la bella vita

I can hardly believe that it has been four years since I spent the most beautiful summer living in Florence, Italy. I can still sense that love. I can still taste the vibrant flavors of the gelati (which added a few pounds to my frame and happily gave my dentist two cavities to discover and fix). I can still feel the thickness of the heavy Italian red wine that I drank with dinner every night, even though it was 95 degrees outside and it made my mouth pucker with dryness. And I can still imagine the feeling of freedom and anticipation that came with exploring such a foreign, storied city and documenting it through photograph. One of my favorite places to spend time was at the San Miniato al Monte cemetery, an often overlooked oasis at the top of the tourist-trodden Piazzale Michelangelo. That adventure has been on my mind lately, as I just completed an iPhoto book of photographs of my summer in Italy for my mom for her birthday. Below are a small sampling, accompanied by quotes from one of my favorite Italian-setting books, "A Thousand Days in Tuscany" by Marlena de Blasi.

"I can make you feel loved but you can't make me feel loved. No one can. And if you try too hard, I'll bolt. I'm a runaway, after all."

"Under the weight of lesser or greater fortunes, I think what happens to a great many of us is that we really don't know what we want or with whom we'd like to have it. Nothing seems real until it's already gone. Until it's sealed up tight, out of reach. Until it's dead. Be it a person or a dream. And then the light comes, and so we mourn."

"Most of the pain in life is caused by our insistence that there is none."

"And I wonder why it is that, of all the thousands upon thousands of people who pass through one's life, most leave not a trace. Into abandon and oblivion they are consigned, as though they were never there. And more curious, why do those few, only those few, stay somewhere safe, dying, even, but never entirely so, engraving the heart, deep and smooth? The cut of the eyes, some voluptuous sting, one exquisite phrase, a voice like chocolate just before it melts, a laugh like thin silver spoons chinking across a marble floor. The way the see crashes into crisp champagne pools behind him as he kisses you. A hand resting on a hip. One mesmeric glance, brown or black, green, topaz. Blueberry."

"You trust risk more than comfort. I've always been afraid of comfort, too. Bring on the pain, because during those moments when I can neither see it nor feel pain, when it's quiet, I know it isn't really quiet at all but only gathering force. Better that pain stays where I can keep an eye on it. There's risk in comfort. There's comfort in risk."

"Each couple has a child: the Florentines a daughter, probably not yet four, the English, a boy of six or seven. The handsome blond boy seems to have caught the eye of la fiorentina...Dispensing with all other preliminaries, she says, 'Allora, baciami. Dai, baciami, Joe. Forza. Un bacetto piccolo. Well then, kiss me. Come on, kiss me, Joe. Try. Just a small kiss.' Stella has learned young to ask for what she wants."

"Maybe it's true that life is a search for beauty, for the harmony that comes from the mingling of things. Maybe life is a search for flavor. Not the flavor of food but of a moment, or a color, a voice - the flavor of what we can hear and see and touch."

"It's sensations rather than things I'm after. Only the mysterious is eternal. I prefer to feel this life rather than to grow foolish enough to believe I own it."

Note: These are all my original photographs. If you would like to use one please message me first and credit appropriately. Thanks!