great expectations

“In my previous life I must have been a nomad,” I said to myself digging my tripod into the ground as if it were a walking stick on the Promised Land. While every story has a specific place, mine happened in the bottom of my heart, set against the backdrop of Michelangelo Square located on a hill on the south bank of the Arno River in Florence, where years ago I had met a Gypsy woman who read my palm. Though I'd never believed in magic before, her predictions came true. How could I deny that she hadn't put a spell on me? Moreover, the weather in Tuscany is as fickle as in England. If you go out without an umbrella on a sunny day, you risk getting soaking wet just after the first coffee break; so the first drops of water on my cheeks didn't surprise me. I looked at the dome of the Duomo and realized that there were tears of joy flowing down my face: he's just proposed to me; we're moving to a remote village in the south of Italy, where I'll focus on my book; he'll open a bakery,; we'll live carelessly. I'd never thought that these words would come out of my mouth, but when crisis strikes in many cases the end justifies the means. This is the lesson Italy taught me. I'd been a decent girl, with naive eyes, madly in love with Jack Kerouac. I'd dreamt of writing my tourist guide following the steps of Dante Alighieri, but Dan Brown with his Inferno beat me to it. That time, I'd dreamt of our family as well, but to make it come true we had to break the law. When my tears dried out, I took one last selfie with the statue of David. I came out with my left profile in the shadow, in the background were Renaissance David's genitals. A world-recognized canon of beauty, but is it in good taste? I believe that all the concepts of beauty and morality are subjective. That's why at times I think it's a classic, yet on a different day I find it scandalous. Moreover, we are all double natured, exactly like in the photography I’d just taken. The right profile is the image we want to represent, while the left one in the shadow is full of demons and sometimes wins in the pursuit of happiness. Consequently, instead of writing about Dante, I compiled a collage of lost souls in Italy: stories of hardship of Libyan immigrants, the underground world of drug dealers from Albania, the tales of the lives of prostitutes from Ukraine. In the Purgatory of my book I forgave myself as well. We just made this money because we wanted to be together, me and my man.