Something Like Home — Suzey Ingold

If the trajectory of my life so far were to be unraveled like a story, then mine would be irrevocably linked with Italy. It was the first country I visited as a child outside of my homelands of the United Kingdom, where I was born, and Finland, where my maternal roots lie. The tales begin in Naples, where I punctuated my mother’s exploration of the city with a near-constant serenade of A Pirate’s Life, and clambered up and down the steps of a small boat with my father. A couple of years later, we would return, this time to the north: greeting the pigeons of Venice and admiring the horse statues of the Basilica.

Those earliest visits are long before my memories begin; stories relayed through my mother and father, through photographs tinted with the hazy green of the Mediterranean Sea or the warm depths of Venetian canals. They are just stories to me, as much as anything, but they feel a part of me nonetheless.

We would return to Venice again, within my own memories, and later, to Sicily to stay with a family friend, where I would finally see the fabled rooftop on which Mount Etna deposited her ash whenever she erupted.

In later years, as an adult, so too Italy remained. I studied Italian at university for two years, my many years of Spanish tuition a perfect foundation to developing the sound and structure of this beautiful language. I spent a summer working outside of Milan (a city I have particular distaste for in a country I otherwise adore), putting my Italian to working use, and my relatively newfound taste for coffee into practice learning to make espresso the right way.

I should have lived in Italy for a year, in Florence. It’s a story I’ve told enough times but even now – perhaps, especially now – I am so grateful that I didn’t. It would not have been the right time for me to live so far from home and could have forever ruined my relationship with this dear country, with Florence of all places. (But we’ll get there.) If I’d moved to Florence that year, I never would have published a novel. I never would have seriously started working in the film industry. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I hadn’t chosen not to go to Florence.

There were some years, then, when Italy remained somewhat in the periphery as I explored other corners of the world, eventually moving over to Canada for many years. When I spent two months travelling through Europe in the spring of 2022, Italy was the first stop on my tour. Even after all this time, even when I seemingly had nothing to tether me there, it felt just a little like coming home.

There is something particularly special about being in a country that is not your own but where you can speak the language – or enough of the language. My spoken Italian can be patchy, settling after I’ve spent some weeks in the country, but my comprehension comes fast and it doesn’t take long before I can read signs or eavesdrop on conversations just as easily as I could in English or Finnish, the languages I was brought up on.

It certainly aids my sense of home, that I feel I can navigate and communicate without wading through waves of incomprehension. I’d never been to Rome when I arrived there that April, but I quickly found my footing, walking loops of the city at five o’clock in the morning when jet lag came calling.

And then, Florence. The city that was owed a long-overdue apology, or at the very least a visit. A city that would become all the more special when I found a corner of the world there that I will forever hold dear. By the end of the year, I had thrown together the first draft of a book set in Florence, as though my mind had never left those winding streets and cobbled squares even as my body had travelled halfway across Europe and back across the Atlantic.

There was only one place I could turn 30, and it was that corner of the world.

Arriving back into Rome after a week in Egypt, a country in which I was only catching my breath in my final hours there, was the most incredible kind of relief. I helped a group of bewildered tourists at Fiumicino Station validate their tickets and hopped onto the train into the city, exchanging friendly greetings with the conductor that came without having to so much as think about it.

“Do you need a map?” the front desk staff asked at my hotel.

I smiled and shook my head. “I’ll be fine.”

I was only passing through, but for my few waking hours in Rome, I could almost play as a local. I whizzed through the streets on the back of a Vespa, and shared a beer with my guides in Trastevere under the baking midday sun.

Life could be like this, I mused. Rome hadn’t been on my list of potential places to live, although my mother had advocated for it once or twice. I was starting to come round to that way of thinking.

Winding my way up into Tuscany, past a week nestled in the hills, I ended up, exactly as I’d hoped, in Florence with friends on the eve of my 30th birthday. But with about half an hour to go until the day itself, stood on a back alley near the river under a waning moon, I was coming to terms with the fact that my great plan might not come to fruition.

You’re still here, I reminded myself firmly. You’re still in a city you love with people who you couldn’t live without.

With a little luck, and a good dose of stubborn temperament from one of my friends, we made it inside with two minutes to spare and I turned 30 under the dim lights of the most wonderful little bar in Florence, with the taste of sweet liquor on my lips and a string of beads around my neck.

“Could you see yourself living in Florence?” my friend asked that night as we sipped our cocktails tucked into the velvet cushions.

I laughed. “No,” I said, “no matter how much I love this bar.”

The next day I came back to her on the question. “Maybe I could,” I admitted. We were walking through the Santo Spirito neighbourhood on the other side of the river, and away from the crowds that flocked to the Duomo and the Uffizi, I could see through to the real heart of the city.

The same friend would remind me later that I didn’t have to live in every place that I liked, as I agonised over my search for a home. No, I didn’t have to. But I could consider them, at least.

I don’t know where home is going to be yet. The next year, year and a half, will be a search for a place to call my own, for a place to put down roots and build a home. A place to unpack my books and hang my artwork on the walls. A place near the water, with a garden, and a little home office in which I can write. But wherever I end up, I will always return to Italy, to pay a visit to the memories I hold so dear.