Paris in Love (43 page)

Next to our table was another such birthday celebration. Center stage was a pencil-thin, elegant woman with bleached blond
hair, fabulous high heels, and a short blue dress. She stood out among her family members like a show poodle sitting in a group of cheerful, loving dachshunds. My favorite moment was when one of her family gave her a floppy messenger bag adorned with a big Snoopy. She charmingly slung it over her shoulder—for the very last time, I’d bet my firstborn.

I went for a run with Alessandro and then trotted up 108 steps to the sixth floor, fell through the door, and threw myself on the living room rug to recover. Milo hauled himself up from his velvet cushion and came to see what was happening. To everyone’s delight, he aligned his fat little body next to mine and rolled over on his back so that we could pant in tandem.

Anna’s favorite moments in life come when Luca deigns to play with her. This afternoon Luca played king, sprawled in a chair, while Anna danced about him, waving her wand. Anna, as has perhaps been deduced, is a Harry Potter addict, while Luca prefers the Middle Ages. From the other room, I heard “Avada Kedavra!” (the killing curse), followed by a fifteen-year-old’s bellow: “What do you mean, you killed my court poet?”

Today the kids and I went to the Parco delle Cascine, a huge former estate that is now a public park sporting Florence’s biggest weekly outdoor market, with stands selling everything from wastepaper baskets to vegetables to dresses for a euro or two. It’s a particularly great place to find long translucent curtains, embroidered with flowers or fleurs-de-lis, the emblem of the city of Florence.

Thanks to an Italian hairdresser, my blond hair has been turned bright orange. Alessandro grinned and observed: “It’s really different.” My bruised self-image was soothed by Luca, who said, “Wow, no suburban moms have hair like that.” In an instance of truly regrettable timing, this week Alessandro and I are off to Venice, where I am to deliver an academic lecture before Shakespeare professors. I can guarantee that none of them will have hair that Ronald McDonald would envy.

Yesterday we wandered around Florence, ending up in a fabulous ice cream shop, Gelateria dei Neri, on Via dei Neri, behind Piazza della Signoria. If you ever come to Florence, try the sweet and slightly nutty ricotta and fig flavor.

In Venice for the conference, the first thing we did after leaving our hotel was go to Caffè Florian in Piazza San Marco. When Alessandro and I were grad students and poor as church mice, we shared a tiny pot of tea here for 7,000 lire ($3.50 at the time—a small fortune). Now we had a pot of tea each, listening to a jazz quartet play “And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.” Our tab came to thirty euros, or about $44.00, a ha’penny compared to the joy of being there together, solvent and happy.

Today we took a tour of Venice’s Jewish quarter. It’s the oldest ghetto in the world (dating to the early sixteenth century)—a tiny island where all Jews were compelled to live, so they built
houses eight stories high, with no elevators. The synagogues are beautiful, as is the memorial depicting the train that transported people to the concentration camps. Out of hundreds of Venetian Jews, only eight returned. It is heartbreaking.

Venice is like the dream of a sleeping shopaholic—the little, gorgeous footbridges rise into the air and come down into yet other streets of shop windows, shining with gold, velvet, and glass. The streets blend together as if one were wandering in circles, always presented with more to desire, more to buy.

Today I happened on a large pink sign for the Fortuny Museum. I thought vaguely of silk and decided to investigate. Mariano Fortuny (born 1871) was a brilliant fashion designer who worked with finely pleated silk and lustrous velvet. Don’t miss this museum: it’s a bit gloomy inside, but there’s a velvet couch to rest your tired legs and read the museum catalog.

Venice is big, labyrinthine, and full of stairs. Its address system is obscure to the point of impenetrability, and because it has no streets, you can’t simply fall into a taxi, which is my response to being lost in other cities. Today I got lost, but then found myself again at the Grand Canal Restaurant at Hotel Monaco. I splurged on an exorbitant lunch on the terrace, by myself. I ate a grilled octopus salad and fish soup
profumo di zafferano
, or saffron, along with a glass of champagne. My waiter thought I was crazy because I drank champagne alone while reading a book. But by that point I was tired of beauty, and a novel set on
a foreign planet featuring a cowboyesque hero was exactly what I needed.