An Unintended Pilgrimage

by Audrey Chen (United States of America)

I didn't expect to find Italy

My travels through Italy have bestowed upon me two things: a fondness for gothic and baroque architecture, and a severe caffeine addiction. Today in Bologna, I was headed to the Basilica di San Petronio – but first, espresso. Churches have more in common with coffee shops than I initially thought – both can be characterized by the feeling of a transient suspension of time. In a church, the stillness emanates from its hallowed history, the gild and gold, the frescoes reinforcing its role as the house of God. In caffès, the feeling accompanies the heady anticipatory aroma of coffee. For an indeterminate period, my world is reduced to the space between me and a cup, filled with the invigorating scent of freshly roasted beans and my thoughts. I was here in Bologna because I sought the divine in painted arches, in marble churches, in the carved flesh and sinews of Renaissance sculptures. But when I inhale the steam rising off my bowl of freshly prepared tortellini en brodo for breakfast, I become overwhelmed by the compulsive desire to take a detour. I had also felt something of the sacrosanct in the craft of an expertly pulled doppio. In letting paper-thin coppa di testa dissolve on my tongue. In cutting into a ball of cushiony burrata, breathing in its milky scent mingling with herbaceous basil as the curd and cream spill out before me like an offering. At the end of the Via dell’Indipendenza, I turn left instead of right. The Mercato delle Erbe is, foremost, a feast for rapacious eyes – seasonal produce, tempting piles of pasta, salamis and prosciutto, and various spice blends compete for attention. I let my nose lead the way, toward the plump, earthy tomatoes; the floral melons; the delightfully pungent Parmesan; shepherded back to the first vendor by the tantalizing aroma of brown butter and lemon juice drizzled over tortelli. After a few circuits through the market, I acquire a bag of rotund figs – a large green variety I’ve never seen before – and continue on my way. I reach the Basilica steps before I give in to the urge to enjoy them. I pause in the piazza to take in the contrast of young Italians dressed in black, smoking and drinking liquor from the bottle on the basilica steps. I stand in the simmering sun, eating overripe figs from a paper bag with the immoderate impatience of someone half my age, ignoring how my hands are already sticky with viscous nectar. I plunge my fingers back into the bag for more, gorging on the figs and the sensation of slightly bruised fruit bursting open in my mouth. At that moment, I am overcome with a desire to recreate the scene in prose one day. A facsimile stitched together with metaphors, this impression of hooligans and churchgoers, and beside them, a single black-haired foreign girl embarking on a gastronomic pilgrimage. The fruits in supermarkets back home in the US are too perfect; smooth orbs with colors enhanced by science. They no longer taste like anything . No more grapes that taste of roses, or grapes that taste of grapes. The actual imitates the imitation. I remember tomatoes sitting forgotten on my counter for too long, like figurines in an ill-conceived centerpiece, undecaying. We seem to have forgotten that fruit always tastes sweeter on the precipice of rot. I split fig after fig open to suck the flesh out, uncaring that I’m smearing juice over my chin, marveling at how the humble fruit has filled me with a voracious hunger to consume and be consumed by sensorial beauty. Is it gluttony, this unquenchable appetite to experience and to relish? I once read that female wasps pollinate figs by burrowing into them, only to become trapped inside, absorbed by the bud as it ripens. Licking nectar from my lips, I silently give thanks through the act of savoring. What is sacred if not this sweet sacrifice, this gradual transformation into honeyed fruit?