Italian memories keep flooding back

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By Shirley Davis | Sunday, October 15, 2006 12:52 AM CDT | () comments

CONTRIBUTED PHOTO In April Square in Taormina, Sicily, Quad-City Times travel columnist Shirley Davis, left, is photographed with her niece and husband, Cynthia and Doug Foster of Cary, N.C., and their daughters Erin and Amber. The year was 1999; now the group wants to return to Taormina again.

There are no Italian stamps in my passport, even though I’ve been to Italy at least three times in the 10 years since the passport was new.

Perhaps the man at the passport desk in Rome in 1999 thought I was an “honorary Italian,” as I have written about the country so much. Or, perhaps, he was out of ink after stamping so many passports, or maybe it was time for his afternoon break.

Whatever, of all the trips to Italy I’ve made in the past 39 years, I would have liked a passport stamp for 1999 to commemorate a very special trip I made with my niece and her family.

Cynthia and Doug Foster of Cary, N.C., formerly of Bettendorf, and their two daughters, Erin, 15, and Amber, 12, had wanted me to show them my favorite country: Italy.

I secretly figured that they’d wanted me to take them to Italy before I got too senile to remember where Italy was. At least, that’s what we joked about when we began planning our adventure.

We knew we wanted to stay in Rome (my favorite large city in the world) and in Taormina, Sicily (my very favorite place in the world to visit), and we’d sandwich in a stay in Sorrento between these two destinations.

The Fosters flew to Europe from North Carolina; I flew from the Quad-Cities, and we met up (coincidentally) at the passport counter in Rome, where I heard someone from across the terminal hollering “Aunt Shirley.”

Maybe that distracted the passport official who forgot to give me a stamp, but then they, too, report that no one stamped their passports in Italy either. The question came up a couple of weeks ago when I wrote a column about my expired passport and realized there was no stamp for Italy —not in 1999, not several years later when I accompanied a Plus 60 group to Italy or earlier this year when I flew into and out of Verona to spend an extra week with friends after a tour in Switzerland and Austria.

However, my family knows they were in Italy in 1999 because we have the pictures to prove it. Hundreds of them!

There have been a lot of changes in our lives over the past seven years. Erin has graduated from North Carolina State and is pursuing a career. Amber, who is now Mrs. Jeremy Smith and the mother of an energetic son named Jake, is attending North Carolina State and dresses her young son in the college’s colors when he attends football games with the family.

That 1999 trip was an incredible adventure, any way you looked at it. Because of the kids, we ate at McDonald’s in Rome instead of my favorite Othello’s, and we stayed at pensiones that were booked on the Internet by my niece who now teaches computer science at a Community College in North Carolina.

I wondered the other day, when the Fosters suggested we do this trip again and include Erin‘s boyfriend and Amber’s husband and baby, what a trip would be like if we tried it again.

Seven years ago these young nieces were bored to tears with my favorite mode of transportation. They humored me by taking the train all the way from Rome to Sicily, crossing the Straights of Messina on the train that was put on a boat and then back on the rail tracks to continue on to Taormina.

And they endured the nine-hour return trip to Rome by taking naps and reading books, rather than looking out the window at the wonderful views of the sea and of villages high in the mountains around us.

Would they still be bored? Or would seven years make a difference and they’d love, as I do, the adventure of traveling in a train compartment and picnicking along the way?

All six of them would now like to tackle another trip to Taormina, as they, too, fell in love with this lovely resort that dates back to the 5th century B.C.

I suppose if we went again we’d have to return to the same walk-up pensione rooms where we stayed on our last trip. My arthritic knee is better these days, so I could probably make all those steps more easily, but I dream of going back to my favorite hotel, the one with the balconies overlooking the public gardens, a new swimming pool and Mount Etna (a volcano that has sometimes erupted when I’ve been there).

On my very first visit, I’d paid $12 for the balconied room that included breakfast and dinner in the price. I know the rate has increased each time when I’ve been there with my husband or with good friend and Davenport sculptor, the late Isabel Bloom (who declared the hotel’s poolside sculpture “too smooth” for her taste, but then she also said Michelangelo’s “David” was “too smooth” too.)

I wonder whether my great nieces — with whom I shared a room — would still wash their hair every hour on the hour. I remember what fun we had taking the hydrofoil to the Isle of Capri, and how we hired a driver to take us along the Amalfi Coast to Positano and Ravello. And how we had dinner one night in Taormina with the Jim Millers and their son Nathan of DeWitt, Iowa, who were then living in Sicily and now reside in Vincenza, Italy — up north near Venice and Verona.

Before we left for home we stayed at another pensione near the flower market in Rome, and we walked to Piazza Navona (my favorite square), the Colisseum and the Forum (their least favorite stop).

We climbed the Spanish Steps and threw coins in Trevi Fountain — and maybe that’s why we will return again. The tradition, you know, is that those who toss a coin over their shoulders and into the Trevi will return again to Rome.

It’s worked for me more than a dozen times. No reason to stop tossing coins now.

Shirley Davis can be contacted at (563) 383-2281 or sdavis@qctimes.com.