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Florence, Italy
  Photo: Peeter Viisimaa
Florence, Italy
  Photo: Arnel Manalang

Florence, Italy: Of Girls And Beasts
By Brian Rogers

On a quiet street far from the tourist-inundated center of Florence, the lock on Sindy’s door clicked twice before she invited us in.  After a ten minute walk from the nearest bus, proceeded by a twenty minute ride weaving through the city’s often anonymous streets, it felt good to find an out of the way place we might be able to explore and take in on our own terms.  After five days in Rome at a hostel and a few more with an American friend studying in Bologna, I was still waiting to be out of my element. I finally began to feel like I wasn’t just tiptoeing along the well trodden path of an endless line of travelers before me. 

We had met Sindy only an hour before at the restaurant where she waited tables.  She had been the only person willing to answer my desperate, last-minute couch surfing plea and agreed to let us stay with her for a couple of nights.  My traveling mates and I were exhausted, and Sindy had made prior plans to go out, so she left us with the keys and her dog, Jurij and told us to make ourselves at home.  Then, just like that, she was gone. 

Her house was cluttered and slightly grimy, but nothing, too out of the ordinary for a twenty-three-year-old living with three housemates and a dog.  The bathroom wall was adorned with an old poster of Mick Jagger, Bob Marley, and Peter Tosh, all three over smiling for the camera, taped under which was a photo of a white guy flanked by two Rastafarians in goofy poses. On Sindy’s door, a huge poster of a pregnant woman, donning a machine gun in the nude, greeted visitors. 

As we settled in for some much needed rest, I couldn’t help but reflect on the brilliantly circular logic of our current situation.  It was our blind trust in Sindy that gave her enough reassurance to toss us the keys and disappear after just meeting us.  She had no idea who we were, nor did we know anything about her, but that was all part of the game, I guess. 

From the brief conversation we had on the way to her house, I had learned she was actually Columbian but had lived in southern Italy for most of her life.  Here in Florence she was studying Japanese and Spanish, the latter of which she spoke well.  She had repeated several times how much she loved Jurij, whom she treated more like a human companion than a dog. 

My mind jumped to a few days earlier in Bologna, when our friend Jon had introduced us to the Italian term punkabestia

“Literally, it means punks with beasts. They hang out on the streets, have a reputation for being wasted in public, and have dogs that kind of do whatever they want,” his own words eliciting a smile.  “It’s a big social issue here.  It has created a lot of tension between older conservative people and young hippie types.”  He promised to point out the phenomenon if we happened to pass it. 

My eyes focused on the back of the room we were resting in, where an unfinished abstract painting in blues and reds looked like it had spilled its color onto the wall.  Below it, my traveling companion was curled up on a mattress, with Jurij the dog nestled in the blankets at his feet.  As my eyelids lowered the day's final curtain, I wondered if Sindy was a punkabestia. 

We awoke to the sound of the after party returning home at ten in the morning.  Feeling rested and fresh, I wandered into the room next door, where bed, floor, chair, and couch were full of bodies sprawled out.  A motley crew of Italians were laughing, drinking, smoking, and discussing music, still going strong after a long night.  Eventually their energy began to wane and slowly sputter to a crash.  It was like a wolf den, bodies piled on top of bodies; and as exhaustion set in, collectively, the pack fell asleep. 

 

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