Italy is a dream lived in the minds of most individuals that have not even traveled there. It is land of gold light and rolling landscape, and one of those intense senses of history that seems to cling to the very atmosphere you breathe. Solo performance of this dream is even more powerful. It is the process of self-discovery, of movie scenes in a background of renaissance beauty, of becoming the lead of your personal adventure and retrospection. I have had experience in the dream since I have pursued it myself. And I know also the fear that may take its place. The fear of being all alone in a nation that is passionate and a nation that has dedicated its culture to family. The terror of being alone in a Roman railroad station, the terror of eating alone at a table in a crowded trattoria, the terror of being an alien soul in the river of mankind which flows through Florence and Venice. I tell you this to say that what you are dreaming is real and that what you are fearing is the wrong thing. The fact is that Italy in its purest form does not deal with crowds. It is the space of tiny moments, non-verbal communication and individual discoveries. And the key to opening up this Italy–the one that is out there amidst queues, and selfie sticks–is the same thing which scares you: the aloneness. The solo travel in Italy is not a disadvantage, it and it is your super power. It gives you the liberty, the transparency and the swiftness of nudging out of the usual path and discover the magic that lies in the shady crevices.
Travelling with another person, you do that through the prism of a joint reality. You are focused externally on your friend, in a continual conversation between you and the world. When you move alone then that dialog is internalized and senses are sharpened. you do not simply look, you really see. You observe the elaborate designs of a floor tiles, how an old lady in her balcony is bending down to water her geraniums, how the afternoon sun casts a different kind of light filtering down the dust particles in a church dining in silence. You are completely there. This enhanced state of awareness is associated with complete freedom. Consider this: no arguments about which museum to go to, uncompromising discussion about which restaurant to eat out, no other person to worry about their time schedule. When you have fallen in love with a tiny, unannounced village you pass in a train landscape just because you look out at a window, all you have to do is alight at the next station. In case you become in love with a certain piazza you can easily spend all afternoon there reading a book and a cup of coffee and you will not vice-garde or feel guilty. This agility is what will get you to get rid of the masses. As organized parties are being driven off on the well-beaten tourist thoroughfares, you may work away through some narrow lane, guided by the strokes of a blacksmith, or by the fragrance of fresh bread coming out of the oven. Above all, you are somebody that can be approached by your solitude. A family or a couple is closed circle, it is selfsustained. The lone traveler is an open question, a beckoning to the relationship. The Italians, who are inherently nosy and friendly will have a better chance of talking to you, since they will be interested in knowing who you are. Your aloneness is anything but an obstacle, it is a short cut to the very genuineness you are after.
As a solo traveler, your choice of where you are going to have your head at night is not merely a logistical issue, but a question of sanctuary. It becomes your home base, it becomes where you recharge, and you should select it to be a source of wholeness and belonging. That is why you should escape the dry and unpersonalized area of big hotels and alienated apartment rentals. The best helper in this endeavor will be the Italian agriturismo. They are active farms, whether wine, olive oil or cheese producers that rent rooms to travelers. Once you are in one, it is like being invited deep into the family home. I shall never forget a stay in an olive farm in the hills of Umbria. My hosts, a couple of the sixties, did not only hand me a key, but handed over a seat in their household. They educated me about the proper tasting olive oil, told me about their families and some hints about what little, forgotten local villages to visit. I did not feel a customer, I was made to feel a visiting cousin. This gives a solo traveler an amazing touch of security and belonging. No, you are not an anonymous person. A family-owned shop of a kind is the family-run pensione or guesthouse, typical of towns and cities. Seek out those with the reviews that have the owner noted by name. These are the places where the owner will be personally interested in the welfare of you. They will also live up to you with the best and sincere pieces of advice, assist you in your Italian language and watch over you. It is a welcoming point in an alien land. Monastery stay is a unique and an effective experience to those who want to seek real peace and self-introspection. In these primeval, peaceful establishments you can have a relatively clean, tidy, and safe individual room at a ridiculously low cost. The quietness and the feeling of history does make the ideal atmosphere to journal, reflect, rejuvenate and a profound regenerative rest with the stimulus of the outside world.
The idea of eating by oneself particularly at dinner may be a great reason to worry. When I had my earliest table d?tair as a single person in Italy, it was a movement of hasty insecurity. So I figured out that it is not an activity to be endured, but a skill to be developed. It is a possibility to really enjoy the food and look at the rich theatre of Italian life. Having lunch first. Italian lunch is more casual. Go to a tavola calda or a rosticceria which are usually glass-fronted restaurants with a view of all the good home-style food inside where all you do is to point at what you want. It is quick, affordable, genuine, and totally free of pressure. The cherish ritual of the so-called aperitivo is another best friend of a solo traveler. This fantastic ritual starts in bars around the country since about 6 PM. You order one drink, and you will get a table full of snack, however, a simple plate of olives can be a buffet of pastas, cheeses, and meats. It is an animated, social environment that it is quite natural to sit down alone with your beverage and it may even be filling enough to be turned into the meal. Once it reaches time to have a real sit down meal, pick your seat deliberately. Stay away off the big restaurants in the main piazza that have menus in different languages. Take a three block walk in any direction. Find a small, cozy-lit trattoria, which has a short list of dishes written in Italian. This is an indication that they prepare what is fresh and local. And do not hesitate to go in. Say: “un tavolo per uno, per favore.” They will secure a place of residence. Go with a book or a journal in your hand: that is your defense against whatever incipient self-consciousness. But then lay it aside. Look at the cooks in the kitchen, hear what people are talking about around you and pay your full attention to the dish of the pasta that is in front of you. Sample all of the ingredients. Its an experience of meditation. after a short time you will find that nobody is looking at you. Each one is preoccupied with his or her own food, his or her own chatter. And the lonely tourist is you not; the keen-eyed traveller is you; enjoy a minute of innocent, sweet peace.
After some time, you will get to a certain realization that the real, authentic Italy cannot be seen in the Uffizi Gallery or the Roman Forum. They are grand certainly, but it is in the little, homelike intercourse which is so frequently denied us, that the personality of the nation is seen. The actual Italy lies in the unsophisticated, unsophisticable delight of inhabiting a lonely piazza in an unknown corner late on an after-noon, with no object at all than to look on the world as it passes. It is in the everyday routine of the passeggiata, the afternoons stroll at which the whole popolazione of a village and town meets to see and be seen, and you on your seat by the bank find yourself the silent spectator of the picturesque theatre of the social scene. It is in the meditative motion of a slow local train rumbling over the fields, one can look out the window and simply stare through the landscape changing and blending and watch miles and miles go by, as your journey takes on the same significance as destination. It is in the visual overstimulation of a neighbourhood grocery store, the fresh fruits and vegetables with their bright colours, the incessant loud and bemoaning art of trade between the market stalls, the fragrance of fresh basil and aromatic peaches. These are also those experiences which are not only all the better experienced because one is alone; but in many ways only to be experienced as such. Your aloneness you can be a silent witness, you can be in the background, you can be the witness of life as it is lived and not view it through a companion. This is when you stop being just sightseeing the country and start to experience it.
The last secret to opening these -to-be moments is by having an open and soft heart when traveling to the nation. However, no guidebook, no map will be of much help to you as a few Italian words that are pronounced with a sincere smile. You need not be fluent, but just the effort, the mere making an attempt to say such things as Buongiorno to a shopkeeper, or Grazie to a waiter, or to enquire whether a person speaks English by asking Parla inglese? and then, even before you attempt English–remembers a basic respect, which will be proved in a ten-fold measure. This cues you that you are not there to realize their culture and become a greedy consumer, but manage to take part in it with due respect. It is a bridge of little effort. It can transform a communication of strangers into a humane human interaction, a direction question into a ten-minute discussion with expressive arm movements and a nightly visit to a cafe into a true, even though a temporary, friendship. The real magic of a solo journey though is in such moments of association however brief. Once a man came into my cab with a little book-shop in Siena, and spent an hour or so with me, explaining which were his favourite passages in books which he knew perfectly well I could not read, because I had shown him some interest about his business. There was the case of a nonna in the City Market in Bologna, when she made me taste a piece, but she insisted, of some of the cheese that she had just purchased, and her eyes glowed when I told her that it was puro delizioso. The souvenirs are the moment itself. They become the essence of the true Italy.
The Italy you find out yourself will not be some Italy you have been viewing in the shiny magazines. It will not be as loud, as over-the-top or massive. It will be a lot more personal. It will be in the flavor of a sun-ripened tomato you received off the hands of a farmer in a agriturismo, in the laughter that you share with a total stranger you met in a festival, the deafening silence of a mountain path, and the calming feel of you exploration of a new city in your own way. The masses will be a relic of the past, a far off fable you have ingeniously avoided. Instead, you may expect space, the sense of connection and the Italy which seems to are all yours and belongs wholly to you. You will not only be going out with pictures, you will be going out with an increased sense of self-reliance and a self-confidence that can be attained only through the test-tube of a solitary voyage. The Italy you visit will enter into your soul, become your standard of beauty, and warm up the memory, and will be your silent voice that reminds you that you are as agency and adventurous as you are.
And after you have mastered learning how to discover Italy in its tiny moments the morning cappuccino or evening passeggiata, then you start to imagine that there is at least another level, one below. The country has a second skin: a seconda pelle, another skin so to speak that you can only experience when you have passed the stage of the visitor and began to get involved in the pulse of life itself. This is Italy that is not only off the beaten path, but a different state of being, a state of mind, quite accessible to the traveler who is alone in his journey. It is a promise to move out of the charmers town and visit the small frazione the officially accepted hamlet of a handful of houses on a hill. It is in these corners, where there is neither hotel nor restaurant, where there is solely a little alimentari and a church which is that your being there as a single traveler is real event. Here it is an offer of a glass of homemade wine by a curious local that is not a tourist sale but an actual willingness of hospitality and a welcome on a journey to a world, which moves as slow as seasons do. Then there is this inner quest that may take you even to the more complicated post-industrial core of Italy. As the world crowds to Florence, think of the dirty, stylish and unimpeachably real city of Turin. It is the city of grand and arcaded boulevards and old royal palaces, a city where Fiat lives and where the industry gets developed through innovation. A single traveller can spend days ambling around its premier Cinema Museum or Egyptian Museum before plunging into the beat and the colour of the multicultural San Salvario district, the heartbeat of contemporary, working Italy, where you simply cannot find a trace of the tourist facade. Or into the port of Genoa with its huge mazelike medieval centre and sense of danger and excitement and very much a seamanlike city, where great palaces lie concealed behind modest doors. Visiting such places by yourself, you will look at the country not as something existing in a museum, but as a living being, breathing and evolving.
This greater discovery is enabled by the art of un-planning, something to which the solo traveller becomes masters. The “hub and spoke” is one of the best measures to this. You no longer dwell on a linear, high tempo travel calendar, but a once, less touristy but well linked city as your foothold all during the week. The good example would be a city such as Bologna with its great food and co-central train station. here the whole of Emilia-Romagna and the rest of it is at your mercy. You may wake up in your small apartment, go to the station and stare at the departure board. Will it be the renaissance elegance of Ferrara to-day? The Ravennas Byzantine mosaics? The quaint beauty of Modena or Parma? You are free to make decisions based upon a whim, due to nothing more than your own mood. This way you no longer have to endure the burden of constant packing and unpacking but you can find a place where you feel welcome and comfortable in your new hub whilst still having infinite opportunities of exploration. In that sense, you should know how to plan the so-called giorno bianco ( It is the white day). It is a day that is actually blank. It is a white page of your journal. It is just there to be saturated in. During your Giorno bianco you may oversleep, be attracted by the smell of fresh bread and end up discovering a brand new bakery, spend three hours in one cafe, or meet a resident that suggests going to a local feast in the evening. It is those days when Italy not only just comes to you, when the least expected things happen, and they are a luxury which is affordable only by the free person who has no companion to worry about.
By consciously slackening your pace you will notice that you will actually be desiring to actively pursue these relationships. The social arsenal of a solo traveler goes way beyond the common room of a hostel. The local bar is your main resource. No the late-night cocktail-bar, but that plain, well-illuminated bar in the corner where Italians drink their coffee. It is the town living room. Turn it into your everyday practice. On the initial day, you are a mask. On the third day of the morning order to buy your cappuccino, you are into the groove. The barista will smile at you with a recognizable motion. The senile men and women reading the newspaper will start appearing as those of the play of yours. One can hone his/her Italian skills here in these low-soak interactions that are short in length but where you feel the strain of connection being built there for the first time. To have a more social immersion, apply technology to locate local gatherings. Social networks such as Meetup are working in big Italian cities, and you may check out a local hiking club and go with them on a Sunday walk, or a language exchange, or a tandem evening, where you can practice your Italian with fluent speakers with the intention of learning more about English. This is the shortcut to the local community which is not a tourist bubble at all. And most importantly, in case you find yourself in Italy during the summer months or the fall, you have to find a sagra, the local food festival. I can hardly emphasize the idea of these events being ideal to a one-person traveler. You will be pulled into a field or a piazza and you are forced to sit down a long table set up as a communal table and you are surrounded by the various youngest to oldest Italian families. The communal tables and the festivities around ensure that you are bound to strike a conversation with your neighbours. You will meet inviting and comforting dishes of food that both tastes and looks good, the local wine will be recommended to you and a degree of whole hearted enjoyment of community will be exercised upon yourself which will never cease operating.
And at the end of it all, this trip through the deeper and quieter Italy is also an interior journey. These sceneries and events form a form of mirror reflecting the resourcefulness, bravery and ability of connection with yourself. These are not mere languages of travel: getting your way around the beautiful mess of the Italian train system on your own, masterfully ordering a complex meal with a mix of fragmented utterances, and bonuses spiced with hand gestures, or figuring out the way back to your guesthouse after you lost yourself blissfully in a cornucopia of medieval allies; these are all small, highly efficient building blocks of self-reliance. You grow knowing how to trust your personal instincts, figuring out all of your own issues and being your own most excellent solo mate. You also get to think about the huge distinction between dread of being alone and deep comfort of aloneness. There is always this warm buzz of human life, as in Italy where life is so public as in their piazzas and in the cafes. This will make you be alone without necessarily feeling lonely. You are one unit of the mass energy, but independent in your own mind, a situation, which is easy and liberating. The most admired concern that Italy inculcates in the heart of the lone individual is the tranquility to embrace non-perfection. The times when things will seem to go wrong also will appear. The museum is suddenly on strike, the bus will arrive an hour late, the trattoria where everything is perfect will be already full. Any person with strict schedule may view this as a disaster. The solo traveler gets to appreciate it as an opportunity. The lost train connection brings about the finding of a beautiful small town you never intended to go. The closed museum releases an afternoon to find a hidden beautiful garden. You get to know when to wait, how to adjust and learn to embrace the unexpected path. It is not only a skill of traveling; it is a way of life: one should never forget that the most beautiful roads are the ones unmapped. It is your Italy, and your own unique one at that since this journey is the sort of mosaic of your personal discoveries, silent achievements, and pure encounters that will become forever inseparable with who you are.
