Chapter 5: Feeling love and finding identity in Italy
A Song for Montignano & Surrounding Regions, Italy. In this section, I create a playlist representing the 80 cities I visited during my year abroad through song.
Song I: Can’t Help Falling in Love by Elvis Presley
Mother Nature caused quite a storm, literally, one Saturday at the end of April. The sky was moody, the animals on the local farms sought shelter and the rain pattered on the roof of the farmhouse I was renting by Massa Martana hours before an outdoor wedding. Yet, I believe that when Mother Nature felt the abundance of love radiating from Castello di Montignano that afternoon, she opened the skies to let the sun shine on Kate and Nick.
Surrounded by the rolling hills in the Italian countryside, I was invited to Kate and Nick’s nuptials in Montignano. The ceremony, and days leading up to it, emitted so much love not only from the bride and groom, but from those who flew in from across the globe to celebrate with them.
Montignano will occupy a special place in my heart. I’ll remember that feeling of love from the moment we got on the bus in Rome and connected with old friends while making new ones. I’ll remember the wedding day when the vows were exchanged behind a hilly backdrop. When Kate's tears were carried away by the wind during the ring exchange and the warmth of the sun for their first official kiss as a husband and wife. At the reception, friends gathered showing kindness for each other and parents treated us as if we were their own.
Then came the moment when Kate and Nick took each other's hands and danced to Elvis Presley’s Can’t Help Falling in Love, a song I would also choose as my first dance, but the Ingrid Michaelson version as I LOVE her. Kate and Nick couldn't help falling in love with each other, and we also couldn't help falling in love with their decade-long romance.
Add the playlist here.
Song II: Take Me Home, Country Roads by Lana Del Rey
The Perugia region, in which Kate and Nick’s wedding was held, was quiet and sleepy. The locals adopted a slower pace of life and I don’t remember counting more than six people on any given walk I took during the few days I stayed there.
As I wandered the villages ducks quacked, chickens clucked, dogs barked, horses clip-clopped and church bells rang every half hour. I wandered country roads until I stumbled upon thousand-year-old fortified town's. As I entered these contained communities there was silence as the exterior sounds bounced off the large thick stone walls, echoing back out into the fields.
The roads Google guided me on had no sidewalks and I simply walked on the side of them diving into the grass to avoid speeding cars from turning me into human roadkill.
While at Kate and Nick’s wedding, I was having a minor identity crisis behind closed doors. In Portugal, I met so many people who were there to connect with their ancestral land and heritage. So when I was in Italy, embracing the culture and communicating via Google Translate with Italian Nonna whose farm I was staying on, I couldn’t help but yearn to be connected to my Italian heritage. To my estranged Italian grandfather who was from the Puglia region. To the 25 per cent of me I barely knew anything about.
In the song Take Me Home, Country Roads, John Denver talks about Virginia, but the lyrics can truly be applied anywhere. Personally, I felt these country roads would take me home. Home to an ancestral heritage I never experienced, to a place where I belonged and where I could reconcile with the identity I struggled to find as a child.
As I walked those roads for hours, passing hilly landscapes, animals and watching the clouds float along the sky, I wondered if these roads would teach me about the 25 per cent of myself I felt was missing. If I’d learn more about my grandfather’s surname, the one my mother and grandmother still bear.
Take Me Home, Country Roads has been covered many times and while John Denver is the original artist, I chose Lana Del Rey’s 2023 version because it had this haunting quality to it. I personally have always felt my Italian heritage has haunted me. Always waiting for me to discover its full existence. While I was not in the region where my grandfather was born, I felt this was the first step in a process to make me feel whole.
P.S. For those wondering the other percentages of my cultural make-up it is 25 per cent Peruvian and 50 per cent Serbian.
Add the playlist here.
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