What was it that possessed me to talk to that American couple sitting across from me on the train from Florence to Pisa? Usually when I’m traveling alone in Italy, I love playing “I’m an Italian”—sitting there with my scarf tied just right, looking over a newspaper I’m barely able to understand and using the looks I’ve inherited from my immigrant grandparents to blend in with the natives. It was the guidebook those seventy-something-year-olds were reading that egged me on to blow my cover. They were going over the same pages I’d read when I’d first thought about visiting Pisa—pages that had little except the usual ho-hum about its main attraction.
When I’d arrived in the tourist-quickie town weeks before this train ride, I’d thrown away the guidebook and checked into the Royal Victoria Hotel, determined to indulge my jet-lag and get into the glorious eat-drink-nap rhythm of authentic Italian life. I’d spent days wandering through the markets and cobble-stoned historic center of town, discovering pretty churches, great cheap restaurants, and caffes. I did the obligatory tower visit just before I headed out to the country to help out with an olive harvest, and now was feeling like an oh-so-seasoned traveler, wrapping up my trip with one more day in Pisa.
I knew I was put on this train at this moment to help this couple out: He, a Jack Klugman look-alike, and she, small and bird-boned, so I named her Cecily, after one of the Pigeon sisters in the play The Odd Couple.
I leaned towards Jack, “Going to Pisa?”
I appreciated his surprised, “You’re an American?” look, followed by, “Yes, going to see the tower.”
Now was my chance to become for these two “That mah-velous woman we met on the train who turned a day trip into a fah-bulous memory.”
“I know some great restaurants you can go to for lunch.”
“Oh no, we’re just going to climb it and get back to Florence.”
Maybe if I’d had my husband at my side to elbow me that “Oh no” meant “Shut up,” I wouldn’t have launched into my personal Zagat’s guide of Pisa, gone on about the bisteca at the Hotel dell’Orologio, or told them that they just had to try the swordfish carpaccio at Osteria Cavalieri, and that truffles were in season, shaved over everything at so many places, for such a bargain compared to what they could get in Florence.
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