Even though I write this story up in 2026 the events took place decades ago. I tell the story solely because in hindsight it is where I learned to travel and began learning what it meant to be adventurous.
In the 1980s I had a chance to join a couple of my IT colleagues in Switzerland where they had a multi-year contract. My job was short and fairly easy and I finished in a few weeks. It was summer and before I returned to the States I wanted to do some touring in Europe, a place I had not visited before. My colleagues and I formed a plan to meet in Florence in a week or so and I set off for Italy ahead of them.
My goal in Italy was to surprise a friend of mine from San Francisco whom I knew would be spending summer in the town of Tuscania at a ceramics school. This was something she did each summer and I thought it would be fun to just pop in and surprise her, learn something of the school, and get a visit to Italy started. So I looked on the map to see which city on the main train line was the closest to Tuscania.
It turned out to be Orvieto so I simply went to the train station and bought a ticket for Orvieto and I was ready to go. So far I had found travel in Switzerland to be fairly easy: most people could handle English even though it is not one of the four official Swiss languages nor one of the non-official languages people actually speak. So I did not think too much about preparing for this trip other than packing a bag.
As a result, it was not until I stepped off the train in Orvieto at 7am that I considered my actual situation: I was in a small city in a country I had never visited, where I did not speak the language, and where I had no idea how to get to the place I intended to go now that I was here.
I began my hunt by trying a low profile approach: I sat in front of the train station where the buses pulled in and waited for a bus which said Tuscania on the front. I waited for at least an hour until I noticed that the same buses kept showing up and none of them said Tuscania. So I went inside to the train ticket counter and somehow managed to wave my arms enough, write enough stuff on paper, and repeat as best I could what the ticket clerk told me that I had a set of instructions for getting there. These involved taking a local train to another city and there finding the bus I needed.
And to my everlasting surprise, that actually worked. I got to the city on a train filled with young men in army uniform who were all on their way to a large army camp or facility there. I found the bus I needed and by afternoon I was in Tuscania.
It did not take me long at the bus station to find out a couple of important information items. First, the ceramics school was closed this year, there were no students, no classes and no reason to think my friend had ever come or planned to come. I had journeyed here for actual nothing. Second, this closure of the school meant no student visitors for the summer and the bus station owner had a dormitory full of empty cots which he rented to students which was going unused. So I had no one to visit but I did have a place to stay which was not crowded.
And this next part is where memory has faded over the years and I don’t know how what happened next unfolded. All that I can say is that by supper time I was sitting under a grape arbor on one side of a small valley. Across the valley I could hear the bells of goats grazing on the hillside below the Lombardy poplars which lined the horizon on the hill. Beside the arbor was the home of our host, a 12th century stone tower obviously initially built for defense and now adapted for use in modern day.
I recall there were four of us at supper speaking three languages: our host speaking Italian, myself speaking English, and a German couple who, I realized, were speaking Hoch Deutsch (high German) which is like saying they had Oxbridge accents speaking English. It was the first time I had heard this accent and I was surprised my high school German understood it easily.
It was a magical moment: to have gone from a clueless morning by the train tracks to a serene and peaceful twilight in three languages next to a medieval tower. All that was missing was the chyron: “Welcome to Italy!”
That sense of wandering discovery stayed with me as I spent three days in Tuscania exploring the medieval/Renaissance town. I learned the town had “migrated” over the hills over the centuries where older Roman buildings were disassembled to construct “newer” medieval buildings. The columns on the catacombs beneath the town church were cannibalized stones of various styles removed from abandoned Roman buildings on the adjacent hills. It was, for me, a microcosm in the flesh, so to speak, of what the change of times looks like through a lens of hundreds of years.
I managed to remain in this state of mind as I took a bus to Rome. I found a place to stay in the old part of the City. I walked to and around the Forum and then wandered up a hill nearby until, unexpectedly I found myself in a huge open square with magnificent buildings all around me. The beauty of the buildings was breathtaking to me. Their proportions and details were simply exquisite in ways I had never seen achieved before in this style of architecture, which was Renaissance. It was not until later when I could look such things up (in a book!) that I realized I had stumbled upon the Campidoglio which had been designed by none other than Michelangelo. It was oddly validating to realize that if I was going to be overwhelmed on sight (or is it on site?) by an architect it was no shame to find that I had Michelangelo to blame.
That evening I took a walk to the Spanish Steps to have dinner at a cafe and then simply followed people in the streets who seemed to have a notion of where they were going until before long I was at the Fontana di Trevi where I dutifully tossed a coin over my shoulder into the pool (I hope) to predict whether I would ever return.
None of this was planned or specifically intentional which made it all the more wonderful in outcome but the next day was explicitly intentional: I was inspired to visit the Sistine Chapel. And, as the result of reading a guidebook hint, I was inspired to visit it alone.
I’m told by my now adult daughter that this trick no longer works but it worked for me. I was near the front of the line waiting to enter the Vatican Museum the next morning. When the doors finally opened I made a beeline up the stairs, almost elbowing nuns aside to get up briskly. I had studied a museum map briefly so I knew the Chapel was all the way across the museum from the entry. I also knew that of all the recommended pathways for visitors, which varied by the time it took to complete them, none began at the Chapel and I presumed that all visitors were likely to stick to a path of one length or another.
Since I had only one goal it was literally a matter of just walking briskly across the museum to the other side and walking into the Chapel and that is what I did. I stepped into an entirely deserted room, the so-famous fresco on the ceiling partially obscured by a scaffold being used for cleaning. I was alone in that space for at least 15 minutes.
The guidebook hint had been clear: if you go when it is crowded you are standing in a museum gallery. But if you can get there alone you are in a chapel, a place of worship, and you are free to let the spiritual nature of the room and the fresco enter into you and so it did. Another magical moment.
Soon enough other visitors arrived and though voices remained hushed the place changed for me and it was time to leave.
I left the museum, left the Vatican, went to the train station and left Rome for Florence. I had spent 3 days in Tuscania and 24 hours in Rome. The day would end when I left the Uffizi Museum in Florence with my colleagues a few hours later and simply sat down on the steps of the museum and wept.
It felt as though I had in some way just lived through a thousand years and more, from Roman times to the flowering of the Italian Renaissance which I think of as the dawn of the modern age, and that the deluge of images, paintings, buildings, statues, and places reached a crescendo in Florence that overwhelmed me.
And that is how I discovered what it really meant to go on an adventure. I didn’t fully understand it at the time but I came to see the lesson I learned: adventures are what happen when you don’t know what is going to happen. This one was pretty dramatic, if I do say so, and not all adventures are. But if you plan your days you are a lot less likely to have an adventure if only because you had already committed to not having one.
Stepping off that train clueless at 7am did not feel like the start of an adventure which would end with me weeping on the Uffizi steps 5 days later in Florence but it was.