Florence, Italy: Part I of II

It's a beautiful morning in the piazza, and the bus driver's son is dead. He died in a car accident the night before, and the bus driver just found out. As a student in the UGA Studies Abroad program in Italy, I have been living out of suitcases for a week in various Italian cities, and the driver's job today is to take us all to Cortona, our new home. Everyone is solemn as we wait in the park with our hundreds of suitcases, which he will soon help us load onto the bus. Does one go to work on the day one's child dies? In this case, apparently so.

"It's scary how many car accidents have occurred in the past two weeks," said Olivia, one of the two girls I will be sharing a room with for the next three months. "My father knew a child who died this week in a four-wheeler accident. Death usually comes in threes, you know."

I shudder, hoping the phrase won't be proved right during the next few days. I'm big on coincidences and superstitions, so naturally I start to get a very bad feeling.

Once we load our bags onto the bus, which we hear won't be taking us home until 2:30 p.m., everyone leaves the park for one last day of shopping and exploring in Florence. There is an optional museum trip later in the day, but Olivia and I are feeling sluggish so we decide to opt out and go have cappuccinos and waste time in the park where we dropped off our bags at the bus. We assume that the group will reconvene there because the bus had met us there all the other times.

After cappuccinos, we search the park for a bench in the shade. The piazza is quite large and has several benches, but only one is free. We notice right away that someone has written a message on it in what looks like whiteout. It reads: "I live in this f**king world / With f**king problems / I hate myself / I want to die." We hesitate for a minute, wondering what to make of such a tragic statement.

"I just hope that no one died because of this, and that whoever wrote it was just in love," Olivia says. In response, I wonder aloud whether someone might have even died on that very bench and used the text as an artistic suicide note. I admit that it is a morbid thing to say, but on a day that began on such a sad note, it wasn't hard for either of us to believe. We decide to sit on the bench anyway.

We pass the time by peoplewatching and telling stories. Somehow we begin telling ghost stories and the conversation turns to childhood fears and experiences. When Olivia was very young, she thought she saw something moving around her room and she decided to begin wearing a rosary to bed. She explains that she's not very religious, but there's something comforting about having one. As a child she thought that whatever was bad couldn't get her if she had a rosary with her.

That got me thinking. I'm not religious either, but my grandmother gives me small crosses and rosaries all the time so that I will be protected. My mother always has one in her car. I usually don't pay it any mind, but I have become fascinated by the number of people I have met on this trip who all think it's important to have one.

In Vatican City in Rome, all my friends kept wanting to stop to buy rosaries, and all I wanted to do was get out of there and sleep off my jetlag sickness. (I spent my first day in Rome throwing up off of the most beautiful bridge into the picturesque canal -- definitely ruined a couple of honeymoons.) Now I wish I had taken the time to pull myself together and buy one. Bear with me, the rosary bit will be important later.

All the ghost stories are starting to make us jittery and it is nearing 2:30 so we decide to go lie in the sun at the spot where the bus will meet everyone to go to Cortona. We lounge in the grass peacefully until 2:45 rolls around, and still no one is there. The thought occurs to us that we are in the wrong place. The program I'm in basically has an abandonment policy, which means that if you are not there when the bus leaves, you will be left behind.

We laugh it off and decide that they said 3:30 instead. Olivia says she kind of even hopes we have been left behind so we can go on an adventure finding our way to Cortona on our own. I agree with her. Neither of us is too fazed by the thought of it.

At 3:35 we know something is wrong. I have one of the professor's numbers from one of the handouts so we give him a call.

"I was hoping I'd hear from you guys," he says. "We waited for 40 minutes. I'm sorry ..." Oops. I still don't know where they met but it wasn't the park. He explains to us which train we should get on and which stop to get off. "You'll have an adventure!"

We decide to take our sweet time and go to the cafe across the street to get some sandwiches. We laugh as we walk in and find that "Bohemian Rhapsody" is blasting throughout the restaurant. Everyone has been singing it for days because the frequent mention of the names "Galileo" and "Figaro." A coincidence! Little do we know the series of coincidences that will ensue after we finish our matching tuna sandwiches.

The man behind the bar magically speaks excellent English so we have him give us directions to the train station, which happens to be right down the street to the left.

"You have to make jumps along the way!" he says.

What? I decide that it's just a joke that got lost in translation somewhere. Whatever the case, had we not been walking down that street along the side of the park at the exact time that we were, I would not be sitting here right now still shaking and writing this story.

(To be continued next week ... )