Gio and I couldn’t be more different.
Yet when we met we had the same hunger and the same desperation in our heart.
We had been hurt badly and we were looking for revenge and solace.
We thought of having found both in each other arms.
Blinded by that urge to recover and forget who had placed us in that unwanted, undesirable condition we ended up instead being involved in what could have easily been the worst trip of my life. And probably his life. But I never actually asked him....so I can’t quote him....:-)
We met through common friends. I was selling my drawings, as many other street vendors, in Piazza Navona, the most beautiful piazza (square) of Roma. It was the beginning of a very hot summer. Gio was an artist, a painter. He stopped at my corner because he knew the two friends of mine who were there with me, selling their own works as well.
Gio and I were different even in our artistic expressions: while I was using only ink and acrylic and preferring intricate and very detailed drawings (more like an ink lace onto a white background), he was lost in his big canvas full of bold, shapeless, fully colored strokes.
This detail only should have given us some key of interpretation; it should have been a bill board signaling our differences. But we didn’t see it.
Gio was a highly dramatic and temperamental painter. His full time job was as art teacher in a local high school. He had sold several pieces already and held various art galleries.
When he met me, I think he was desperately looking for another muse. The love of his live had left him one year earlier with their two little girls.
And me? I was a lost, deserted, betrayed soul as well. My man, Marco, had left me after 5 years just few months earlier.
Gio and I were damaged. Seriously damaged and dangerous for each other.
But we didn’t see this too.
He was a true bohemian. His house was huge but interestingly and painfully empty. He couldn’t care less about decorating it. Only big completed canvas were hanging at the walls or against the walls waiting to be filled up....there were only lots of books on the floors, a table with few chairs, and his two easels.
Oh, and his huge white bed.
I remember that bed. Not because of the great sex that had happened on it but just because it was the first bed I shared with another man after having slept in Marco’s bed for many nights. I liked the bed, and Gio on it.
We ended up in that bed the second time we saw each other. At that time it was my way to soothe my pain: sleeping with anybody who I felt a connection with. I didn’t want to wait alone for the pain to go away. All those beds were my drugs. My pain killers.
Gio had a very huge bed. And so I stayed with him for a while
We shared the same passion for art, museums, books and music. There was a lot of intellectual, artistic flair in the air, as you can imagine.
Gio trained me immediately to respect one rule: if I would have gone to his house and I would have seen a t-shirt hanging from the shutters I should have kept going.
The t-shirt meant he was having another girl rolling on that bed. It was a mutual decision: both of us wanted to date other people.
Our hunting wasn’t over after we met. We were aware of this.
But for some reason he decided we were actually forming a good couple and we should go on a trip together. We would have traveled with his motorcycle to Capri, a small beautiful island in front of Naples spending one week photographing, sketching, sunbathing and making love.
Well, on the paper the trip was really a fascinating one: it would have taken around 3 hours to arrive to the ferry at Naples’s port and another hour to reach the island of Capri. We would have slept in tent in some camping site.
I said great.
He said lets do it.
We did it.
The morning of our departure all the signs were there perfectly aligned to warn us of the danger. Suddenly it got very cloudy after a long row of shining days. Gio forgot his driver license and we had to come back to his place to gather it. It was my very first trip on a motorcycle and I wasn’t very natural on it so I was forcing him to adjust his drive to balance my rigidity. When you drive a bike you have to follow the driver, be one with the motion. I would have learned this fundamental rule only later biking with my ex husband. But during that trip I was a mass of nerves and when the bike would turn left I was instinctively throwing my body to the right. For Gio that trip was pure torture.
But we did it. We arrived to Naples and even took the ferry on time.
It was a crowded ferryboat full of tourist, families, campers.
And Gio right there showed me how quick he could shift mood and close himself to me and the world in an icy, unmotivated prolonged silence. And so he didn’t talk to me until we arrived at Capri.
I sat on the bench watching Capri turning bigger and closer and all the excitement for the trip fell like a ripe fruit form the tree. Gio and I had had before those moments of sudden drop of interest for each other, like someone had made a spell on us and magically put us on mute. But I wanted be optimistic. I was going to Capri again, one of the most romantic place in the world. It was summer and Gio would have been good enough to keep me company.
He was probably thinking the same about me.
Both of us were so wrong.
Did ever happen to you to see suddenly a person nude and bare in front of you, as if somebody had taken off your nose the pink glasses of the infatuation? The giggling is gone. There is only a blank face in front of you, a person who is not more vaguely interesting to know anymore.
Well, that was what happened to me in that quick ferry trip to Capri.
But I had a week of vacation, and I was determined to have fun. So I took those pink glasses and forced them back on my nose.
To make a long (painful) story short, Gio and I ended up sharing only the tent at night...he tried to make love with me the second night but I told him no.
He never asked me again.
So I ended up going around by myself. And having a blast doing so.
I used to go very early in the morning to take a swim alone on the small beach close to our camping, before the crowd would assault it and deprive it of its exquisite beauty. I went alone hiking to reach one of the higher panoramic site of the island...some tourists were hopped on the back of wise and slowly paced donkeys to go up there...... the view was simply breathtaking and rewarding of any knee jerking pain.....I would fill up my water bottle, slather sun block on my legs and face and follow the less followed paths...to nevertheless found that another solitary hiker was always there before me...
Capri is a small island after all so Gio and I did bump in each other many other times...no hard feelings anymore, indifference was our main mood. To the point that we even shared some meal together. He told me that he had met some of his friends from Bologna and Venice and he was having fun with them. I wasn’t feeling bitter toward him anymore.
I kept visiting alone the fish market at the pier, watching the fishermen docking and selling super fresh fishes still gasping for air. I took tons of pictures of the Faraglioni, those majestic, gigantic emerging rocks proudly exposing their spectacular beauty to us from the most amazing blue water ever seen. The famous piazzetta di Capri was too crowded for my taste....I would stroll by and just seat somewhere on some bench people watching ...if you were lucky you would have seen some celebrities walking around as well .if I was interested, which I wasn’t ...
I was savoring my lonely time and Capri.
But that island is truly made for love...its too beautiful to let you alone for too long...lol...
So I ended up having my slice of Caprese moon. Because at the end Gio delivered what he promised me: romance at Capri.
Only it wasn’t him to kiss me passionately under that huge moon but ironically one of his friends from Bologna, who was working as coordinator in a tourist village on the beach....it happened that when Gio and I had dinner together he met him too and introduced me to him.
Can I tell you his name was Marco? (if you have read my sailing trip blogs you know why I a giggling now....). THIS Marco and I ended up sitting on the beach with him playing his guitar, the sand still warm after another gorgeous day and no string attached.
It was passionate, sweet and short. Just what I needed.
The next day Gio and I had to leave again for home.
Marco kissed me goodbye in front of the tent where Gio was already peacefully snoring.
.
I returned to Capri. It is too charming for not visiting more than once in your life but I came back with my then freshly married husband. Marco at that point was just a sweet memory.
Gio and I said goodbye to each other as well. As soon as we arrived back home. No regrets. I got my vacation, after all, and my romance under that Capri’s starry sky.
It was the right time to say goodbye to that huge bed too.
Do you have any story about trips gone horribly wrong?
Can you still remember when the pink glasses of the infatuation fell from your nose?
