Italy Fermata 15: La Spezia
tl;dr: the last stop/post
When do you call it quits?
Anytime the seed of the thought of quitting something would enter my mind,
I would remember the chorus of my parents, who would say:
"You are very good at starting things, but not at finishing them."
or the variation:
"You don't finish half of what you start!"
The first few times I heard this,
I never took the blame
I thought that it was kind of normal,
aren't the beginnings of things always more exciting than the endings?
Even the feeling of completion...
It can't surpass the infinite freedom of possibilities at the start.
of what all the other things could be!
and anyway, as you will learn later:
the moment you finish something,
life asks you to start something else.
You also learn with time,
as with many things in life that you hear often,
you start taking them on.
It was true that that you didn't actually finish everything you started,
but now you believe it even before you start something.
And then, based on your personality or your star sign
and like any Greek tragedy
you rebel!
you want to prove the chorus wrong!
You are going to finish EVERYTHING you start.
even if
you are tired you don't see the value you find it annoying you are hungry your feet hurt you are angry you are lazy you wanna go home you have no more joy you hate it here were you sleep you can't find the idea
even if all that
you will FINISH what you start,
so that along with it, you can also complete
yourself.
La Spezia was my next stop. I still had three more days before the flight back to Cape Town from Rome. Chiara had asked me - “Ma perché La Spezia? There’s much there” Just because. I had put it on the route, to try a place that was a bit unknown, more local perhaps. I was still trying to figure out how many more places I could still squeeze in before flying back out. Pisa? Lucca? Sienna? I was keeping the travels going, trains right up until that border control. Three more nights, each in a different place.
So far on the trip, I had placed the least amount of attention on the quality of the places where I was spending the night. I usually picked up the cheapest single bed options closest to the train station. My choices were mostly poor, from the mouldy cramped cavern in Matera (disguised as single room in a boutique hotel) to the Bergamo room next to a waterfall (ok a very babbling brook) that prevented sleep. La Spezia’s accommodation, a flat halfway between the middle of town and the train station, greeted me with a 3/4 bed in a room built for a single bed, and a smell from the toilet that made it seem as if the whole apartment building had been smoking weed since the Lira made way for the Euro.
But hey, the place doesn’t matter. I am not in Italy to hang out in a room. I am just there to sleep. I am here to see the sights, feel the places, walk the cobbled streets, etc… That was my thinking for not being so picky with ensuring that I could always return to a comfortable space at night that would help me recharge for the next day. The charm of La Spezia would win me over!
La Spezia was local and unpretentious. It is coastal, with a harbour hidden by rows and rows of apartment blocks. There is a hill on the one side, and buildings are tucked into a well behaving grid, like a graph notebook. The centre has several pedestrian only blocks with restaurants and shops, but nothing too ostentatious. Kind of typical, dialled back small bits and pieces of every town i had visited so far. Nice, but not extraordinary.
Perhaps I was just low on energy, and required some food, a nice meal, some specialities, or maybe I should just grab something quick. I passed blocks, looked at restaurant menus, looked for a place with vegetables. A green smoothie? Maybe just something dough-like. Don’t need something fancy. Perhaps around this corner there will be a place that will be it. It will replenish the stomach, the soul and the soles. No, next one then. Don’t see much. There is a bubble tea place called Mochi, like my cat, cute. Maybe it is a sign to get some bubble tea. No. Next one then, just around the corner. Do I really need more pasta in my life? In my body? Is 15 euros too much. Could I get a drink here? No, that’s too much for an Aperol. There will be a place. Next corner.
No, nothing. the line was crossed. hunger became hanger. And La Spezia tasted bland. Cute. But diluted. It did not have the bombacity of the south, it did not have the quaintness of old renaissance towns of the north east. It was what it was. But what was I looking for? Maybe all the other destinations had given so much I had reached a saturation point, and now I couldn’t enjoy it for what it was. Like I had already seen what was there to see in other places. After the antiquity and uniqueness, had i seen enough?
Was it me?
But no, one can’t quit so close to the end. You must finish what you started and how you were doing it. There was potential to see more. Ok, so maybe not La Spezia, maybe the next town. This was just a mid choice. Or maybe I just needed sleep and tomorrow La Spezia would be fine. I could find the maritime museum or take an excursion to the more flashy Cinque Terre towns. Just have to keep walking.
I was eating my takeaway dough back in my cramped room for the night, on the bed. The feet were tired, the soul fatigued. How did we get here? Right. Maybe just sleep and we start again. When things really don’t go how you plan, so you would rather just start from scratch. I have a few options for tomorrow. The room was still unpleasant, but can just get through the night till tomorrow.
Then a sound came from outside. First some euro techno music, then a quaint marching band. I looked out from the narrow window. A group of people were holding a banner (a name of place?), they were walking in front of a platform on wheels. They kept walking, and then another similar group passed. Other people were behind the barricades watching. The barricades! I had seen those on my ill fated walk. I look online. First Saturday in August in La Spezia… The Palio del Golfo: the various boroughs gather and have boat races and competitions through the weekend. Tonight, they were doing a parade in the middle of town, underneath the window of my high apartment block. I looked on for a bit, and I also found it…bland.
OK.
It was me. I had enough.
I knew that there was no way I was going to write any of these reflections during the trip itself. I wanted to first document it all simply by being wherever I was. I wanted to be as present as possible to the person I became away from home. Though I would succumb to the stereotypical image of the solo traveler, and whip out my small diary and pen while drinking Aperols by the piazzas. I would simply capture notes on where, and my moods and feelings. This was more out of a routine I had started to help me process the day and I thought would help be reference for later. For the night of La Spezia, I wrote an entry about how I had traveled so far from Bo-Kaap only to find a street parade outside my window (there was also a marching band!). The day after I took a train to Rome, and waited out for my flight back home in a spacious hotel room, without even walking out to see anything Roma had to offer. The Vatican was around the corner from where I was staying, but i only got as far as the hotel pool).
But all those Aperols had kick-started a dream. I would write about all of this properly when I got home, and compile it into a something that people could read. It would be a way to re-traverse the trip, and etch what I had experienced deeper into memory. It was a way to bring the past into the present. I could walk back through each town and re-trace the physical and mental paths I took while there. And other people could come for the ride, just to see where my feet and mind took me. But more selfishly, I was solidifying memory, of re-living in those moments of life which felt nothing like the usual day to day, where almost the only thing in common from my regular routine was myself, and even that person was changing, becoming someone else along the way. Writing about that who I was away from home, now back at home, maybe it could help me keep that other version alive after the trip.
The first few posts were easy. I was still carrying that energy of the away from home version of me. But with each subsequent post, the day to day of regular life pushed and screamed for attention. It is more more urgent. People can fall apart if it not attended to. Things might even starve if not fed in the moment. It asks you to put all your non-immediate projects away. I would tell myself that when I get this part of immediate life sorted out, then I will work on this important dream. Let me feed the bills, the boss, the babies.
Two years have now passed since abandoning La Spezia (took the first morning train out as if embarrassed to have spent the night) and I am finally finishing writing about this last stop, and thus finally concluding the archive of this whole trip. On many a night, sometime after the 8 to 4 and before bed, or on a weekend, I placed myself in various positions to write.
The screen of the focus writing app that comes with the gentle sound of being inside a train. The regular rumbling of train tracks will take me back and spur me on. Agh, but the afternoon sun has gone now, not so nice to write in this room anymore. The lamp light is not good. And anyway, I wanted to write with my fancy calligraphy ink pen and use the nice Japanese notebook (the two paired make an inspiring duo). It will make me more creative than typing. Is it more inspiring to stare at a blank page or a blank screen? What was the name of that Basillica in Bergamo with the panels? Let me see if my photo has a geotag. Ah, okay. I can google it now. Ok I am back there, but what do I say? What do i write? Agh, let me try tomorrow. Go to sleep.
I justified the delays with scope-creep. I wanted the posts to try to become more elaborate, the weaving of observation & memory more intricate. It also gets tough describing these forges, connections, remembering streets, events, rekindling associations. It is a struggle to hold on to the past. I would sit in front of the computer screen/page of fancy Japanese notebook paper and hit a mental wall. It would be such a familiar feeling. Back in undergrad in a lecture hall for Intro to Calculus. The first few functions were so straightforward, but then every function past the first lecture slopes steeply upward. Exponentially. I write a bit but only covering half the distance I need to capture the dream. The next step might bring me there. The struggle is infinite. It makes you want to quit.
You will never capture the dream like you want to.
You will never match the vision you have.
You will never realise the dream.
Or did I not want to finish, nor to quit, because I did not want to say goodbye? Writing something about each town meant holding onto those memories until I had finally written them down. By then, the trip through the town would have forged itself into me. Only then could I let it go. But if it remained unfinished… If a town remained un-posted about, the trip wasn’t over. As long as it remained a draft, I still hadn’t left.
Maybe I never confused quitting with finishing. Perhaps my character flaw is believing that finishing is the same as leaving.