“Tuscan Holiday,” by Lisa Brennan-Jobs, was originally published in the February 2008 issue of Vogue. For more of the best from Vogue’ s archive, sign up for our Nostalgia newsletter here . We met on the wide sidewalk of the Via Cavour where it intersects the Piazza del Duomo.
Marco* was a friend of a friend. I'd just arrived in Florence. As I reached out to shake his hand, a voice in my head, low and calm, said, You're going to date him, but you're not going to marry him.
I'd never heard voices before, and I couldn't imagine a reason for such an admonition on a weightless Italian afternoon. I was 24. He was good-looking in jeans and a blue collared shirt with a button undone, tan and a little gray at the temples.
He was slim, and he spoke clear English warmed by an Italian lilt—perhaps I would date him, I thought—and he smiled, and his warm brown eyes sparkled, and we shook. I had arrived on a one-way ticket with savings from the banking job I'd quit a month before. A man I knew, a jet-setter,0 had introduced me to two kind and well-connected Italian women before I arrived.
I planned to stay and learn the language. I'd dreamed of going to Italy and living there and most of all of belonging. When I was in elementary school, I watched Cinema Paradiso 22 times and memorized the dialogue.
In the movie, everyone had a place, even the bum who thought he owned the piazza. Eccentricities were celebrated, and no one was isolated. There was tradition and camaraderie, and all.