Firenze and back

Several Christmases ago, I couldn’t say exactly which, but I think I was still in college, my parents gifted me with this lovely compendium of Florentine artworks. At the time I considered it a nice gift, but not something particularly in step with my interests – perhaps a little basic. When one thinks of art, one thinks of Florence…

What did interest me, however, were the free maps included inside! What excellent decorating potential – no concept of the place “Fiorenza” – somewhere old and the colors match the wall. Good enough for me!

When first decorating my house, I also had a desire to influence the aesthetic in a direction that suggested arts and culture. I found these framed images of Florence and Pisa at the nearest Goodwill and they were purchased and hung without a second thought.

You might be thinking that there’s nothing so spectacular about this. I love Florence, so of course I would decorate my house with Florence-y things. The strange part about this is that I DIDN’T love Florence. Well ok, I loved the Renaissance, and that might as well be the same as loving Florence, but I hadn’t the smallest intention of going there or of loving the city itself.

One memorable day last summer, I was beginning to feel restless. I was on vacation with some friends in Michigan and I’d left my phone behind for the day. This combination had me so bewildered that I was compelled to rethink my entire life over the course of those 8 hours. I was going to turn 27 next year. I’m not sure why this number feels like such a milestone (perhaps it has something to do with 7 rounding so easily up to 30), but I had wanted to do more things by that time.

God gives us desires for a reason, right? Either because he wants these things for us, or he wants to teach us not to desire them anymore. Either way, I had this desire that had been around a long time: the desire to spend time in Europe like my mother had done in college, like my college friends had been doing over the years since we’d graduated together, and I’d wanted to study art.

Alright. Time to act. I went home and called up one of these college friends for a long conversation about the Sacred Art School she had attended, situated on the banks of the Arno River running through Florence, Italy. Before I got off the phone with her, I stated my intention to go.

Day after day, the right doors opened and the right doors closed. Month after month, my desire and my intention remained the same. What an adventure awaited me!

I had one more item floating around my house which might have hinted at this coming adventure. You can think as little or as much of it as you want, but if I’m packing one journal on this trip, I can’t think of a better fit. Back in 2016, I filled the first few pages of this book with notes from Dante’s Inferno. Dante! The greatest poet ever to come out of Florence, Italy!! Tell me I’m crazy.

I hadn’t wanted to spoil the rest of this journal with anything inferior to Dante, plus, my life at the time didn’t really fit with the airplane/adventure theme. How providential that I’d left the pages blank.

All this is to say that if you keep an eye out for signs, they tend to show up in uncanny places. This could be something wrong with our eyes, just our brain’s knack for finding patterns, or it could be a small hint of the guiding hand of Providence. I honestly couldn’t say, but in this instance, the details fell into what seemed like the perfect opening for a story…

Leandra