Looking On With Stranger’s Eyes: Lessons Learned My First Week In Umbria

Spoleto, a town within the Umbrian region of Italy, is a city of stone, sanctity, and centuries of lore. It was a medieval territory later absorbed by the Roman Empire, and every local person, sight, and uneven brick in the sidewalk underlines its ancient sense of history. I don’t have the roots here that the pagan-protected trees of Spoleto’s sacred forest do, but this unmooring grants me room for wonder instead: I marvel at all the novel traffic signs, at the surrounding crested mountains in the blue blurred distance, and at every unfamiliar candy wrapper tripping like tumbleweeds across the paved roads.

When I first stepped off the bus at my villa, soggy and fatigued from my previous overnight flight, I was in awe at the contrast between the little neon gas station to my right and the sprawling peaks and ridges that enveloped the city around me. Later, my group was guided on a tour of the town’s functional attractions; this revealed a modern city bustling over and around primordial buildings, its restorative scaffolding and Prada-clad locals crawling up and down historical bricks like ivy, unbothered and adaptive.

The city itself became personified. It seemed to carry a sense of concord within its structures and within itself—a confidence and comfortability that comes from decades of standing established in the same place in the face of modernity. Its locals seemed to carry that same self-assuredness in them, too.

I, of course, did not bear that sureness. This was thrilling to me. On my second day of travel, we took a broader tour of the city, this time focusing on its sights and history. I brushed my hands along stones slabbed together before Christ’s birth, yearned over the life of a cat warming its soft body on an eighty-year-old rooftop, and tried to adapt to the obstacle of space and a six-hour time difference between me and my family. Every time I ogled at the rolling hills below peppered with brown and pink houses for a bit too long, stood in the way of someone with places to be, I was reminded I was an outsider.

But I was improving. The beauty of Spoleto lies in its simultaneous stability and adaptability, and I was learning from it quickly. The next day, when I got in someone’s way, I let out a timid scusi instead of sorry. When I evacuated my comfortable bed in the morning, its gentle dip of the mattress and white linens soaking up streaks of dawning sun, begging me to stay, to instead bike twenty kilometers up a mountain—I had grown. The sweat in my eyes and the mighty bruise blooming on my calf were my trophies; that, and the farmhouse meal waiting for me at the end.

Our biking guide, a local man named Luca, lived there in a town over from Spoleto. He grew up at the farmhouse surrounded by bright poppies and soft grass, its rough walls and wooden beams filled with the smell of dandelion honey. During the parts of the trail too treacherous to cycle, he would pass us walking our bikes with jovial laughter and a teasing “It’s semplice!” thrown over his shoulder. Needless to say, it was not simple. For us anyway.

But this was Luca’s element. He thrived on the narrow path of a spiraling mountain, he made blazing through shoulder-high forests of grass and wildflowers look easy. Could bustle about the kitchen like it was his own mind, too.

So this is what Umbria has taught me so far: that there is power in adaptability. That any effort towards connection, no matter how small, means a great deal to people. That there are individuals living a life half a world away that never would’ve touched mine without crossing language barriers and borders. I have learned that I am not destined to become a champion mountain biker, but that it still feels good to try. And I’ve learned that the position of outsider isn’t inherently a negative thing—it can instead be a position of growth, beauty, and wonder with the right perspective (and the right guide).