First Glimpses of Italy - Turning Tuscan: A Step-by-Step Guide to Going Native - page 7

Paradise lost, I made my way back to Iraklion, the capital city, where I spent a few days
in a lovely hotel with a courtyard garden. The room at the hotel cost one dollar per day;
for an additional ten cents, the hotel staff would bring an iced cold bottle of lemonade with
a slice of lime to your chaise-lounge in the garden. As the French anthropologist, Claude
Levi-Strauss, once noted, when we travel we move not only back and forth through time
and space, but also up and down socially. In Greece, on a student budget, I was a rich man.
One morning, on my way back to my room, I passed by an open door where the maid was
making the beds, and I noticed a copy of Norman O. Brown's book, Love's Body , lying
on someone's nightstand. Later in the day, while I was relaxing in the courtyard, the topic
reappeared, this time in the company of its owner. After sizing up each other for a few
minutes, we dove headlong into the kind of frenzied cerebral conversation that East Coast
intellectuals would sometimes enjoy in the late Sixties when they found a kindred spirit.
“Don't you think Life Against Death had a much more coherent argument? What do you
make of Brown's move toward poetics and away from a more orthodox psychoanalytic
framework? Isn't the new topic really just a way to distance himself from Marcuse and the
New Left's exploitation of Freudian theory as a kind of liberation theology?”
My new comrade, Peter, turned out to be a graduate student at the London School of Eco-
nomics who also had been drawn to visit sunny Greece over the holidays after the bleak-
ness of the British winter. By the end of the afternoon I had been invited to join Peter and
his travel buddy, John, on their way back to England in their Volkswagen bug. After having
spent three days bouncing up and down in a sleeper car on the way to Athens, crouching in
the back of a bug seemed like a dream of luxury travel.
I was also very pleased to learn that we would be passing through Italy on the way back.
It wasn't so much that I longed to visit Italy, but their choice of a travel route meant that
I wouldn't have to pass through Yugoslavia again. One train ride through the wretched,
flowerless villages of mud and cinder block had been enough to quench my curiosity about
the world behind the Iron Curtain.
***
We made the morning crossing on the ferry that runs from Patros in Greece to Brindisi in
Italy. Then, after many hours of manic driving, we finally arrived in Rome late in the day.
After the sparseness of Greece, where only fragments remain to bear witness to the past,
Rome was overwhelming in the sheer plenitude of what has survived. Columns, arches,
monuments, excavations everywhere.