Laura Fraser - An Italian Affair

ACCLAIM FOR LAURA FRASERS
AN ITALIAN AFFAIR

[Frasers] sexy memoir gives new meaning to the word wanderlust.

Glamour

Part travel writing, part erotica, An Italian Affair will transport you to the Amalfi Coast faster than a glass of pinot gris.

The Boston Phoenix

Dreamy, romantic, spiced with the exotic, just a little bit indulgent. Its an intoxicating trip.

The Star-Ledger

A sharp-eyed romantic, [Fraser] gives her story a freshness and intimacy that makes her book impossible to put down.

Palo Alto Daily News

Dotted with sumptuous details about food, scenery, and the landscape of the human heart.

Womans Own

In a perfect world, all romance novels would read like An Italian Affair. Fraser is an unusually generous memoirist. When she gets lucky so do her readers.

Salon

A charming travelogue [Fraser] writes beautifully, one might even say lustily.

Chicago Sun-Times

LAURA FRASER
AN ITALIAN AFFAIR

Laura Fraser has written for Salon.com, Vogue, Glamour, Mother Jones, Self, San Francisco Examiner, Gourmet, and Health, among other publications. She has taught magazine writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. She lives in San Francisco.

ALSO BY LAURA FRASER

Losing It: False Hopes and Fat Profits in the Diet Industry

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MAY 2002

Copyright 2001 by Laura Fraser

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2001.

Portions of this work were previously published in essay format on the Internet media site Salon.com (12/2/97 and 9/29/98) and subsequently in the book Salon.coms Wanderlust: Real-Life Tales of Adventure and Romance edited by Don George (Villard Books, New York, 2000).

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Fraser, Laura.
An Italian affair / Laura Fraser.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-375-42138-9
1. Fraser, Laura. 2. Divorced womenUnited StatesBiography. 3. Man-woman relationshipsCase studies. 4. Fraser, LauraJourneysItaly. 5. ItalyDescription and travel. I. Title.

HO834.F73 2001

306.7092dc21
00-052881

Author photograph Christina Taccone

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

To M.

And it pleased Him that this love of mine,
whose warmth exceeded all others, and which had stood firm
and unyielding against all the pressures of good intention,
helpful advice, and the risk of danger and open scandal,
should in the course of time diminish of its own accord.
So that now, all that is left of it in my mind is the delectable
feeling which Love habitually reserves for those who
refrain from venturing too far upon its deepest waters.
And thus what was once a source of pain has now become,
having shed all discomfort, an abiding sensation of pleasure.

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO,
THE DECAMERON

Mi hai spaccato il cuore.

Youre reading a fairy tale in your evening Italian class when you come across this phrase. You think you know what it means, since the sea princess says it after her one true love abandons her, but you ask the teacher anyway.

You have broken my heart, he says, and he makes a slashing motion diagonally across his dark blue sweater. You have cloven it in two.

Mi hai spaccato il cuore.

The phrase plays over and over in your mind, and the words in front of you blur. You can see your husbands face with his dark, wild eyebrows, and you whisper the phrase to him, Mi hai spaccato il cuore. You say it to plead with him, to make him stay, and then you say it with heat, a wronged Sicilian fishwife with a dagger in her hand. But he doesnt understand, he doesnt speak Italian; you shared so many things in your marriage, but Italy was all yours.

Mi hai spaccato il cuore.

You hear the phrase so many times that it loses its meaning, it just becomes Italian music, and it takes you into another realm. Youre in another world, a place where people linger over lunch, drink full-bodied coffee, and stroll arm-in-arm at sunset. A place where the towns are built on such thick layers of tragedy and romance, stacked up like stones, that you cant take anything that happens to you very seriously. A place where you wouldnt be worried about running into your husband, who left you after a year of marriage for an old girlfriend, at an intimate little restaurant in your neighborhood. Where you wouldnt be home making dinner, expecting to hear the thumping sound of him doing fast-paced yoga in the bedroom upstairs. Where you wouldnt walk into the bathroom in the morning and miss having to pick up the Scotch glass and wet mystery novel he left behind on the ledge of the tub the night before. In Italy, you would be far away.

Mi hai spaccato il cuore.

Lets say you have a few friends in Italy and you speak the language well enough. Maybe you could go there, just drift away from all of this and leave it behind. Maybe you would feel more like yourself again. Why not? And then a fantasy flickers and you think perhaps an Italian man might not be such a bad idea, either.

Someone speaks to you and you look up and see bright blue eyes with smile lines and a head of gray-black curls. Your Italian teacher. He puts a hand on your shoulder and you realize you are crying.

Laura, your teacher asks. Che c? Whats up?

You quickly wipe your eyes and gather up your books. Mi dispiace tanto, ma devo andarmene, you say. Im so sorry, but I have to leave.

When the plane touches down in Florence, its evening. Lucia is there, waving from outside the security area, flipping her short dark hair away from her angular face. She kisses you on both cheeks and says you look great, even though that cant possibly be true. She speaks Italian faster than you can understand in your bleary condition, but youre glad to just follow along. Lucia loads your bag into her miniature car and goes careening around the perimeter of the city and into the center.

Just outside the pedestrian zone, she maneuvers into a tiny parking spot, and you walk from there along the narrow cobblestone streets until you reach a pensione right in the historic center, near the Piazza della Signoria. Youre staying at a little hotel this visit because Lucia, an art teacher who was divorced, unhappily, in her late thirties, has a new boyfriend who stays over. So theres no more room at her place. You dont mind; Lucia seems so content, her face softer than the last time you saw her.

You ring at a massive wooden door, get buzzed in, and then squeeze into an elevator cage that barely fits the two of you and your bag. You greet the grumpy signora at the front desk, roused from her TV napping, and deposit your things. Its late, but Lucia insists you have to go out for a drink.