To Italy with love on idyllic honeymoon

We slept for 13 hours our first night at the Cipriani, on a king bed with goose down pillows. The next day we took the hotel launch, a vintage mahogany Venetian motoscafo, to Piazza San Marco and meandered along the canals. We crossed 14 stone bridges and eight piazzas, ending up at the Gallerie dell’Accademia beneath huge oils painted by Titian, Giorgione and Tintoretto. That afternoon we sat under a honeysuckle tree and watched the murky water slide by. It was 38 degrees and raining at home in New York City. It was 75 on the Rialto Bridge with poufy clouds and a pale blue sky that looked like a painting straight from the Renaissance.

Eating very well

That night we ate at an old-style restaurant called Antiche Carampane. A sign in the window warned “No Tourist Menu.” We ordered bay scallops caught in the lagoon, roasted fennel, artichoke salad and baby squid with pasta in ink sauce. The waiter told us how the walls of Venetian buildings are built like boats: three layers of wood and a lacquer finish. Once a month, he said, during the full moon, the ocean fills the restaurant with three feet of salt water. The staff puts chairs and rugs on the tables the night before and comes to work early to mop up the place before opening for business.

There had been at least 5,000 people in Piazza San Marco all day. At midnight that night it was empty. I happened to have our wedding mix saved on my phone and played it from my shirt pocket as we danced over the polished cobblestones. The air smelled like wood smoke, and we could hear the low rumble of vaporetti cruising the Grand Canal. San Marco’s bell tower was a dark obelisk against the silvery moonlight. As we twirled over the scaffolding the buskers use during the day, I felt happy and hopeful and thought of a favorite line from “Jane Eyre”: “our honeymoon will shine our life long: its beams will only fade over your grave or mine.”

Tuscan villa and classic car

We felt like one of the lucky couples on a dream honeymoon the next morning, traveling 175 mph on a train through the farmland surrounding Padua, Ferrara and Bologna. Travel agents are soothsayers in a sense, and Cindy had, correctly, predicted a hangover after our weekend in Venice. Instead of bickering our way across the city on three hours of sleep, we glanced at our itinerary, ate breakfast at the Cipriani and waited for a private motoscafo to take us to the train station.

Ermanno Gallo met us in Chiusi, Tuscany, four hours later. He works for Zephyrus Classic Car Rental and handed me something that changed our lives for the next three days: the keys to a 1981 Fiat 124 Spider convertible. My father drove the same car in his later years and, since he died before Sara met him, I thought she could commune with him on a kind of spiritual voyage a la façon anglaise.

Classic cars sit somewhere between the pope and Leonardo da Vinci in Italy, especially one that Enzo Ferrari’s chief engineer helped design. Children on the side of the road yelled, “Bella macchina!” as the 124’s double overhead cam purred through vineyards and cattle ranches in Val di Chiana. The swath of farm country is two hours south of Florence and runs north-south on the border of Arezzo and Umbria. We hung a right near Il Passaggio up a cyprus-lined driveway to the Villa di Piazzano, the regional cardinal’s old headquarters and our home for the next two days.

Tuscan villas haven’t changed much since the Renaissance. They are cold and austere in early April. We dropped our bags in our room and were back in the Fiat 30 minutes later. Ermanno had given us driving gloves, for me, and a scarf, for Sara, but no map. We didn’t need one. The 360-degree view with the top down was so perfect, so reminiscent of driving scenes in our favorite Fellini and Antonioni movies, we simply followed the road wherever it went.

An hour later it zigzagged up a steep hill to Castiglion Fiorentino, a medieval city built on fourth century B.C. Etruscan ruins. We drove until the road dead-ended in a parking lot, then climbed six flights of stone stairs to the only cafe open in town.

Hollywood posters and memorabilia from the 1950s hung from the walls, and a giant picture window looked out at the green spine of the pre-Apennine mountains running northwest toward Florence. The bartender set out goat cheese and figs, tapenade bruschetta and mini slices of pizza and served us $3 glasses of the best merlot we had the entire trip. The scene was ridiculously picturesque, straight out of a 1990s romantic comedy. We were both travelers — me a writer, Sara a photographer — who had somehow wandered into each other. And here we were, together, on the greatest journey of our lives.

The International Encyclopedia of Marriage and Family states that: “More than an initiation into marital roles, the postindustrial honeymoon is a ritual that is socially framed as the most romantic juncture in one’s life. The honeymoon is about forming one’s self-identity as romantic, and couples make honeymoon choices as a means to secure their individual and shared romantic identities.”

A few days later on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, steps from a store where my father bought my mother a ring shortly after they were married, we were happy that we chose to act out Sara’s story. It came from a dream, and in many ways the ritual of the honeymoon is a fantasy. It is an escape from your life, job, stress and every other hassle associated with modern life. It is a chance to be together, undistracted, and not much else.

Sailing to Sicily

My uncle, who lived in Italy for years, taught us the Italian word for newlyweds: “sposini.” If you are sposini, he said, everyone in the country will treat you as if it is your birthday. The word came in handy a few days later when we followed the final leg of our fantasy on a ferry bound for Sicily. We had spent a couple of days on the Amalfi Coast — walking Ravello’s gardens that inspired Richard Wagner, touring Capri and hiking between medieval cliff towns that Norman kings once ruled — and the car rental return was more complicated than expected. I ended up pulling the sposini card to get a security officer to let me on the boat, 18 minutes before it departed.

Discount airlines have decreased ferry traffic considerably in Italy, excluding an exceptionally colorful group of elderly and teenage working-class travelers who crowded a blue-carpeted lounge bar that night. We ordered negronis and retired to the poop deck, where we watched the sparkling lights of Capri slide past the gunwales.

A blasting horn woke us in our family cabin — double bed, bathroom, shower, TV — at 6 a.m. the next day. Mount Pellegrino stood above Palermo harbor, alongside a half-dozen other forested mountains. The air and sky are different in Sicily — bigger, wider, like Montana in a way. D.H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, lived on the island longer than anywhere else the embattled couple holed up during Lawrence’s self-imposed exile.

The raw scenery, laid-back Sicilians and history dating back thousands of years are exotic and fascinating. Of sailing into Palermo, Lawrence wrote in “Sea and Sardinia”: “The fantastic peaks behind Palermo show half-ghostly in a half-dark sky. The dawn seems reluctant to come. Our steamer still smokes her cigarette — meaning the funnel-smoke — across there. So, one sits still, and crosses the level space of half-dark water. Masts of sailing-ships, and spars, cluster on the left, on the undarkening sky.”

We walked from the ferry terminal to our hotel, dropped our bags and kept walking. The marina was crammed with fishing boats and weather-beaten sailboats. The streets around Dominico Square were as narrow as a refrigerator. Structures were a pastiche of Norman, Gothic and Greek architecture, most old and layered with grime.

Beneath the tarnish, Palermo is the kind of city where you stumble across exquisite things. We almost stepped on a late-Roman mosaic, “The Four Seasons,” while looking for a public bathroom. We found the bathroom a half-hour later, in the largest opera house in Italy.

We saw the 17th-century Quattro Canti, an intersection with sculptures of four kings of Sicily, one on each corner. The air smelled like lilacs and the ocean in the Orto botanical garden, and we bought an old canteen at a sprawling flea market in Piazza Marina. That afternoon we haggled for groceries at the 1,000-year-old Ballarò market, where fishmongers cut crimson slabs of swordfish to order and vendors sold blood oranges, pecorino fresco and marble-size capers.

It is bizarre how swiftly the days go by — on a vacation, in life. It’s nothing new, but you feel it more on a special trip. I remember my parents talking about their honeymoon as if it were a thousand years ago. Ours was right here, and there was some pressure to end it as perfectly as it began.

We drove to Cefalù early the next morning for our last few days in Italy. The headland that the little fishing village is named for lurches up 850 feet from the center of town and holds the ruins of every culture that ever settled there. We had rented a tiny apartment with a large deck that looked out on the mile-long beach extending from town. We made pasta alla norma the first night, a Sicilian classic with sautéed eggplant, penne and ricotta salata, and watched the ocean morph from blue to indigo to silver to charcoal.

The next day we acted out the final scene of Sara’s story, packing a picnic and hiking the headland. Four older men charged us $5 each at the entrance of Madonie Park. The trail zigzagged to a gate in a tight draw, situated to defend “La Rocca,” which was occupied by the Greeks, Syracusians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs and Normans. Halfway up the path we saw a pre-Hellenic Temple of Diana and mounds of clay that were bread ovens at one time. There was a pine forest near the temple, and after charging to the summit and back we laid out lunch on a picnic table.

I’d filled the old canteen we bought at the flea market with wine, and we sipped it and ate eggplant sandwiches wrapped in foil while a hawk glided just above the canopy. The ocean reflected blue light through the pines, and a sea breeze hissed through tall grass on the mountainside. There were no small furs or blankets, and we were not going to sleep under the stars as in Sara’s story. But we had lived close to the fantasy for a moment, and that was enough for us. Love waxes and wanes. Life is a dream. Sometimes you get to live as if you’re in one, too.