Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox (2 page)

—Francesca da Rimini in Dante’s
Inferno,
canto 5

I
can still pinpoint the moment I fell in love with Amanda Knox.

In Italian, we have an expression for moments like these, moments when you connect with a kindred spirit with whom you may not, on the face of it, have much common ground—language or otherwise. Yet you find yourselves locking eyes and exchanging smiles and feeling an instant connection. We call this moment
un colpo di fulmine,
a lightning bolt.

That’s what I felt the night I met Amanda.

It didn’t hit me right away. Rather, it crept up on me, almost unawares, like a beautiful dream. I’m a romantic by nature, I’ll admit it, but when I met Amanda, I was also a shy, awkward twenty-three-year-old with limited experience of approaching girls, let alone having them sweep me off my feet so suddenly, so unexpectedly. So it all seemed vaguely unreal, even when we were standing and holding each other close under a star-filled Perugian sky in Piazza Italia, overlooking the rooftops of the city and the Tiber River valley below. When I leaned in and kissed her for the first time, it was intense and beautiful and seemed to last forever.

I don’t know what it is about a first kiss that makes it so much more powerful than the thousands that may follow. It’s as if one kiss can bind you to someone forever—it may be in friendship, it may
be in love, it may be by some kind of cosmic connection that has no name in English or Italian, and it may be nothing at all. All that matters is living in the moment and experiencing life when you are young and alive and bright, with nothing but promising futures ahead of you.

*  *  *

It was October 25, 2007. I’d just finished the last undergraduate exam for my bachelor’s degree in computer science at the university in Perugia, and while I still had a thesis to complete, I felt relaxed for the first time in weeks. That night, a musician friend invited me to a classical-music concert at the Università per Stranieri, the University for Foreigners, which attracted tens of thousands of young people from all over the world. Even though I was dog-tired and looked a mess, with shaggy hair, several days’ growth of beard, and the same jeans and sneakers I’d been wearing all day, I didn’t care—I was ready for a break, and zoning out to some live classical music sounded like the antidote to all those long hours of studying.

The concert was held in the university’s Great Hall, a marble-floored room adorned with early-twentieth-century art, and refreshments were served in a magnificent side room with a gilded rococo ceiling. Most of the audience were Rotary Club members my father’s age. My friend and I sat at the back of the room and settled into the music, starting with Astor Piazzolla’s spectacular “Grand Tango,” arranged for viola and piano.

At intermission, as the audience dispersed in search of refreshments, I glanced across the room and spotted, looking in my direction, the only other person under fifty years old. She was pretty; beautiful actually, with long, blondish-brown hair and striking eyes.
Normally, I would have been too anxious and reticent to consider approaching her, but I was in a great mood and figured I had nothing to lose, particularly in this crowd.

“Ciao, sono Raffaele. E tu?”

“Amanda.”

“Amanda,” I repeated. She wasn’t dressed like an Italian and she didn’t sound like one either. So I switched to English, dusting off the little I’d learned in school. “Where are you from?”

“
Sono americana.
Sorry . . . my Italian isn’t very good. I just got here.”

“It is not a problem. Where in America?”

“Seattle,” she replied. “Do you know it?”

“Seattle! Of course. That’s fantastic. I’m a computer scientist, and Seattle, for us,
è come Mecca per i musulmani
 . . . it’s like Mecca for the Muslims.”

Amanda laughed, and we chatted until the lights started flickering to signal the end of intermission. I asked if my friend Mauro and I could sit next to her for the second half, and she agreed. Mauro, or Tozzetto, as I knew him, gave me the hairy eyeball when I called him over. “Come on,” I urged. He sat next to us with all the enthusiasm of a sullen teenager.

The second half of the program was Schubert’s
Trout Quintet.
With each movement, Amanda noted the change of tempo by whispering the few Italian words she knew—
allegro, andante, lento, presto.
I laughed and whispered encouragements back. Every now and again she would bob her head in time to the music, almost as if she were alone in her room with no one around to see her. Something about her was undeniably eccentric, but I didn’t dislike it at all. I’d never met someone with so few inhibitions, yet she had this
goofy charm that drew me to her and made me feel immediately comfortable.

When the concert ended, Amanda said she had to go to work. She had a part-time job handing out flyers and serving drinks in a cellar bar called Le Chic. Apparently, Thursdays were one of their busiest nights.

“Will you give me your number?” I asked.

“Come by the bar later on and we’ll see.” With that, she headed home to change her clothes.

Tozzetto was already feeling like a third wheel, and he wasn’t enthusiastic about tagging along to Le Chic. But I didn’t want to go alone—I’d never set foot inside before and it wasn’t the kind of place that I frequented. So I offered to buy him a drink. Tozzetto said he wanted to call two other friends and go out with them instead. I wouldn’t take no for answer. In the end, I paid for everyone.

The bar was dark and poky, and the customers were not my kind of people. It belonged to a Congolese immigrant named Diya Lumumba, whom everyone knew as Patrick. His crowd was transient—foreigners, musicians, people passing through for reasons both good and maybe not so good. Amanda had been introduced to Patrick through an Algerian named Juve, who also worked at Le Chic. From what Amanda told me, Juve was the kind of guy who latched onto every girl in sight. She gave me no reason to feel any better about being there.

The place was crowded, but we found a couch to squeeze onto. As the last of Tozzetto’s friends sat down, a lever on the side of the couch suddenly fell with a clunk—just as Amanda walked up to greet us. Her face fell and her mood changed immediately. She looked around furtively, clearly worried that her boss would blame her in some way for breaking the furniture. So I sprang up and
offered to fix it. For several minutes I struggled with the lever on my hands and knees and eventually screwed it back into place. To my surprise, the entire bar broke out in spontaneous applause. For a moment I felt embarrassed, but then I saw Amanda beaming and it dawned on me I might actually have a chance with her.

“Do you want to go for a walk or something after you finish your shift?” I asked.

She smiled and said she would.

My friends took that as their cue to leave, and I was left staring at the ceiling and wondering how to pass the time until she was free. Eventually I wandered over to the bar and chatted with Patrick, who was perfectly amiable. I’m not a big drinker and didn’t want another beer, so I ordered a tonic water and waited until well after midnight.

Perugia was full of foreign students, and a lot of my fellow Italians saw the women as easy targets—good for a quick roll in the hay, or a discreet affair on the side, with a built-in guarantee that sooner or later they would head back where they came from. But that wasn’t at all how I felt. I’m too dreamily romantic to think of using women that way. For me, it’s always been true love or nothing. Given my overprotected childhood and my introverted personality, “nothing” had been the prevailing story line to that point—for which my friends teased me incessantly. When I came back from a year abroad in Munich, in 2006, they laughed that I was the first person in the history of the Erasmus student-exchange program to leave home a virgin and come back still a virgin.

I’d only had one girlfriend before Amanda, another transplant from my home region of Apulia, on the Adriatic coast. We met at a birthday party a few months after I returned to Perugia from Germany. Neither of us knew entirely what we were doing—she was
as inexperienced as I—but we muddled our way through our first time, both rather pleased to have got it out of the way. The relationship was short-lived; when my grandmother died, a month after we started seeing each other, I headed home for the funeral and broke up with her before I returned. Getting into a serious relationship was the last thing on my mind—I didn’t have the headspace for it. I was happier focusing on my studies and kickboxing and thinking about my future.

Now that graduation was upon me, I was planning to leave Perugia for good in a few weeks. Foremost in my mind was the pressure I was feeling from my father to apply for a nine-month internship at a prestigious university in Milan. He was planning to take me there as soon as we’d celebrated my graduation. We talked about it incessantly, usually several times a day. As he knew, I was more interested in enrolling in a master’s degree program in Ireland, and working toward my dream of becoming a video-game designer. But my father, a doctor specializing in urology and my only living parent, was both highly protective and a difficult man to say no to. So I agreed to apply to Milan. The last thing I wanted was to start one of my family’s notoriously melodramatic fights, which some of my relatives seemed to thrive on but which always left me feeling debilitated. I did want to make my father proud; that much was important to me. But figuring out how to please him while also establishing my independence was a skill I had yet to master.

I can now say, looking back, that meeting Amanda was a glorious escape from these concerns. She was an accomplished student, like me, but also quite unlike anyone I had ever met. As she told me on the walk we took after she finished her shift at Le Chic, she was a third-year student at Seattle’s University of Washington and was studying German as well as Italian. So we had another language in
common. She, like me, was the child of divorced parents, and she too was close to her family—stepparents, stepsiblings, and all. She had arrived in Perugia a month earlier and found a room in a house just outside the city walls, which she shared with two Italian women at the beginning of their legal careers and a young English student named Meredith Kercher.

Meredith had, in fact, accompanied Amanda to the concert but left at the interval, just before Amanda and I set eyes on each other. If Meredith had stayed, chances are we would never have started talking and things would have worked out very differently.

*  *  *

Our walk seemed to last for hours. We strolled down Corso Baglioni toward the piazza where we shared our first kiss. We admired the views and talked about our families and exchanged many more kisses until we were too cold to continue. I asked Amanda if she wanted me to walk her home, or if she’d like to come back to my place to watch a movie.

I wasn’t expecting her to accept my invitation; it’s just one of those questions that Italian men feel compelled to ask.

“Okay,” she answered, “I can come to your house.”

Her answer took me completely by surprise. Where I was brought up, in the traditional-minded Italian South, women who say yes on the first date are regarded as suspect, and men are warned against getting involved with them. But Amanda didn’t seem to be one of those girls. She was gentle and genuine, and even my bafflement couldn’t mask how thrilled I was that the night was turning out so well.

“Aren’t you afraid to be out with me?” I asked. “How is it that you trust me?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but I trust you.” Then she took me by the hand and smiled, and my heart melted. The lightning bolt had hit its target.

*  *  *

I took Amanda back to my one-room apartment on Corso Garibaldi, just a few steps away from the University for Foreigners. At night, the area attracted drug dealers and street bums, but they mostly kept to themselves and were easy to avoid; for all the subsequent talk about this being a
brutta zona,
a bad neighborhood, it never struck me as particularly dangerous. I showed Amanda around and invited her to plop down on the bed while I loaded a film on my computer. Of course, by the time I settled in next to her, all thoughts of the movie were quickly forgotten and we pulled each other’s clothes off before the opening credits finished rolling.

When I woke up the next morning, Amanda still had her arms wrapped tightly around me. I remember feeling safe and warm in a way I hadn’t since I was a little kid. We related in a sweet, almost childlike way, maybe because we didn’t share a native language. I helped her with her Italian, she corrected my English, we found common ground in German, and everything felt fresh and new. Amanda brought me back to my childhood, a time of purity and carefree abandon long since overshadowed by family disputes and reversals of fortune, none worse than the death of my mother in 2005. It was as if Amanda had found an old dresser, dusted it off, and opened a drawer full of toys and beautiful objects that had been locked away for a long time.

Did I fall hard for her? Absolutely. Did she feel as strongly about me? No, but as we first got to know each other, I preferred not to
let that trouble me. I was floating high in a pristine, azure sky, and I just wanted to keep floating.

*  *  *

I didn’t know what I should tell my family about Amanda, so for a day or two I said nothing at all. I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold back for long because my father called several times a day and he would have sniffed out any real reticence in about two minutes flat. Besides, we were in the habit of discussing everything, even the most intimate parts of our lives. That’s a Southern Italian thing; families in my part of the world are all over each other’s business and treat everyone’s ups and downs as their own. But we Sollecitos had also developed a special bond because of my mother’s sudden death. She and my father had been divorced for years, but once she was gone, he went into protective overdrive with me and my older sister, Vanessa. We didn’t always welcome his intrusions and fought bitterly with him from time to time. Vanessa would sometimes cut off communication for weeks or months and insist on going her own way, but not me. I kept right on talking, no matter what.