The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
The holiday that changed me ‘We got a tattoo or a belly ring’
After a student trip to Italy, Tishani Doshi resolved to stop ‘plodding along’ – and to become a poet
Ifirst visited Italy in the summer of 1995. I had moved from India to study at Queen’s University in North Carolina and chose Italy as the destination for my junior year trip. The idea was that we would spend the semester studying Italian culture, history and language before going on a three-week trip from Naples to Venice.
When we landed in Naples, I was struck by the feeling that I understood this place – I think partly because Italy has always reminded me of a sort of European India, which was where I grew up. You see the buildings with the clothes hanging outside, the bustling street corners, and there’s a nervous, exciting energy of life that’s outside and very vocal. This was in particular contrast to my experience in America, which I just didn’t understand, and where I felt lonely and far away.
We did all the usual sites while we were in Italy. We saw the Sistine Chapel, the Pantheon, the Uffizi Gallery and the works of Caravaggio, Botticelli and Michelangelo. I was very moved by Michelangelo’s Moses, rather than his Pietà, because the statue was displayed in a small church without glass around it; I was taken by the humaneness of it. I remember it all being a blur afterwards and buying hundreds of postcards because I didn’t want to forget what I had seen, but by the end of the trip I realised Italy was a country of inexhaustible treasures.
But it wasn’t just what was inside the museums or g galleries, it was the way the beauty ty transcended on to the street. The shoes and the style were something ing I noticed immediately, and I just thought that, both in their heir dress and in their life, Italians had this sense of panache. I bought a black ack miniskirt in one e of the markets in Florence, and it was my most treasured possession ossession for years.
Wa l k i n g t he streets of Rome me and seeing the markets arkets of Campo de’
Fiori, going ng into the Rialto in Venice and seeing the fruit and veg – for me, this was how life could be. I remember standing in Piazza Navona, barely 20 years old, and almost being on the verge of tears because I didn’t want to leave Rome. I felt that I belonged there. It was a very strong feeling – I’ve never felt like that about any other place.
Every evening we would go out to a restaurant or a bar and get chatting with whoever happened to be nearby. I never used to like the taste of alcohol before that trip, but then when I got to Italy and tasted the w wine, I loved it. I just thought, “Oh “Oh, this changes everything,” and I continue to love Italian w wines the most today. Ther There’s something quite si simple about them… and they’re very drinkabl e , somet sometimes dangerously s so.
On One nigh t I reme remember having dinn dinner with a man who must have been about 60, and who seemed anc ancient to us at the time. I think he had asked one of the American girls to go to dinner with him, but she didn’t want to go alone so seven of us went with her. He took us up to his house one by one on a scooter, which felt a bit mad, but our intuition told us that it was harmless. His house was cut into the hill in Praiano. It was very small and very beautiful, and it was filled with shells. He cooked us spaghetti vongole and gave us wine, and at the end of the night he drove us back on his scooter one by one and dropped us at our hotel.
It was interesting that the same people I had been with in America were all very different when we got to Italy. We were all transformed by the exuberance and the beauty of the country in different ways. When we returned, a group of us girls got either a tattoo or a belly ring. I’m not sure what the exact significance was, but it was our bonding thing. I got a belly ring and I had it for some years before I removed it.
That trip to Italy was life-changing in many ways. It gave me a sense of dolce vita; that life is sweet and beautiful, that it is meant to be full of passion and that not a minute of it should be wasted doing something dull. When I went back to the States, I promptly broke up with the man I was seeing with whom I’d been unhappy for a while. Also, at that time I was doing a very competent degree in business administration, but I had been writing poetry and taking creative writing classes on the side. When I got back from Italy I switched my major and declared that I wanted to become a poet. The feeling that I had in Italy was very alive, very open, very excited, as opposed to just plodding along and doing the degree that I had set out to do. I said: “Now I’ve been transformed by this experience, I must always aim towards this glow.”
As told to Olivia Gavoyannis
Tishani Doshi’s fourth book of poetry, A God at the Door, will be published in spring 2021 by Bloodaxe Books (bloodaxebooks.com).