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On the Perils of Travel Writing

After dropping my bags at my apartment, I headed to Pancho’s restaurant for lunch. I was hungry, so I avoided the piazza, knowing I’d run into someone who would either want to hug me or hit me. Instead, I wandered the winding lanes and encountered Romano, the painter whose one-woman fan base had been stalking me back in New York.

“Why you don’t write about me in your article,” he asked. But before I could answer, he said. “I would give you one thousand euros if you wrote about me.” It was yet another first: a bribe, although he laughed so heartily that I took his words as a joke. At least I wanted to. I told Romano that I would have never taken the money anyway. Thinking quickly, I said the editors cut him out due to space issues (when in doubt, blame the editor).

In the next few days, one by one, I ran into locals I hadn’t seen for a few months. Some of them walked by and didn’t say a word; others returned my greeting with a distant “ciao.” I made a point to never walk by Gianni Macchia’s café, but when we did run into each other—at the stone gate—we both just giggled nervously at each other.

The problem went beyond some of the local artists’ anger about not making it into the article. Some were angry that I included their arch-enemies. Others were angry that they were in it but not quoted. I had once loved living in Calcata, a fortress town where dinner parties on the square would often erupt in singing and joint smoking; where you could walk 50 feet and eat at an amazing restaurant; where you could make the intimate square your living room. But now, after the article came out, I felt like a persona non grata for at least half of the place. I hated that I was hated.

But then one day while sitting on the square chatting with one of the few people who still talked to me, my friend Omar, a stranger approached, asking if I spoke English.

“Fluently,” I said. He was holding a newspaper article. My newspaper article. And he wanted to know how to find some of the places mentioned. I gave him directions and he went on his way. Then a couple of days later another person turned up with my article asking the same question. “Is that a good article?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t have come here if I hadn’t seen this in my local paper,” the woman from Houston said. It turned out, the article went out on the Times’ wire service and was picked up by a dozen or so other newspapers. There was even an article about my article in La Stampa, the daily newspaper of Turin. In the coming weeks, I’d see versions of my article in numerous newspapers, including the Seattle Times, the Boston Globe, and the Toronto Star. Interestingly, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Dallas Morning News cut the two paragraphs about the town’s famous relic, the Holy Foreskin; the newspapers in Poland and Mexico, however, did not.

I never came straight out and told anyone I was the author of the article, but if I was sitting on the square with my wife, Jessie, or our friends Elena or Omar, they’d feel it was their duty to volunteer the information. Which, when I thought about it, must have been an interesting surprise: We don’t often get to meet the person who inspires us to alter our itineraries. I soon became a photo magnet for tourists, often being made to pose with them as I awkwardly displayed the article in front of me. Sometimes the jaded villagers would look on from across the square and glare at me as I’d pose for photos with tourists or was asked to autograph copies of my article. A few times someone had told the tourists where I lived (passive aggressive locals, perhaps) and random strangers would just show up at my apartment wanting to meet me.

Another time, my mother-in-law, who was visiting, started chatting with a woman from Portland at the front door of an apartment. When she opened the door a little wider, we could see about a dozen lesbians having a wild wine-fueled party. “We’re biking around Italy,” said the woman, “but then an article about Calcata came out in our local paper and we knew we just had to come here.” Knowing what was about to happen, I steeled myself as my mother-in-law, a proud look on her face, put her arm around me and announced that I was the author of the article. I was suddenly yanked into the raucous party, a plastic cup of vino put in one hand, my article put in the other, and forced to pose in photos with each of the women.

Eventually, when locals saw the amount of tourist traffic the article produced for Calcata’s businesses, the “ciao” ratio began going up. There were still people who acted cold to me, but as Pancho told me one day, that’s almost a rite of passage to being a Calcata resident. “Everyone here has enemies. We’ve all lived on this medieval island for years. We’ve loved and hated and loved each other again. If you’re going to live here, it’s just something you’ll have to accept.”

He was right. As usual, Pancho had a way of putting a convincing and positive spin on just about everything. Not that it lasted very long. 

The next time I ran into Romano, he said a guy who only comes to Calcata on the weekends had requested my presence at his house for dinner that night. “How nice,” I responded, thinking I was feeling some love, finally. “Sure. That would be great.”

“But I must warn you,” Romano added. “He only invites you because he read your article and wants to attack you for it.”

I declined the dinner invitation. Instead, I went somewhere I was welcomed: the Grotta, Pancho’s restaurant.

For the record, I don’t think I ever ruined Calcata, as some people there had feared. If anything, I only ruined it—or at least half of it—for one person: myself.

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Photos Courtesy:  REUTERS  |  iStockPhoto  |  flickr  

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