Florence
The first time I went to Florence, I was 14. I was accompanying my father on his semester-long teaching post at the American University. Even now, so many years away, it's one of the most real and vivid experiences of my life.

We lived in a small cottage outside a villa 5 miles from the old city. A wealth of pine-nuts rained down in the fall. A patch of basil grew wild by the arched green door. Every day we'd stop by the tiny stores and get fresh sausage, tomatoes and peppers, dripping mozzarella and fresh pasta. The spaghetti created by these simple ingredients and the herbs outside our door had a flavor and quality that I've never tasted before or since. "You think you know what spaghetti is?" Each mouthful demanded. "No you don't. This is what spaghetti is." Italian food is famous not for its nuances or sophistication but for its flavor, bold, swaggering and inimitable as the Italians themselves. We lived on the simplest fare you can imagine--cheese, fruit, bread, sausage, basil, tomatoes--but every bite sang out with the lusty strength of a Bel Canto solo.

And oh, how we walked. Miles a day. Florence is a town for walking, almost as seductive as the Dakota hills. Hand-hewn blocks of stone, lovingly textured by jackhammers and chisels and then ignored forever, pave the roads. Narrow streets tease you just a bit further, in the hopes that one more corner will transport you four hundred years back in time. During rush hour the streets are canals of humanity on motorbikes, cars, buses, bicycles and legs. Italian drivers are fearless: two inches is the normal space between vehicles. Cars park on foot-wide sidewalks. Traffic lights are suggestions rather than commands.

Thanks to my father, I got to take college classes in Art History & Italian. I still remember art history: "OK, class, today we're going to study Michaelangelo's sculptures. Everyone get your coats." Everyone get your coats. Can you believe it?

And with that, we all walked down the street to see the David. He stood casually in a round chamber, caressed by the light pouring in from four round windows. I stared and stared. It was filet mignon for the eyes. It was...perfect. Even the too-big hand. It was the first time in my life that I had ever seen anything manmade that was perfect. I must have spent an hour walking around and around it, trying to find a single angle that wasn't beautiful and balanced. It was in a realm apart from all of the photos, the cheap resin repros available in the markets, even different from the copy, covered in pigeon shit and the excrescence of the city's vehicles, that stands in the Piazza di Signoria. It's what I strive for when I create things now, that breathless sense of otherworldly, heart-squeezing perfection from which you can't look away.

It does something to a people, living among the combined artistic and architectural accomplishments of a thousand years past. Donatello, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti: These weren't obscure dead men in art books, these were buildings, statues and sculptures I walked by every day. The Florentines have gotten used living among the magnificence of centuries. They take it for granted; doesn't every city boast a dreamscape of geniuses past? Can't everyone gaze up at perfection on their way to work? Don't all antique stores have ancient rapiers casually standing in umbrella stands, and Renaissance tapestries rolled and stacked against the walls? It gives them a confidence and innate sense of taste and surety that not many populations have.

We visited the smaller towns around Florence: San Geminiano, with its unlikely cacophany of tall, squared towers and jewel-like gardens. Mountaintop Assizi, with its pink and white marble gutters. The graceful park atop Lucca's 100-foot wide city walls. Siena, my favorite, with its sweet golden earth that looks good enough to eat.

Everything about Tuscany is golden: the walls, the roads, the light. August afternoons are a honeyed shimmer gilding fields of wheat and vine. Winter sunlight casts a pale champagne glint across the land. This light is like amber; it catches hold of you and makes time stand still. It has fallen on Tuscany's hills since the time of Christ and is still here, holding the weight of a thousand years in each beam. Medieval peasants harvested vines as I walked by, if I only had the eyes to see them. The ghosts of courtesans leaned out of green-shuttered windows above me, calling out to long-dead vendors below.

At first I hated the smell of the city. Millenia-old sewage systems mixed with gasoline fumes mixed with street gutters cleaned too rarely. In the autumn, the smell of roasting chestnuts sold on street corners was added to the urban reek. It wasn't until I returned for three days, during my year in Austria, that I understood what I had missed; I stood in the Pensione Leo X and opened my windows and took a deep breath, and in rushed that horrid, lovely, inimitable Florentine scent and with it the emotions and experiences and memories that had lain dormant for years.

I played hookey from the rest of the American students and visited all of the places I had loved: the rustling, silvered olive orchards, Lonely San Miniato up on the hill, the old and new markets, the Uffizi (which I truly appreciated this time), the palazzi, the piazzi, all of them were filled with memories. Here was the square were we saw the pope tootling along in his bulletproof golf cart. Here we saw the hare-krishnas dancing and took them up on their offer of a free dinner. Here we had come across a carnival out of nowhere, full of leaping acrobats, drums, whirling flags, mythic masks, horns and singing, while walking home at midnight. Here was where I used to get those amazing flat-smashed sandwiches with all sorts of wierd fillings. Here was the wine store that I was always told to run out to, to get another bottle of wine, while my father and his Ethiopian friend Ashkenazi ate cheese and apples, and argued late into the night about shamans and 19th century expeditionaries. Here was Santo Spirito, the most naturally tranquil church in all of Europe or America, where I used to sit and do my homework.

The monk in charge of all of us lectured me sternly, the rest of the students thought I was a snooty bitch who didn't care for their company (which was true, actually) but I didn't mind. The old familiarity of Florence slipped around me like a kidskin glove and welcomed me home.

I returned four years later, during the spring break of the year spent going to college in Ireland. It was a strangely serendipitous trip, the week I came back to remember Florence. I met Katherine there, an amazing woman, one of those rare planetary conjunctions which occur only once in one's life. I ran into my first-year college roommate in the middle of the street, and spent the next two hours talking with Jana about absolutely nothing as we both tried to figure out what mystical purpose could be behind such an impossibly coincidental meeting. I bought a tarot deck in an old shop, which turned out to be so frighteningly truthful that I avoid using it.

I hate cities, as a rule. They are dirty and crowded and loud and ugly and hurried and there's not enough green. But Florence is different; it's not just a city. It is a vortex of memory and myth. It's the dream of a city, a distillation of the wars and aspirations and sacrifices and ugliness and bravery of a thousand years, which has saturated every brick and stone and courtyard. I understand now the passion that some can feel for a city, loving it more than a woman, willing even to die for it if need be; the city it has an eerie, eternal comfort and familiarity. Visiting Florence, even if only for a few days, is always a homecoming.