Cathedrals

“Perhaps a city is a living thing. Each city has its own personality, after all. Los Angeles is not Vienna. London is not Moscow. Chicago is not Paris. Each city is a collection of lives and buildings and it has its own personality.”

“So?”

“So, if a city has a personality, maybe it also has a soul. Maybe it dreams.”

—From Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman: Worlds’ End”

A few years ago, I quoted these lines at the beginning of one of my college essays, and they have been branded in my mind since then. The essay prompt asked me to talk about the most important city in the world, and I opted to discuss the cities built in our minds. No city is the product of buildings and infrastructure alone; it is the product of the thoughts and dreams of the people within it. 

As I sat on the steps of San Miniato al Monte (a monastery high above the city of Florence), listening to my creative writing professor read an excerpt of George Eliot's Romola, this essay came to mind. Eliot describes Florence as both unchanged and subtly different over the course of time, and I couldn't agree more. The streets are filled with tourists and most of the corner shops sell everything from headphones to decidedly modern medicine, but one still feels as though they might find Dante or one of the many Medicis just around the corner. Perhaps this is due to the city (or at least the city as we know it now) being founded in the Renaissance, a time of great change. Change becomes Florence because that's what it was built for. It's different, though, from the change we are so used to seeing in the United States: change requires relinquishing and almost forgetting the past in the U.S. Florence, though, is a harmonious mixture of past and present, and it is clear that the future will be welcome here all the same. 

Clearly, I am enamored.

This past weekend, I went to Pompeii, Sorrento, and Capri. The trip was amazing and I enjoyed most of it very much, but I still found myself telling a friend that I missed Florence. I had been gone less than a day before I wanted to go back home. Home. Florence has become home for me in such a short amount of time. 

Hawaii, though home to my family for generations, has never felt like my place. I can't remember a time when I didn't want to leave. To quote a beloved song of mine, I've "been staring at the ocean like it's a language [I] could learn" since I was a kid. I had always chalked this up to an adventurous spirit and a propensity for wanderlust, but now I'm having second thoughts. Home, to me, always represented people--my parents, my loved ones--because I have never been tied strongly enough to any place to feel truly at home there. Yet, somehow, Florence has become home. 

I am already dreading leaving, but I'm trying to save those thoughts for closer to my departure. In the meantime, I'll revel in my time here with good coffee, great people, and gorgeous cathedrals.