Several years ago I knew that I wanted to spend a few months – I thought a season – somewhere else. I’d seen a movie with Colin Firth that t
otally inspired me, A Summer in Genoa.
Something about the idea of transplanting yourself for a while somewhere completely different appealed to my nomadic self. I’d done this before after all but not for many years and usually not temporarily.
I did once go to San Francisco, pretty much on a whim, intending to stay. It was a memorable six months.
I didn’t know where this time. Over the years it has mostly been Porto but somehow it became somewhere in Italy instead. Perhaps it was the language. I’m really not sure.
And then it was Torino. Mostly it was Torino because of Krish. That’s the truth. But there’s more to it than that. I like the market, the multicultural population, the working class areas, the size of it and the people. It doesn’t feel like the rest of Italy so much for some reason. Sure there are palaces and museums (Turin was the first capital city of Italy) but I barely give those a thought.
And then it became two months instead of three. Economics and other things played into this. On my own, I would have gone to a second city for the second month. Somewhere smaller like Bologna, where I at least knew one person, Esmeralda, my teaching friend from Toronto. And I thought I was coming alone for quite some time. It all changed a couple of months ago and then the trains were booked and the apartment rented and that was that.