Epilogue (Mar 2026)
Mar 2026
Reading through this letter full of memories from ~30 years ago, it’s been great reconnecting with my younger self. Some felt like discoveries, and some had stuck with me through the years and came back enhanced in full color detail. Note to myself now – revisit Italy!
Venice without a romantic partner had felt a bit pointless. I have wondered since whether the missing ingredient was simply that – someone to share a gondola with and get lost with on the “wrong” side of the canals. I haven’t been back to test the theory, but I intend to.
Rome I could have stayed in for months. The friendliness of the city was a revelation – navigating its buses with zero Italian, and people going out of their way to help, and that feeling of arriving at 9pm in an unfamiliar city and feeling not unsafe but at home. The Sistine Chapel and the Pieta made impressions that have not faded. I went back into the Sistine Chapel twice in a single visit; I went back to see the Pieta three times across different days. Some things demand repeated looking.
I went to Herculaneum, not Pompeii. One set of ruins was quite enough and Herculaneum turned out to be the right choice – better preserved, less crowded, and the detail of those first-century lives is startling. A postman could ride his bicycle on those streets tomorrow.
Vesuvius with Nel was the kind of travel that happens when you’re alone and open: you meet someone in a dorm, you end up on the crater of a volcano the next morning with a taxi driver flirting in Italian all the way up. I wouldn’t have done it without her.
Milan I have never seen beyond the inside of the railway station. The night I spent on its floor is one of the more vivid memories of any trip I’ve taken. The Chilean cement workers, the Dutch couple who were my companions for a few hours, the policeman who gave permission with the weary grace of someone who had seen this before, the lemon tea at 7am. The station opened into a big blue morning and everything was fine.
The Alps from the TGV: I’d like to go back on a walking holiday someday. The mountain streams the colour of emerald that looked like fantasy to me. Gosh, I was that young girl seeing the Alps for the first time, wide-eyed with wonder, drinking it all in almost without blinking.
Florence I have been back to, ~2013, for a Euro Python conference with a few colleagues – a memorable trip that reinforced my love for Florence. Went back to the Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze – David is still there, still magnificently flaunting his nudity.
After this Italy rail trip, I knew I could navigate a rail network in a country whose language I didn’t speak, find my way between cities, make friends and lose them and be fine alone, sleep on a station floor amidst strangers. The identity of solo woman backpacker, which had been forming through two years of British weekends, became something I knew to be true.
Italy quenched a thirst I hadn’t fully named: the thirst for long train journeys in strange new lands, the feeling of crossing from country to country by night, waking up to a different landscape, watching the continent rearrange itself outside the window. The journey was the trip.
