister had flown from Australia to join me in Italy and the Institute had organised rooms for us in a boarding house near the Duomo that we shared with Scandinavian girls enrolled in the same course. London was already seeping out of me. I had begun to sling jumpers casually around my shoulders, the way Italian girls did, and knot scarves loosely around my white Anglo-Saxon throat … And, now, there is Gianfranco.

Amore and Amaretti by Victoria Cosford is published by Summersdale (paperback; £8.99). It is also available through amazon.com and all good booksellers.