Italian in the Chapter \"Thinking

Italian

In the chapter "Thinking of Travel" Frances Mayes wrote: "[...] the passionate traveler looks for something. What? Something must change you, some ineffable something - or nothing happens. [...] Change - the transforming experience - is part of the quest of travelling." Is the learning experience a kind of travel and therefore a transforming experience as well? What does your learning-experience travel look like? Did something happen? Is it possible to travel, merely by learning something new?

To learn about a new culture or language is not simply to acquire knowledge. It means learning tolerance and understanding that will make even the ordinary, everyday world seem different. Someone who learns to appreciate the slower pace of life of Italy, like Frances Mayes in Bella Tuscany, for example, will never assume that the fast-paced American way of life, where people live to work, rather than work to live, is innately superior to all other modes of existence. Leaving your home and then returning makes your world seem different. Even if your hometown is unchanged, you are changed. Go to a poor country and when you return, America seems much more affluent and privileged. Go into the wilds, and see how comfortable and easy your life is, in comparison -- and also realize that you have survival skills you never thought you possessed.

To travel is to learn, but to learn is to travel. The act of writing about what you have learned can take you on a journey as you think about the events in your life anew in a way that you did not when you were experiencing them in real time. When Mayes was writing Bella Tuscany, she was likely learning just as much about Italy and herself, and the nature of travel, as when she was actually experiencing the events. In Italy, Francine Mayes was seeking a different kind of life, and also a different kind of identity. Learning how to write about Italy offers the opportunity to understand both the country and the writer's own soul better, and to re-live the experience of travel with a more critical eye.