In Search of Beauty

In early Summer (in the waning of the moon from May to June), I set out on a quest, à la Odysseus. Only I had no ship and it didn’t take me 10 years to reach my destination. After a few hours by train and car, my travel companion and I were there. My destination: Italy. My purpose: to seek out beauty.

Months have passed and, through the soft lens of nostalgia, I can finally leave aside the memories of crazy-expensive toll roads, Google Maps frustrations and the bus driver who, past midnight, drove off to central Venice without us, while we were still scrambling for our masks. I can focus on the beautiful moments now. And yet, how to begin? How to find the words? How to fit beauty, the true, overwhelming beauty of this place into the likes of basilica and bridge and cypress? They do not do it justice. Nor do 15-second Instagram reels, but we try anyway.

Armed with Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Italian Journey, my film camera and plenty gelato-dedicated pocket money, we set off to our first stop: the Floating City. Venice is a dream. Experiencing it just before high-season and in covid times heightened its dreamlike quality even more. We had the city to ourselves. It felt as though all the buildings leaned in for a kiss on cold stone cheeks, all the statues winked shamelessly at us in broad daylight. In the evenings, sitting at the water’s edge, the lagoon jostled the gondolas, sleek and gleaming with sweat after a long day’s work, to lap eagerly at our feet in so many rustling whispers, as if coming to greet a long-lost friend. The gulls were less friendly though – they hadn’t forgotten how to dive-bomb unsuspecting travellers for their sandwiches.

This time in Venice was different. The lack of tourists cast a calm over the city, an authenticity that I had not experienced during my two previous visits. It felt more real – it rained for an entire day, for example, where it was impossible to do anything except run to the nearest corner shop to buy pasta. Bad weather always makes things more real, more relatable somehow. And I felt more like a local, although I am certain I didn’t look like one, what with my camera and frighteningly limited Italian vocabulary. But I took everything slower, as if I knew the city well and was merely going for an afternoon stroll. I was not hurrying from one tourist attraction to the next (although I quite enjoyed those too), but was savouring all the quiet corners, watching all the (real) locals going about their business taking out the dog and going grocery shopping (I legit saw a guy carrying a pot plant in a Valentino gift bag). We took the vaporetto from the Grand Canal out to the Biennale Gardens and watched people getting on and off with briefcases and shopping bags. To get a glimpse into their lives was truly special – I would stand there, eating my gelato, watching life unfold itself in the piazza before me. Two dogs racing each other between their owners’ legs, a group of children playing ball on the cobblestones, some adults laughing loudly. I witnessed a group of dressed-up actors climb out of a gondola, a family climb into their boat after a lunch with the grandparents, students smoking in the square outside their faculty building, workers hammering a new wooden pillar into the lagoon, schoolboys lining up for morning assembly, not far from St. Mark’s Basilica.

If there is anywhere that best shows the city’s old riches, it must be the Basilica. The gold! One step into the cathedral’s belly and whoosh! you are overcome by the shadowy, ancient glory of it – everything, into the highest dome and furthest transept, is covered in gold mosaic, like a night sky with so many stars there’s no longer any space for space. The San Marco Piazza is the crown of Venetian beauty – and to have had it all to ourselves! To have been free of the crowds, to have spun and spun and seen the Basilica, the Palazzo Ducale, the Campanile, the moored gondolas flashing by, unimpeded by masses of tourists! As we wandered through the alleys, over ornate bridges and along the waterside promenades, I kept thinking of all those that had captured the beauty, the mystery of Venice. Cornelia Funke’s The Thief Lord came to mind, a book which enchanted my childhood and still casts a fairy-tale spell over the city every time I visit. Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice casts a similar spell, albeit darker, and Luca Guadagnino’s We Are Who We Are crafts an atmosphere that snuck into my heart and stayed there, making me feel like one of its characters exploring love and youth in the Floating City.

My quest lead on through lush mountains that unfolded into the Florentine valley, the magnificent Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore greeting us. The AirBnB we were staying in had a large window that opened up onto the most charming view of roofs, washing lines and this same Duomo in all her blushing beauty. What a sight! I was living the 21st century version of E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, and felt like young Helena Bonham Carter strolling through the streets and sculpture-lined piazzas of this city of art. Not only is Florence’s Duomo the most beautiful in the world, I am sure of it, but boutiques of handmade marbled paper can be found around every corner. A street virtuoso played drums on plastic buckets, and a carousel lit up the evening piazza with a golden glow and the music of childhood. The Boboli Gardens were filled with fruit trees, fountains and students lounging on the lawn at the lookout point. We peeked through the gates of closed rose gardens, sat by the river eating gelato and stumbled upon a whimsical workshop packed to the brim with intricate clockwork, glass domes housing bizarre jewellery, and speakers blasting eerie opera music at full volume. Again, a lack of tourists meant there was no line at the Uffizi Gallery, despite not having booked tickets, and Botticelli’s women reached from their frames for my hand in dance. We looked Medusa dead in the eye and didn’t turn to stone. We compared portrayals of baby Jesus and came to the conclusion that he was not blessed with beauty. David was everywhere, alone in his silent museum, guarding the Piazza della Signoria and nonchalantly watching the sun set over the Arno’s many bridges from the Piazzale Michelangelo. We were drawn to a lively square full of locals sitting at tables on the pavement, and decided on an unassuming little pizzeria which turned out to have won numerous awards and served the best black truffle, orange blossom honey and Tuscan cheese pizza I ever did eat.

But come, my friends – ‘tis not too late to seek a newer world, further South, in the heart of the Tuscan countryside. Here we stayed at the most charming farmhouse serving home-baked bread and jam tart for breakfast on our private balcony, with a view over unkempt fields strewn with poppies, horses under a distant tree. The garden was buzzing with life, brimming with flowers. An entire day was devoted to taking in the summer air, reading and snoozing in the sun. There is beauty in rest, in the silence of the heart.

Siena called to us then with her unique striped cathedral, narrow alleys and large open Piazza del Campo, where we sat for at least half an hour just watching life happen around us. Children and dogs playing in the fountain, falling and rolling and running across the sloped piazza, parents hurrying after them or unworriedly chatting with friends. A courtyard restaurant filled our bellies with far too much pasta, and we waddled drowsily over the cobblestones, utterly content. San Gimignano and all its medieval towers lent us its evening view across the far-reaching plains surrounding it.

Our last morning at the farm was spent on horseback, exploring the wildflower fields and pockets of forest, a chapel or ruined farmhouse here and there on a distant hill. We came across a family of wild boar, which I had only ever seen in Asterix and Obelix, and listened to the local tell us in broken English of his fox-sightings. The road took us still further South to the famed Val d’Orcia. The hilltop town of Montalcino welcomed us with music, dancing, drinking and hundreds of cyclists completing their race (some wearing vintage helmets and goggles). Pienza, a few cypresses to the East of Montalcino, curled around its hill in quiet perfection. Stone arches and alleys named Via dell’Amore and Via del Bacio opened onto sweeping views of the valley below. For sunset we found the dreamiest landscape, picnicking in a circle of cypresses amidst rolling hills covered in flowers the colour of frutti di bosco gelato. The long grass swayed in the evening breeze and the sun cast a gold sheen over everything it touched. To be quiet in a sea like this, of green and pink and gold, of wind and trees and the quiet rustle of something ancient, to breathe for a moment without shouting, to acknowledge how easily one is moved in these waves of earth. Sometimes, beauty comes to sit so easily by your side, so suddenly and unaggressively.

The final stop on this search for beauty was, naturally, Rome. Arguably my favourite city in the world, and one I am convinced I will one day live in for a wild while. If your feet don’t hurt after a day in Rome, you haven’t done it right. This is a city to be walked into the ground it rose from. Here, the seven hills spill their treasures at your feet like the Magi from the East. You turn and there is a church hiding a famous sculpture, you turn again and here’s a fountain-filled and there a flower-filled piazza, and again and there’s the road that led Ancient Rome to the world. Everything you touch has been touched a billion times before, over the course of millennia. Everywhere you walk, you walk in the footsteps of gladiators, senators, caesars and popes. Modern Rome, at times, mirrors Ancient Rome. Not far from our apartment (in the heart of lively Trastevere), trapeze artists were performing to an appreciative crowd that sat on an amphitheatre of steps. The students with their beers and pit bulls and pink hair and reggae music had created their own Colosseum, still relishing in a spectacle these many centuries later. Further down the bridge, a group of young men played African music on instruments I had never seen before. Still further down, on the same bridge, a little girl danced to a jazz band. In the gardens of the Villa Borghese, roller-skaters showed off their skills while another street musician danced passionately with his saxophone. I saw a nun trip. Someone read in the grass, somewhere someone sang Can’t Help Falling in Love.

After having done our fair share of walking, we decided to experience Rome in a truly Italian way – on the back of a Vespa, with a local tour guide. Off we whizzed one evening, from hill to hill, along the Tiber, winding through restaurant tables and past shocked and angrily gesticulating spectators (our drivers were true Italians and took no heed of the rules, blaming others for their own traffic transgressions). We were shown the guide’s favourite café, the oldest pyramid in Europe, the tower from which the Emperor Nero allegedly set Rome on fire and played his violin as the city burned. My driver and I discovered a shared obsession with the film La Grande Bellezza as we approached the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola that features in the opening scene. A bachelorette troupe traipsed by in white veils, taking selfies and laughing tipsily. We stopped at any and all possible sunset spots, one of my favourites being the walled Giardino degli Aranci on the Aventine, a path of umbrella pines leading straight towards a balcony that overlooked all of Rome. Upon exiting this magical place filled with gold and birdsong, a group of girls chattered past in pink tutus, heading home after ballet practice. Around the corner I peered through a keyhole and saw the silhouette of St. Peter’s dome framed perfectly in gold, at the end of a dark tunnel of green. Who knows what wonders this city still holds, hidden behind closed doors and in hushed gardens, waiting for someone to slip silently into awe?

This city, this country, offers beauty on a platter in all its ancient, breathtaking opulence. Wherever you look there is something to relish, some fresco or statue or charming ruin. And though this ‘easy’ beauty (easy because it’s so obvious, because anyone can take a picture and post it on the gram) is utterly enchanting, I found, on this quest of mine, a different kind of beauty. It was tucked into the spaces between the cobblestones, hiding behind the stone robes of Roman emperors and peeking out from behind the pines. It was there, always, mixed in with the crowd of classic beauty, and while I was photographing this cathedral or that ruin, it was forever just outside the frame.

It was the everyday. It was the slice of life that played out in front of me if only I deigned to pause and look. It was the children playing, the nonnas laughing, the nuns tripping. It was the pizza chef proudly explaining the source of his ingredients, the policeman trying very hard to describe the directions with his limited English, some Vatican employees chuckling at us for thinking the priest we’d seen giving the evening sermon in St. Peter’s was the Pope. The sunset in the orange garden was magnificent, yes, but all the more so because there were students chatting on the stone balustrade with beers in hand, children racing between the trees and being lifted up by their parents to better see the sun. I caught a glimpse of what their lives must be like, their magical and mundane lives in the Eternal City. This whole other way of seeing, this other world, revealed itself to me the moment I slowed down, the moment I decided not to rush immediately to the next museum or monument, but instead to sit a while and watch. I realise, of course, that this is a privilege that comes with already having visited many of the ‘must-sees’. With familiarity comes the confidence to slow down and savour the details. This was the longest I had ever spent in the Vatican Museums, the longest I strained my neck to study Michelangelo’s masterpiece in the Sistine Chapel, because not only were there no crowds, but I didn’t constantly feel pressured to rush off to the next point on my itinerary.

If familiarity with the unknown brings such an appreciation of the beauty of the mundane, imagine what would happen if we paused every once in a while in our hometown, the place we know best. If we looked up from our busy lives and took a moment to delight in the little things, the interactions, the play of light, the pockets of glory that are constantly smiling at us through the seemingly uninteresting everyday. Perhaps then, we would find St. Mark’s Basilica on our doorstep, and when tossing a coin into the Trevi Fountain, we would return not to Rome, but home.