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more about that than you'll ever want to know in the later chapter, Discovering Renais-
sance Art: The Scenic Route .)Ourcofferswere flushwith money that Ihadearned working
overtime managing QA testing for On Target , Symantec's first Windows product release. I
hadn't been to Europe since my student years, and I longed for it. So, Pam and I battened
down the hatches, packed our bags and set off on our European adventure.
We spent about a month visiting London, Paris, Bruges and Prague and a slew of smaller
townsinseveralcountries.WeeventuallyfoundourfriendsinItaly,andwekepttheirapart-
ment when they returned to the States a couple of weeks later. After touring five countries
in four weeks, we spent the next two months just taking day trips around Tuscany to ex-
plore art, wine, food and landscapes from our little hamlet on the mountaintop.
I loved everything about Tuscany. On our first trip to Florence I stood in the Piazza della
Signoria, looked up at the bell-tower of the old city hall, the Palazzo Vecchio , and I was
moved to tears. I have no idea why. It didn't affect me at all in that way when I had first
come here some twenty-odd years before. This time, though, I felt deeply connected and
completelyathomeinacountrywithwhichIhadnoancestraltiesandwhereIcouldhardly
speak a word of the language.
At some point I said to Pam, “I want to come here every summer for the rest of my life.”
We almost pulled it off. That was in 1991. We missed '92 and '94, but apart from those two
years, we somehow managed, come hell or high water, to return to Tuscany to our same
village every summer until the end of the millennium.
As each summer's vacation came to an end, we began to count the remaining days. For
most Americans a two-month vacation would seem like the answer to a prayer. For us it
was never enough, and packing up to go was always an agony. Just as we had started to get
into the swing of things, it was time to go home and resume our other life.
The truth is that our summers in Italy had ceased being simple vacations. We didn't realize
it at first, but we had already started living here. It was a time-share experiment with one-
sixth of our life unfolding in Tuscany and the other five-sixths in California. We knew we
wanted to put more time-slices over on the Tuscany pile, but we had no idea how to make
it happen.
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