The Path Up and Down is Always the Same

Oh, this might be a personal favorite as well. For my class we were given the title as a prompt, but could do anything we want with it as long as it had to do with our time in Italy. I seemed to be the only one who took it literally? I dunno. I think there was a better edited version of this somewhere, but this is all I have - dated 2 febbraio 2007. Oh, and the Zach I speak of was an American working at the school doing student programming stuff.

Older people like to tell their lazy children that when they were young, they had to walk uphill both ways to and from school each day. As my younger self would stick out my tongue in concentration trying to visualize such a possibility, I never quite believed it could be true. In Italy, however, for the first time in my life I've found that phrase to be extremely accurate. Zach's infamous guide book to Perugia makes it easy to find one's way to the center of town: "If you get lost, the simple salution is just to follow the roads and paths that lead uphill until you reach the center of town again." My heart rolled down that hill when I found that the next sentence pertained to the street where I live: "The one exception to this rule of thumb is Corso Garibaldi."

The path up and down is always the same. I leave my apartment in the morning, trying to avoid eye contact with the construction workers who stop and stare at my roommates and me as we begin to head downhill towards the end of our street and the Universita per Stranieri. We carefully make our way across the wooden beams which we hope are supporting us, half wishing that someday the contruction will block our exit out of the house, allowing us to take a break from Italian class that morning and go back to sleep. After a five minute walk to the Stranieri, we arrive at Via Rocchi. Taking a deep breath as we pass under the Etruscan arch, we huff and puff our way back up to the Piazza IV Novembre. It has been said that Italian women are hunched over because of the hill they've walked all their lives, and I can definitely see how that's true. My roommates claim they don't feel the Via Rocchi hil anymore, but despite the winter air I still find I don't need to wear a coat to class, because after finally making it to the Piazza, the hike has completely warmed me.

I don't mind walking back down Via Rocchi on my way back home, however arriving at the Straniri always manages to change my mood and questions my ability to finish the trip. Although I love my apartment, the stories of rape and drug trafficking I've heard about Corso Garibaldi make it daunting to walk back up that hill by myself, especially at night (they regretted to inform us when we moved in our street used to be considered the most dangerous in Perugia...although having an influx of student housing, a military post, and a convent on the street have since turned that around). Jumpstarting my desire to get home, every evening I clutch my keys between my fingers, mentally going over everything I learned in Taekwondo and ready to defend myself against any attacker. Number 10...30...41...okay, I've made it to the Laudromat...75...now I'm at the yellow Vespa that never moves...100...avoid eye contact with creepy man...okay, I've made it back to the construction...finally, I'm home.

While originally I included my exact apartment number in this, I figured blog readers don't really need to know the exact apartment where I used to live, haha. I'd forgotten how much I liked that piece. It seriously took me three months to be able to walk up my street still breathing. Apparently it wasn't dangerous anymore, well lit, and actually was home to a couple of the best restaurants in town. It's just that once you got past the businesses and it became solely homes, it got creepy at night. The hard part about my area of Perugia was that all the buildings looked alike. I lived in the old historic center of the town (surrounded by a 15th century wall), and none of the buildings were built after the renaissance. Most of the renovation that's been done has either been on the roadways or inside the buildings. Everything on the outside looked exactly the same, so it was hard to tell if you wandered into a bad area of town unless you actually walked into the buildings. For the most part, though, Perugia is one of the safest towns in Italy. The murder that happened there in the fall of '07 only got such worldwide press because study abroad students were involved (not from our program, thank goodnesss). Other than that, no one had ever heard of any murders happening there in rememberable past. Perugia is a big university town, especially for foreign students...so it functions much like American college towns. Ok I should stop babbling - get me started about Perugia and I might never stop. Maybe I should stop rewriting my Italy entries...makes me a) too nostalgic and b) probably pretty annoying. Tomorrow I will move on to other things! :-) (ok maybe I lied...I might write about a little town called Sutri...then I'm done) hehe