Venice’s Basilica di San Marco
It was still Friday November 23 1973, and I was still processing my encounter on the train with Sophia, as I proceeded from the Venice station to find my way to the local hostel. It was by far the most sexually charged encounter I’d ever had with another human being, her pressing me about details of the women I was attracted to, sharing details of losing her virginity in the backseat of a car, and her not discouraging me from ogling her very oglable boobs. Yet she was probably more than twice my age, the age of some of my mom’s younger peers.
It’s not like I wasn’t attracted to, and maybe even casually flirted with some of my mom’s female friends, who indulged in the same with me. They were strong, intelligent, activist women, which is why my mom befriended them and why they interested me as well. Struggling for equality as they were, if their male peers were going to flirt with much younger women, they would flirt with much younger men right back. Some of them were single, either never married or divorced like my mom. But even married ones would play the flirt game, just like the married men. It wasn’t the sexually repressed 1950s anymore. They were all going through the sexual revolution in a very liberal university town that prided itself on its openness to most everything. It was a very egalitarian time, and one where people no longer acknowledged or respected their elders, I certainly didn’t. So if I, still a teen, wanted to engage with the grown ups at my mom’s parties, I was fair game. Everybody was flirting with everybody, at least in the whole male-female dynamic, if not much much more. Several of my mom’s married male friends were allegedly having affairs, and some had even hit on her at one point or another, particularly when they’d had too much to drink and their wives were not around.
It was Friday November 23 1973, the day after Thanksgiving in the States. Despite all my fellow backpackers traveling the Rome-Florence-Venice circuit like I was, I somehow ended up on the after lunch train from Florence to Venice by myself. The guys from Cleveland had decided to skip Venice because they had heard it was dreary and depressing and there was not much to do. They had instead headed farther northeast to Vienna, where I had originally planned to go after Venice. Jen and Sarah had left Florence for Venice earlier that morning. Trix and Evelyn and their crew were probably already in Vienna. Moana I think was headed west to Paris, continuing the Western European leg of his world tour that would take him across the States, via a two-month Greyhound bus pass, in December and January.
It was Tuesday November 20 1973 when I awoke in the male bunk room of the youth hostel in Florence, or as I was referring to it now by it’s suaver sounding real Italian name, ‘Firenze’. I had arrived at the hostel the previous evening with a big throng of my cohort, all of us with wet ponchos from the rain, dripping everywhere in the main common room as we stood in line, boisterously chatting with each other about the shitty weather, anything to break the ice. Trix and the other five young women, who I had shared a crowded compartment with on the train from ‘Roma’, went off in their own directions for the evening, and Jen and Sarah, who had left Roma for Firenze a day before, were yet unsighted among the throng in the hostel that night, but hopefully I would encounter them again.
It was Monday November 19 1973, and I boarded the train headed from Rome up to Florence. I saw others of my ilk, easily spotted by their backpacks and ‘freak flag’ hair boarding as well amongst a crush of people at every coach door. Some of them I recognized, but I presumed most of them had been staying at our hostel, or perhaps another one across town, and were now headed for guess where, probably Florence.
So the next morning, Thursday November 15, I set out on my own into the streets of Rome with the task of making my now much anticipated flight home a reality. I was headed to the BOAC office to book my already paid for return flight from London to Detroit, and then to the post office to mail postcards. Eyeballing my Rome city map, and folding it in such a way that just the route from the hostel to the airline office was displayed, I calculated it to be about a five kilometer walk, maybe forty minutes, and with as much walking as I was now used to doing, what I now considered an easy hike, even shouldering my fifty pound pack. I was carrying it because I would try again to call Marcello, and hopefully hook up with him and head directly to his mom’s house and enjoy the hospitality of him and his mom.
