There a many things I have difficulty grasping, like the appeal of watching a movie more than once. The storyline is already familiar. The characters are predictable. The surprises and plot twists no longer have their draw. Bob begs to differ. He is content watching The Lord of the Rings or the Game of Thrones for the umpteenth time.
I do make one exception however. It is the one movie that sets my daydreams aloft and gives me the warm and fuzzies. Just the mere thought or mention.
Maybe it was the inner middle-aged woman in me but I grew more and more excited the further we moved away from Rome and the closer we got to the Santa Maria Novella train station in Firenze (the Italian name for the city of Florence). Here were the checker-boarded fields and gently rolling hills of Italy zooming by. Unlike the Gladiator movie and the Colosseum, Under The Tuscan Sun stoked my anticipation of Toscana (“Tuscany”) with every viewing.
TRAVEL TIP: Enhance the experience of a place by watching a movie about the country or, better yet, a film from that distant land. Read a book about the city or an important event that occurred there. Listen to a song in the local language. If possible, hear the track while visiting. It is this latter that I found was the quickest way to recall the memories of that time and place.
I happen to pick up a new habit on the train ride north from Rome to Florence: keeping my eyes and ears keenly aware of everything, even the most trivial. In all likelihood, it was caused by the intermingling realizations (strange how the mind wanders when staring out a train window for nearly an hour and a half!) that we were here, that we had organized this excursion ourselves, and that we needed to get our money’s worth. An unexpected and unfortunate consequence came though, in the form of being especially hard on myself when I could not keep my eyes open on the long bus rides or had to make yet another rest stop because the heels of my feet were sore or, the absolute worst, intentionally left out an item on our itinerary.
