In 2012 I travelled to Italy on a women’s walking and writing tour. I was nearly 36 years old and it was the first time I’d ventured outside of Australia on my own. The experience was exhilarating, anxiety-inducing, and one of those pivotal deviations of the status quo and many of my readers will know that led me to leaving everything behind and moving to a little town on the flank of Monte Amiata in Southern Tuscany.

While I was experiencing the first “headinesses” of Italy, I knew I had to write it all down, because the “nows” all get lost to the years. I’ve recently come across the blog again. Most of my posts are brief impressions written before I knew the language I’m now fluent in. Reading back over it all, some of it is truly mortifying. I stopped the blog and made it private when I felt as though I were living on the outside looking in on a life that did not feel like I belonged to – or me to it…which is what I was always doing while I was there anyway. I just had to fool myself that I could belong, for a time. And what better way to do that for this serial learner than by self-imposed exile from my homeland to a world I could only ever grasp the edges of. That’s still me, now, to be quite honest, back on my home turf, in a state of perpetual wonder (and often, “how/what/where the f*ck”).

Back then, though, in that remote, liminal stratosphere of new culture and language, I could give myself the excuse for “not getting the gist” of the world around me.

For the next little while I’ll be revisiting “Ali in Italia” and sharing those posts in all their whimsical, cringeworthy glory – with added commentary from this end of the experience.