On Travel Part II
The deep part!
Welcome to this week’s post, the second in a series of essays about travel, a topic that has been on my mind since we returned from our trip to Italy. You can read the first one here if you missed it! On Friday, paid subscribers will receive a recipe for the most garlicky pasta I have ever made. It’s a national treasure!
Obviously, Italy is magical. I feel like a basic b*tch even typing that out because of course you’ve seen the movies and read the books and know this already. Since Diane Lane bought that charmed Tuscan villa, all of America fell, hard, for la dolce vita. It’s an understandable if a bit stale phenomenon, this italophilia, and one that I taken up with my usual obsessive nature.
Italy is a place where I have now spent six weeks of my life—longer, I think, than any other vacation destination except perhaps my grandparents’ house in Florida. The two trips could not have been more different: last year’s was firmly footed in Florence, and this year’s was a much more mobile adventure (*deep breath* Gaeta, Rome, Castel San Pietro Terme, Florence, Turin, and Milan, featuring day trips to Modena, Bologna, and Como). Last year, we were joined by family and friends, and this year, we traveled just the two of us.
Three weeks is both forever and a nanosecond when it comes to international travel. Those of you who know me (and possibly those who don’t?) will be unsurprised to hear that this is a trip I prepared for months in advance. I did heaps of research about the best places to eat and drink, of course, but also about the language and the culture and how to best blend in and not be those people. You know the ones I mean.
What began as innocent research quickly turned into a problem. Our itinerary morphed, spiraling out of control. My Google maps of places to visit in each city grew, first helpfully, and then to a point where it gave me anxiety to look at. This translated to me, paralyzed by choice in the face of so many, getting stressed out on vacation. (Just act like this is all surprising, okay?)
There’s a kind of inherent tension within me when I’m traveling. I want to feel like I’m getting off the beaten track and discovering something myself. I want nobody to know that I don’t belong there. I want to defy expectations and go where nobody expects tourists to go. It’s a weird, competitive drive, and I don’t know where it comes from. This is obviously something that I should explore more in therapy.
Outside of my own psyche, though, I can’t help but feel that there’s a societal reason for this pressure. The rise of travel apps, websites, Reddit threads, Instagram guides, Google ratings, and all that jazz has created a pressure cooker for travel enthusiasts. You feel obligated to find the best! dinner. The coolest! experiences. The most Instagrammable! vistas. The worst moment of our entire trip was walking through the gardens of a lakeside villa on Lake Como and watching lines and lines of influencers queue to take a photo against the same backdrop. I have never felt older and more confused. Isn’t the point of vacation to find those hidden gems and quirky places that feel special because of what you did there or who you were with?
And yet, it’s easier said than done. That very night, I caught myself worrying about which of the hundreds of saved restaurants we should pick for dinner and whether it was a cop-out to go to the popular looking one. What a silly waste of time on vacation. I spent too much time worrying about the ethics of travel while we were in it, and feeling guilty about whether or not we were doing things right. Guilt on vacation should be impossible, and yet here I am, living proof. My guilt was often assuaged by a glass of impeccable wine, which made me feel better at first, then worse.
Now that we’re back and I am no longer surrounded by bars offering wine lists that I can only dream of until I return, this is a subject I want to continue diving into and exploring. There’s been a lot written about this by people far smarter than me—Alicia Kennedy taught a course at Boston University that she generously made available on her Substack. Italian writer Giulia Scarpaleggia has written amazing pieces on contentious tourism. Travel and culture podcast Gola is one of my favorite listens, and it just kicked off its new season (interestingly, with a plea from hosts Katie Parla and Danielle Callegari: please reconsider traveling to Italy in the summer). Things are, like most things these days, complicated. I’m diving headfirst into that, and bringing my recent experiences with me.
Being on vacation and weighing these big questions in real time is not something I’d recommend, but it is something I’d encourage you to think about ahead of your next trip. Planning time to stumble upon the quieter streets, spend money outside of high season, and just sit back and let vacation take you where it will are all things that I, a person who just got back from a trip where I did not give myself enough time to do those things, highly recommend as well.
And, as always, if you want to chat about travel, ethics, or tourism, comments below are open to all.
See you back here on Friday! That pasta has enough garlic to drive away travel guilt AND vampires, so I can’t wait to share it. Next week’s essay on travel will be MUCH MORE FUN, I promise.
PS: Reminder that I sell travel/food prints on Society6. Check ‘em out! I haven’t put the new photos up yet, but I’ll get to it sometime. Gifting season is approaching, after all!