Chapter 38

Up to the final stop our European trip was glorious. But it was in Rome that I had my first encounter with the man who was to affect my life probably more than any other I'd ever known.

Actually it wasn't quite an encounter, more on the order of ships passing in the night although through no fault of his. And of course I had no idea at the time what a major role he was going to play in my future.

Rome was the culmination of our first ever trip abroad, Lee's, mine and of course little Johnnie's as well. John had just turned two, and was becoming something of a little hellion—they don't call it the "terrible twos" for nothing—but he was an adorable little hellion, and we weren't about to park him with strangers (OK, friends, but still not relatives and I well recalled from my own childhood how great was the difference).

Neither were we willing to postpone the trip any longer. We'd been looking forward to it ever since our passports had arrived, we'd spent literally months planning it, and it was our time; we went.

Our itinerary was nothing terribly imaginative, but for us first-time visitors to Europe it was thrilling. First Paris, the "city of lights" where we enjoyed our first-ever taste of another country, another culture. We'd planned a full week there, both to give us leisure to recover from jet lag and to take in its famed sights—the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Champs d'Elysées, the Arc de Triomphe, Versailles, everything on the postcards.

And we did see most of it. For two years old Johnnie was really pretty good. He got cranky if he didn't have his afternoon nap, which put a minor crimp in our plans a few days, and he started a couple of temper tantrums which Lee quickly quashed with firm displays of maternal authority, but in general he seemed pretty happy and was generally quite well-behaved. Through our hotel we were able to arrange for baby-sitters (they call them that in France, too, they just say it with a French accent) for several evenings which we spent at the top-rated restaurants and nightclubs we could find in the guidebooks.

But both Lee and I found that our best times were, not visiting the touristed sites, but simply strolling the city. We'd plump John down in the pram we'd brought with us and simply walk. It had been our custom back home in Charleston, in Paris it became almost a passion. John slept through a lot of those walks, of course, but Lee and I found them exhilarating. We'd make our little attempts at French, at which Lee, who'd studied it in school, was much better than I, and mostly we'd just walk and gawk.

I could have spent weeks, months even, in Paris; the time went all too quickly.

Then it was Eurail to Venice, the "city of canals." Venice doesn't have streets, it has waterways; it's actually an aggregation of islands, half of them man-made and almost all at least shored up by human-built bulwarks. In the Middle Ages that layout provided a built-in defense against aggressors and made Venice briefly the pre-eminent city in Europe; today it was mostly an inconvenience.

I was a bit disappointed in Venice. We could still walk, but the sights—save for the Piazza San Marco, the Doges' Palace, one or two others—seemed fairly ordinary, and the neighborhoods, even in that area, appreciably poorer and less well maintained than we'd grown used to in Paris.

For a change it was I who took linguistic priority. I wasn't fluent, but before the trip I'd really tried to learn Italian via computerized instruction. It was I who greeted passers-by now instead of Lee, and I relished my linguistic superiority. For as long as it lasted; Lee had an "ear" for languages, where I didn't, and even in our three days there she had pretty much caught up to me.

Venice's biggest let-down to me was those damn canals. They were dirty. It was said the city had come a long way, but they struck me as not much more than open storm drains. Cruising Venice in a gondola was supposed to be the epitome of romance; in my head, at least, it seemed more like a bad re-make of Phantom of the Opera where the Phantom takes his beloved Christine on a boatride through the Parisian sewer system.

And our gondolier sang, all right, but he was off-key.

From there our trip was by rental car. That alone was an adventure. First was the problem of getting a baby seat for John; by sheer effort of will (mostly Lee's) we managed it, but it looked several years old and I wasn't sure I trusted it. John damn well didn't, he made that much clear.

Then there was the Italian traffic. Either Italian drivers have personal death wishes or they revel in the game of automotive "chicken," I'm not sure which. They have these wonderful limited-access superhighways called "autostradas," on which I could drive 80 mph and watch the entire country pass me, and they have other roads, where I could feel like a target for every oncoming driver, usually at close to the same speed.

I wasn't ever sure which I hated more.

Even so, we actually made it unscathed. First to Florence, home of the Medicis, about which I'd read so much. And it was everything I'd hoped, the Ponte Vecchio—the old bridge, rimmed with shops—the Uffizi art gallery, the Pitti Palace. I felt I was back in Paris again, I wanted to stay forever but we had places yet to go.

On to Siena, home of the famed palio, the annual no-holds-barred horse race that careens around cobbled city streets. Each horse is sponsored by one of the city's "contrade"—basically, territorial gangs, akin to New Orleans' "krewes" with a 'tude—the jockeys using their whips to slash at each other more than their own mounts. We hadn't come at palio time, and while the town was interesting there wasn't much to keep us.

And so to Rome, the "eternal city," where we'd end our trip and pick up a plane back home. Oh, sure, we stopped at Pisa on the way to see the famous "leaning tower," but it was underwhelming; it looked like just what it was, a church tower with a lousy foundation that had accordingly tilted sideways. You could climb it, and we did, all three of us—me carrying John—and maybe it gave Galileo a charge, but it did nothing much for us.