“You're eating like a good Italian,” Marco beamed as I sopped up the saucy remnants of my bucatini with a heel of bread. “We call that ‘scarpetta’ meaning ‘little shoe.’” “Scopare?” I repeated. His eyes widened and he laughed, “No no no, not that! That is to—how would you say—shag? Screw? But ruder. Don’t say that.” My friend Marco was showing me his hometown of Tivoli during the final leg of a month-long solo European trip. In part, archeological mystery had drawn me to Tivoli. The RISD Museum of Art, where I then worked, houses an enigmatic marble column with distinctive creeping vine reliefs, allegedly from Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli. The ruins of the Roman Emperor Hadrian's extravagant country residence are an engineering marvel, even though today the grottoes are crumbling and the pools are coated with algae. Personal reasons also brought me to Tivoli. After wrestling with depression and an unfinished master’s dissertation—each exacerbating the other—as well as the indignity of moving back in with my parents, I had planned this tour to celebrate my emergence from dark times. I’d called it my “Victory Lap,” as if making my moping transatlantic were a triumph. During college, I’d studied and worked on an archaeological dig in Rome, where I had first tasted true independence. Italy was the obvious finale for my trip, a poignant bookend to this chapter of my life. And where better to reflect on the past than Tivoli, perched on the edge of the Sabine Hills? “Perched” is not poetic license. Its official 700+ ft. elevation feels like an understatement when you sit in La Panoramica, the park overlooking a vertiginous drop towards the Campagna plain. For 3,000 years, locals have looked down from this vantage on their upstart neighbor to the southwest, Rome. Mention Rome to the Tiburtini, and civic pride reflexively compels them to point out that Tivoli was already an ancient city at Rome’s foundation. This attitude seems entirely reasonable when you realize that the faint grey smudge on a clear day’s horizon is actually the dome of St. Peter’s. Tivoli’s civic motto, taken from the ancient Roman poet Virgil, is stamped on every manhole and trashcan: TIBUR SUPERBUM, “Tivoli the Proud.” Marco and his mother, Franca, hosted me in their apartment. He hadn’t warned me that she didn’t really speak English. And—notwithstanding the claims on my résumé—I didn’t really speak Italian. After a single semester of study, I had never progressed to such useful concepts as the future tense or subjunctive mood. Plus, the crippling perfectionism that torpedoed my academic career hamstrung the humility needed to practice another language. Initially, I spoke to Franca half in basic Italian and Marco translated the rest. After a week, I reached a watershed moment with her over our shared passion: alcohol. I’d brought her a bottle of craft whisky from home in Rhode Island. As we sat drinking it in the kitchen one night, she examined the bottle and I ambitiously (and foolishly) offered to translate the back label. Without any botanical vocabulary or knowledge of technical distillation terms, I would ask in broken Italian: “What do you call when water turns to air?” “Which tree has leaves like this shape? [gesticulate]” “What's that red fruit over there?” We laughed and it was the most at ease I’d been in a long time. The next day, Marco invited me to his aunt’s sixtieth birthday party. Inside, he introduced me to her, and she asked what had brought me to Tivoli. I paused and, buoyed by my newfound confidence in speaking Italian, stitched together a sentence in my best diction: “My boss wants me to examine every column in Hadrian’s Villa.” An alarmed micro-expression crossed her face before she curtly smiled and turned away. Had I said something wrong? One look at Marco, doubled over and stifling laughter, was enough to bring home my mistake. The intended “scovare” (“to examine”) had come out as “scopare.” Learning a new language changes you: sometimes you’re a vulnerable novice, sometimes you’re a confident cosmopolitan, and sometimes you’re the pervert who told his friend’s aunt he wanted to fuck all the columns in Hadrian’s Villa.