Final entry; 28-2-2024

lungomare

                June 14, 2025

            Final entry; 28-2-2024

            Hello, friends! 

Some time has passed.

As much as I wish I could open with "I'm sitting at my kitchen table in Mondragone!" alas, I cannot. Instead, I am sitting at my kitchen island / desk / kitchen table / storage unit in DC, one month after a second beautiful return trip to Italy and to Mondragone.

Sure enough, same as last year, I did not intend to write a newsletter. In fact, I was so committed to this that I traveled without a laptop! So freeing, would recommend. And yet, as soon as I arrived in Mondragone, the itch to archive and articulate the (truly minuscule) changes I was noticing overtook me. Here is the introduction I wrote while there:

"As you may have guessed --- I am in Italy! As I am writing this, I am sitting in the living room of my host family's home, typing on the (different! Italian!) keyboard of Mario's laptop, waiting for us all to eat lunch, after which I will FINALLY get to go up my beloved mountain. I am traveling with NO laptop for the first time in years and it is SO freeing. By the time you receive this, however, I will be back in the US for reasons related to formatting and my not having my own computer.

Before I get too far into this, I have an administrative announcement: TinyLetter has informed me that, as of Feb 29, they will be closing shop. What this means is that my emails will still exist in your inboxes, but that the embedded photos and links will no longer be available. I may be biased, but for me the photos are an *essential* part of the newsletter experience. And so, upon my return (so shortly after you all receive this) I will be sending you all an email from my email, not via TinyLetter, with a combined PDF of all of my newsletters, including functional hyperlinks for videos. We adapt! Onward!

My experience here has been overwhelmingly one of familiarity, rest and comfort -- I feel renewed -- with one notable exception: I am in the belly of the respiratory illness beast. Of the three different cities (generously choosing to include Mondragone in this category) I have visited, upon my departure from the two I have already left, my hosts have fallen ill. There's nothing like the particular roulette of sitting down for a 4-hour meal at a massive table, not knowing who is ill or who may have been exposed to someone at work, with the knowledge that visible symptoms do not correspond directly to viral load. And, generally, as in America, the culture of masking and testing and staying home when sick has fully faded, which I was wholly not expecting here, given how intensely they experienced the first wave in February of 2020, and subsequently how intense (and I might add, bitterly, how ascientific) the restrictions were in the classrooms when I was teaching. They also botched their booster rollout and have stumbled to recover. However, I do keep reminding myself that I am amidst a population with a much, much higher overall vaccination rate than in most of America. And, I am sleeping on average 10 hours a night on my trip and have consumed many, many clementines fresh off the tree.

But back to familiarity and rest and comfort! I have been running in all of my favorite places -- Giardini Margherita in Bologna, the massive hill under the highway in Abruzzo, obviously the lungomare here in Mondragone. I have been eating all of my favorite foods (see photos below). I have also been balancing people with places -- I saw everybody I'd planned to (and was recognized by some I'd planned to avoid), which is a win because I made my whole itinerary around spending time with people most important to me, and therefore I am not going anywhere new in Italy. In fact, aside from a minor tweak to avoid being alone on a train platform at 5 am between transfers, my itinerary is identical to the trip I did last year, down to the train departure times.

All of this has me reflecting on how one of my favorite things about living here, and one of the things I am most afraid to lose, is my Discomfort/Trying New Things muscle. What I am realizing is that, simply because of the passage of time, I am exercising my Discomfort muscle by being here. However, my Trying New Things muscle is less toned (see above: familiarity). And I have acknowledged this trip that the Return muscle is also its own separate muscle, which I am learning how I want to train. Something to reflect on for my next trip --- I mean Return.

And at the same time, I had come into this trip, especially the portion in Mondragone, bracing for enormous, uncomfortable changes to this place that I love. But I was wrong! I have found Mondragone overwhelmingly unchanged, except for the train station, a new trash can on the lungomare, two murals, and some new scaffolding on a few houses and storefronts. Ah, and the navetta price is up another 20 cents to a whopping 1.50 Euros. I had run through the changes that were most likely, the elements of my time here that felt the most ephemeral --- things like my favorite tree, Regina (she is very old, she is very crusty, but her personality is 100% intact), the reed fence around one of the beach bars that whistles like a ghost when its windy, my favorite graffiti, the weird headless playground toy alone in front of the Madonna on my way to school. Of these examples, the only one changed was the graffiti.

So perhaps my Discomfort muscle is not that tired after all.

Before we go on, a note --- you may have noticed that February 29th is in a few minutes. And so, I am leaning into the intentions I set for myself two and a half years ago when I began this practice: this is a practice, it should serve me, and it is never, ever a finished product.

So let's dive into the roughest, most raw, most bare bones newsletter I've ever sent.

The view from Giulia's apartment on Bologna

The fruttivendoli in Bolgona -- wow so good to be surrounded by fresh, reasonably priced, locally grown fruits and vegetables

The view from my run in Abruzzo

Happy dogs -- Gio` is 12 and thriving

In famiglia -- featuring the newest cousin!

Nighttime walk on the beach by the trabocchi on my last night with family

Just a cat and her boat

And a behind the scenes look at how that ^ magic happened

Word pictures

You know the drill!

- First day, straight off the airplane. I get on my train, they come around with cookies, I politely decline and hand them back, explaining that I have Celiac. Without missing a beat, they pull out a packet of GF cookies. Ah, it's good to be back.

- Missing some muscle memory: forgetting to weigh my fruit at the grocery store; in a public restroom, pulling the emergency alarm instead of flushing the toilet and embarrassingly announcing my Americanness to the whole restaurant

- Waiting for Giulia to wrap up work, wandering around Bologna alone for hours. Crossing the Piazza Maggiore while a busker sand Ed Sheeran with a heavy Italian accent. Reflecting on how many hours (days) of my life I have spent enjoying my own company (read: hard-earned reframe for 'being by myself') in various Italian cities over the past 6+ years. Also reflecting on how much the Italians like Ed Sheeran -- his album X has been a constant presence in the soundscape of my time in Italy since 2019.

- Watching Giulia peel a clementine and react "Oh, it's not good anymore." It looked like every clementine I have ever eaten in the Northeast.

- Being in a room with 20 cousins, making small talk about elementary school with my 8-year old cousin who greeted me by walking up to me and sitting in my lap, then being called 'Zia' by my two year old cousin as she ran laps around the kitchen with her beanie over her face, and refused to put her coat on unless we did it together.

- Arriving in Mondragone -- watching the station get closer out the train window. Tearing up at the first sight of my mountain and, in the same breath, cursing as I watched the navetta pull away and resigning myself to a 60-minute wait.

- Upon my arrival, going for a run on the beach and being honked at by passing cars. It is still unclear how many cars were people who recognized me saying hello, vs strangers catcalling me (and I am certain of the presence of both options). The eternal question. It was so foggy I could not see Ischia, or the coast of Gaeta, or the mountains to the north. But, it was very speical to see how the trees in the dunes had grown, and to soak in the familiarity of the pattern of the tiles on the lungomare, the placement of the trash cans, and which beach clubs have sand that spills out onto the path.

- Going for groceries and realizing that I may have been singlehandedly driving the tofu supply in the whole town. When I lived here, when I first arrived there was only one store that stocked tofu sporadically. After a few weeks of my stockpiling it, they began to stock it regularly (I continued to stockpile). The same thing happened with a second grocery store, and from there on, I had fairly consistent access to tofu. Upon my return last January, only one of those stores still stocked tofu. This year nobody had it. I even asked at the desk, and they simply do not carry it anymore. And so, I have concluded that in 2021, I was the demand that drove the entire tofu supply.

- On that same grocery run, I ran into three of my students. I was outside for 20 minutes, tops, walking between places. Classic!

- I saw an electric car and did a doubletake. So anachronistic.

- My students organized a pizza dinner, and there were eighteen of us. I spent the whole dinner fielding questions from different parts of the table. We talked about the cost of living, my access to a piano, work and American poltiics. Now that some of my students are in university we talked about cultural differences between American and Italian universities. Throughout these conversations, my students referenced lessons we did over two years ago -- about Allentown, about the legal drinking age.

- When asked about my work, the two examples I gave were the Arizona dropbox litigation in 2022, and Rudy Giuliani's recent defamation case -- which, for those unfamiliar, all started from a video of a ginger mint being handed between the mother and daughter., After the pizza, one student handed a mint to the other, and another jumped in to joke "Are you sure it isn't a flash drive to change the votes?" They are still learning from me, and that is so so beatuiful.

- Getting coffee with a student who I mentored. As her mother dropped her off, being greeted with "We hear your name all the time, it's wonderful to see your face!"

- Going for dinner in Gaeta, on the northernmost end of the peninsula which surrounds the bay. Getting to see Mondragone across the bay, from the other side, just like I looked up at Gaeta alll those days.

- Napoli: nothing like crossing Corso Umberto, sitting alone in a bakery slowly eating a pastry and listening to the conversations around me.

- A year's worth of secondhand smoke in just two weeks, geez.

- So happy to see my stray dogs

- A busker up on Vomero who noticed that I was reading, asked me where I am a student, and looked genuinely perplexed when I responded that I was reading a sociology book for fun.

- Did I really take the train from Napoli to Mondragone if there wasn't a problem with the navetta? I asked an older woman for a ride, and she ended up introducing me to her daughter, who is my age and speaks English! I also had a chatty seatmate on the train, and it was fun to strike up so many conversations.

- And finally, having my final travels within Italy made more complicated by a nationwide railworker strike -- the joys of organized labor!

First impression of Mondragone: they are completely redoing the platform so that the train station looks like all the other train stations. But it's okay, no matter what they do it will always smell like the bufala (cattle) in pasture right behind the station.

Mondragone, the old: A recreation of the first photo I took on my first day in October 2021

Mondagone, the old: My favorite headless playground toy

Mondragone, the old: The road to get to the bottom of the mountain

Mondragone, the new: MURALS?!

Mondragone, the new: the infamous trash can (ok but tell me it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb)

A trip to Napoli: pizza, sfogliatella ricca with cappuccino, an urban hike up to Vomero (peek between the buildings in the alley, up there!), and then a sfogliatella frolla at the top

And of course, my Vesuvius

On my way back to the station from the lungomare, I watched the group of teenagers in the background of the photo drop a rose and then trample it. One of my Fulbright lessons was to stop and take the damn picture.

Reflections

I am keeping this concise (haha we'll see how that goes). Not letting perfect be the enemy of good here and I'm far enough out at this point that I have distilled my narrative of the trip into punchy key points.

- Y'all there is so much I want to say here but we are keeping this so brief. I had some really beautiful surprises interpersonally -- so many of my Mondragone friends have moved back. I got to have really wonderful heart to hearts with former colleagues and friends who moved away. I also am the only one of my friends who is still under 30. It was easy to daydream about how my year would have gone had I had a social life, but I cherish it for what it was. In Giulia's words, on my last night ,as I recounted my whole trip to her: "A trip of discoveries!" Journal excerpt: 

Balancing people and place: first night, Lisa reminded me that I was not sola sola. I was in famiglia, I had the alunni. Ok I did not have friends my age, but I was not sola. This is such an important reframe, because when I talk about my experience here, that is one of the first things I say -- I call it my year of solitude, my free 10-month meditation retreat with travel and teaching interspersed. And that reframe is making itself present on this trip -- as you may recall, of the 3 friends I had here, during my Fulbright they all either moved away or had a lot going on and were not present. Right now, all of them happen to live in Mondragone, and are all doing well. SHOWING UP MORE WHOLLY BECAUSE LESS TO LOSE. I have felt such a strong tension between spending time with my people, cultivating and attending to those important relationships, and taking time to be enjoying my own company in all of my very important places. What a beautiful challenge to be navigating!

- Reflecting on ability -- intergenerational households automatically build in a level of need, Nonna needs her food cut small, we are all going to ge tup and take turns bouncing the baby etc. But that care does not always transfer over to chronic health. Boo!

-Ugh I have a great story that I simply do not have time to tell. But in the briefest terms, I was invited out to have a pizza dinner with a group of teachers who I found absolutely horrendous, uncompassionate, and infuriating when I taught with them because of their lack of compassion for the students. Truly dehumanizing stuff. But after a number of serendipitous encounters, and some very pushy invitations, I decided to go out and have dinner with them. I prepped and prepped to stand my ground pedagogically, defend my values, stand up for students who were being spoken poorly of etc. And three minutes after we all sat down, one teacher went "Let's not talk about school!" and then I sat silently and listened to them all plan a group vacation (which, love that for them! adults need to hang out with their friends, too!). But the irony was not lost on me. I got to practice the proactive part of Restorative Practices.

- I also realized that my relationships w students were thanks to this dynamic. Unfortunately we did need to choose sides (teachers vs students) and I chose theirs, and I have no regrets about that. Again, it was easy while I was there to wish for things to have been different (more engaged co-teachers), but I think it turned out great.

-And my kiddos are becoming young adults (oldest ones are 20, nearly all are over 18 now), I'm getting to see my impact on them as a teacher reflected back to me via our friendships. Which is the most meaningful part of it all for me. And, as they are making bigger life decisions, I am getting to truly function as bridge -- sending links to opportunities in America to them, helping folks plan trips and understand how education and politics work

-Lastly, journal excerpt 1: 

And then I remind myself not to romanticize my time here -- I was lonely, I was unable to bring my whole self. I had very very few moments of elation, exuberance, community, feeling held and cared for, moments which I gratefully have many of right now. I made myself so small to fit in here. I was afraid that if I took up too much space, I'd cause harm to somebody who I depended on for basic needs, and did not have the social net to meet those needs other ways (and I mean the most basic, like getting a ride to buy shoes at hte mall that youncan only get to by car). Gotta remind myself to use this space to reflect on elements of my life that I want to lean into, and others that I want to lean away from. How to sift through all of the grains and scoop up the most good possible, fully understanding that there will also be bad, and then organize and structure my life in such a way to maximize the benefits of the good, while minimizing or creating guardrails to contain the bad.

Journal excerpt 2:

I had been yearning for my Young Aduly post-lockdown I'm Here Wild and Free moment, and realized quickly that Mondragone was not teh place for the kind of moment I  wanted. But, even if mine did not look like that of others, it did still function as my stepping out moment, in that it hit at a formative period of my young adult life. It is the place where I learned to face adversity as an adult, to carve out and scrape out space for myself where the people around me may not be eager to give it, to spend time with myself and enjoy my own company, to connect to #place, to confront fears and take risks (like hitchhiking sorry mom) and grow into my current self. Part of the return muscle is processing primary experience here -- in fact, I had noticed that some of my strongest associations with certain places were the first moments in which I made them feel like home, the moments when I most actively needed to carve out, to scrape out a space for myself here (running across the Piazza Plebiscito in the rain at night, biking to the train station when there was no navetta sorry mom, choosing which spot along the beach would be my 'regular' reading spot.)

My mountain, my place.

On the way up

Looking over Mondragone

My favorite spot to write

Up towards the castle

My tattoo, in its birthplace

Did I really go to the mountain if I didn't see something weird on the way? Peppa the Pig is a new one

Regina is thriving. They think she is 17 years old. And my affection for her aside, this is one of my favorite photos ever.

Guard kitty.

And to bring it all home, it does feel good to be back home in DC, even if I already missed Italy from the moment my return flight took off in Milan. This is the longest I have lived anywhere, this is the longest I've worked the same job. I am a little bored sometimes, but the uncertainty of the current political climate makes up for that. And plus, we all know I'm not good at staying put for very long ;)

To tie this back into what I was saying above, about not romanticizing Mondragone, this is the most stable my adult life has been thus far. (I think that is part of why I put this practice on pause -- less to write about. Brb interrogating that narrative.) And, I do think it's worthwhile to practice balancing being present with where I am and continuing to imagine about what I might do next. I do believe I'd be fulfilled and happy as a high school teacher, although I'd have a tough time existing within our public education system; I then jump to teaching at the university level, but that comes with its own challenges (namely the adjunct doom loop); I recently had a lovely conversation where I named out loud that I could see myself as an investigative journalist? (although these days journalism is in a rough state); and of course, I'm always figuring out how to make my conflict resolution and Restorative Practices trainings more a part of my career. There are so many paths!

But for now, I will continue on with my adventures, with the knowledge that if I ever feel compelled to revisit this practice, it will be on a different platform. I am very sad to be archiving, embalming, this chapter. And it also feels fitting that if/when I pick this up again, it will be unequivocally different. (I didn't proof this because I'm afraid this site will turn into a pumpkin in 6 minutes so here we go).

Thank you for coming along with me on this journey.

Con tranquillita`,

Antonella

fine <3

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