Balancing the Shamed Line Between Tourist and Invisible

The Author of this article spent the week of October 14 in Treviso,

Trying to get to Venice, stuck in Treviso.
Photo Credit: Lindsay Needels

Venice, Bologna, Rome, and Naples, Italy. In this three part series she will share her reflections on being a solo tourist and learning to define the relation between herself and the greater society around her.

There probably comes a time in every person’s life where they find themselves walking down an ancient highway, dark with night and the knowledge of being hopelessly lost, through foreign farmlands, passing the homes of those that keep these farms alive and their dogs, yelling furious barks in a language not their own as they pass by. This is what I find I’m telling myself, anyway.

Among all people, there are the same confusions, alienations, and revelations upon visiting a country in which you are without a doubt on the very outside, un-belonging, and so temporary that there is hardly a chance to become otherwise. The idea that a tourist or visitor in another country should search for an experience that is “authentic” or different than what everyone else tries to experience has never made much sense for me, especially when one is so in the dark about another country’s life that they could never begin to know how to define the word.

Then again, I see the folly in coming to a country merely to “see” it: take pictures of the monuments and landscapes that everyone before you has taken pictures of, often with more skill, simply for the evidence these pictures provide, to be posted publicly (proof to your friends, acquaintances, and that guy you met at a gospel choir audition once that you still desperately wish to impress, that you are, in fact, an interesting person who has been to a place or two).

I don’t know the proper way to visit a country, for a week or a year. Above all, I assume it involves talking to people who live where you are visiting. Real conversations that give you an idea of what life is like there: the struggles, the joyous celebrations at the end of the week and otherwise. Preferably you talk enough to be invited to these struggles and celebrations.

That being said: I don’t know what I expected to find in Italy. I speak the language enough to persist and nothing more.

On landing at the Venice-Treviso airport (which is actually just the Treviso airport; “Venice” was probably placed in front of the name as a way to convince people to fly there) at 22:30, I found I had missed the last bus and needed a taxi. There was exactly one in front of the terminal. “Scusi…ho bisogno andare a…” (I pointed at the name of the hotel I was staying at for the night, which I had written in a blood red moleskin I had brought with me…I don’t know why I did this; I knew how to pronounce it.) This cost me 12 euros more than the bus would have, but I felt victorious all the same, knowing that I was able to survive the situation. I had passed the first hurdle in what I had expected to be the most nerve-wracking part of my journey.

Of course, on the ride to the hotel, I said very little besides “si,” which I only assumed was the right answer to the questions he asked, which I only barely understood.

The next morning, I missed the train I had planned to take to Venice, slightly on purpose as sleep proved to be a more seductive option. I then missed the bus I needed to take,  with bad research to blame. When I finally got to the train station, I was greeted by a line of yellow “cancellatos,” standing purposely next to every destination. There was a system-wide Trenitalia strike that day, something which happens in Italy fairly frequently that I had failed to learn.

So I waited in Treviso for a bus, stranded by my own folly, unable to ever know that these: the bus, the train, the other bus, and the cab driver, were only the first in a series of missed connections that would come to define my week in a country that had haunted my imagination for years.

Tune in the first week of November for Part II.