Rome. The sun is rising over the City of Seven Hills. I am sitting at a cafe, not far from our hotel, editing a column on a yellow legal pad. I am here for breakfast, waiting for my wife to wake up.

The Colosseum is just down the street. The old stones are kissed by morning light. The Circus Maximus, the ancient chariot racing stadium, is flooded with morning fitness enthusiasts, jogging the old track. Most of whom are American.

The waitress stops at my table. She is an older woman. Exotic in every way. Midnight hair. Black eyes. She could have been Sophia Loren in another life.

She smiles when she takes my order.

“Are you a writer?” she asks.

“I’ve been called worse.”

“What Southern state are you from?” she asks.

“How’d you know?” I said.

She smiles again. “You say the word ‘chair’ with two syllables.”

Her name is Ginerva. I’ve never heard this name before, but it’s a lovely name. And it makes me feel warm inside because the women I come from don’t have

names like this. We have Myrtles, Ruth Anns, and Janice Louises. Here, they have Isabellas, Ludovicas, and Ginervas.

Ginerva is a highly traveled individual. Speaks six languages. Has been everywhere. Seen everything. But she loves America the best. Especially the Southeastern United States.

Namely, she loves our food. She loves iced tea. And fried chicken. Also, she adores American television shows like “Monk,” “Bonanza,” and she grew up listening to the Grand Ole Opry. She has a tattoo of Lucille Ball on her elbow.

And I’m starting to get homesick. Don’t get me wrong, I love to travel. In fact, “love” might be too weak of a word. I’ve learned a lot about Italy. Some good; some bad. I’ve learned a lot about Americans, too. Some good; some bad.

But mainly, gentle reader, I’ve learned that you will never know what…

Morning in Firenze. The cobblestone streets are wet from a light rain. The sun is not yet up.

The Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore stands in the distance, red tile roof obscured by a mist which hangs over town like a damp washrag.

I leave my inn, looking for coffee and breakfast. I’ve been in Italy for weeks now—and I never thought I’d say this—but I’m sick of bread.

I pass a homeless man on the corner. He is sleeping at the foot of a basilica, on the cobblestones. A dog is curled up beside him. They are both wet. Both shivering.

Next, I see two nuns approach the man. Their habits are dark and nontraditional. The nuns look youngish. Maybe mid-forties.

One nun stoops to speak to the man. And I cannot help but watch them. I’m thinking to myself, “Now here is something you don’t see every day.” A nun and a beggar. It’s like the flannel boards from Sunday school class, only in real-time.

Maybe the nun is asking whether the man

is all right. Maybe she is offering to help him, or buy him a sandwich. Or whatever.

She stays with him for a while, as crowds of students meander past them.

There are students everywhere here in Florence. You can tell they are students because they are always surrounded by a giant cloud of vape fog. Almost all young people vape in Italy. It must be an unwritten law. If you are young; you vape.

The air is cough-syrup scented miasma. It’s almost enough to make you miss the days when people smoked cigarettes. Almost.

But these children are young and happy, and full of wonderful plans for their lives. Just seeing them makes me feel a little excited somehow. Also, all these Italian students have more fashion sense in their pinky toes than an entire Kardashian family reunion.

Speaking of fashion. Recently, a…

She was cool. That was my initial thought when I first met her. She was just cool.

It wasn’t her milk-chocolate hair. Or her Poarch Creek skin. Or her quirky mannerisms. Or her loud, Alabamian voice. Or the way she spoke, like everything she said carried the same level of importance as, say, national security.

It wasn’t her filthy ‘89 Nissan Altima. Her car was disgusting. Before you crawled inside, you wanted to make sure you were current on all your shots. Her backseat was littered in culinary school textbooks, mostly with French titles. Fleetwood Mac was in the cassette player. There was a church key in the ashtray.

It wasn’t that she was bossy—I have a thing for bossy women. It wasn’t that she was a tomboy—I have a thing for tomboys. It wasn’t that she truly believed she could beat me at arm wrestling, and then proceeded to do so.

It wasn’t that she knew all the words to Joe Diffie’s “Pickup Man,” or that she could clear a dance floor whenever they played

“Watermelon Crawl.”

It wasn’t the way that dogs and children always followed her around. And it wasn’t the way she smelled without perfume; a sweet smell, mixed with a little sweat.

It wasn’t the way she listened intently when someone spoke, with a slightly tensed brow, like she was REALLY listening. Either that, or she was trying to solve the Riemann Hypothesis.

It wasn’t the way she laughed too much. Or the way she was always cracking jokes. Or that she had her black belt in sarcasm. Or the way we could spend 138 hours in a car together, without one serious word being spoken between us.

Or the way she chewed her nails. Or the way she never had to shave her legs because she is the only human being I’ve ever known who was devoid of arm and leg hair.

It wasn’t…

There are many perks to being a professional writer. Namely, whenever you are at a swanky cocktail party and you tell people what you do for a living, they will smile and reply by giving you their drink order.

But sometimes as a writer, you actually get to do exciting things that other citizens never get the opportunity to do. Cleaning public toilets is only one example.

Another example would be piloting a gondola down the Canale Orfanello in Venice. Which I did.

Matteo was my gondolier today. He was a youngish middle-aged guy, fit, wearing a navy-and-white striped shirt and tennis shoes. He has been operating a gondola in Venice for 22 years.

He stood at the stern of his boat, constantly pumping an oar in the blue-green water of the canal, and he asked what I did for a living.

So I told him. Then I asked how he came to his current profession.

“It was my uncle who first suggest me to try this job,” said Matteo

in broken English. “I was 17 when I first try to use the oar, and I think to myself, ‘How hard can it really be?’”

The answer was: hard. For many reasons.

First off, the Gondola is a temperamental, flat-bottomed boat whose design took 800 years to perfect. It is a giant asymmetrical banana, which makes it responsive, quick, and the boat is as sensitive as a gassy toddler.

The slightest movement aboard a gondola affects the whole ship. If you clear your throat on a gondola, everyone onboard feels it.

Secondly, the single oar that propels the boat, in a sculling manner, also serves as a rudder. Sort of like a fish flapping its tail. Learning to use the oar takes some a lifetime. Many never get it and abandon their apprenticeship.

“It take me seven years just to learn to use this oar. It never just ‘clicks’ in…

It is after dark when our train pulls into Stazione di Venezia Santa Lucia. We step off the railcar in Venice, onto a platform that is empty, except for a few singing crickets and railway employees on smoke break.

We made a few friends from Nebraska on the train. They are mid-seventies. Just a few Americans, helping each other through a foreign land.

We all descend the terminal steps. Our backpacks sit heavy upon our backs, akin to carrying 3-year-olds across Europe. Our bodies are cramped and sore. We have been hopping trains all day like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Dorks.

But we all soon forget our misery. Because as we exit the station, we are greeted by incredible streetlights.

“Wow,” say our friends from Nebraska.

“Wow,” say we Alabamians.

The street lights in Venice are not like American lights. In the US, outdoor public spaces largely adhere to a strict design style that could be loosely defined as Adult Correctional Facility. The buzzing fluorescent lights found in, say, a Walmart

parking lot, glow harshly white, bringing to mind your last appendectomy.

Whereas the streetlights in Venice are the color or flickering torches. Orange light is reflected in the mirrored water, Van Gogh-like, rippling beneath city sidewalks.

Then, a gondola passes beneath us. The gondolier is a young man, scrawny, working the stern of his flat-bottomed boat, singing for the tourists. The song he sings, a capella, is “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” by Meatloaf.

Not exactly what you’d expect from your typical Venetian, but hey.

We all walk around the city. There are ornate archway bridges everywhere—435 bridges to be exact. Venice is a town made up of 118 islands, so there are lots of bridges. Each bridge has a name. And most bridges predate the Boston Tea Party.

The bridge we are standing on, for example, is Ponte de Rialto, built in 1173.

And all this history…