Berkley Center

There are a few things you can always count on in America: the ubiquity of Starbucks and Chipotle, unqualified adoration of Beyoncé, partisan bickering in Congress…and another thing that I consistently took for granted—the availability of help. Whether it be 9-1-1, 24-hour businesses, special hotlines, even helpful neighbors, there are always people awake and available to come to your aid. There’s a habitual lack of isolation in a country of all-night workers and little sleep.

This way of operating is alien to Italian culture. Here is the land of 3-hour lunch breaks, unreliable bus schedules, and arbitrary store closures. Sometimes, this mindset feels very Eat, Pray, Love—relaxing, de-stressed, spontaneous, smell-the-roses. It can be a welcome asylum from the coffee-infused pressure cooker of Lau 5 or braggadocious internship season back at Georgetown.

But when you’re in trouble, when you don’t speak the language, when your phone doesn’t work in this country, when your dumb American tourist tendencies are out in full force—this is when you want people to be on alert and waiting by phone lines, when you want businesses and services to have regular, clearly advertised hours.

I ran headlong into this problem on a weekend trip to Venice. My time in Venice was exquisitely romantic, in the grandest sense of the word. The winding cobblestone streets, winking streetlamps, and mist-shrouded canals create a stunning and unearthly fairy-tale land.

We had come to the end of our trip, a joyful time filled with Carnevale masks, frittelle (a life-changing beignet-like delicacy), and many semi-lost strolls. My three friends—Genie, Natalie, and Santana—and I headed back to our Airbnb to clean up, check out, and make the slog to the water taxi in plenty of time to catch our Megabus back to Florence.

Genie pulled out the key and turned it in the lock. The door didn’t budge. Accustomed to the idiosyncrasies of this key, she removed it and tried again—no dice. The rest of us took turns, and for the next hour wearied our palms and souls with fruitless tinkering of that frustratingly stubborn lock.

Admitting defeat, we called Alice, the owner of our AirBnb. (NB. All of us are in “Basic Italian”—a.k.a., we can introduce ourselves and list some rudimentary foods and drinks and that’s it. Alice speaks broken and limited English). When we finally made Alice understand the problem, she accused us of breaking the lock since the door had never been any trouble before (blatantly false, according to all of our poor neighbors who we harassed for help). Finally, she promised to send her “colleague,” Donatella, since she (Alice) was away from Venice.

Assuming that Donatella was the landlord, we relaxed in anticipation of our liberation. Donatella arrived a half hour later, possessing no English skills whatsoever. She went up to the door and asked for our key. She inserted it into the lock and ~shockingly~ it didn’t open. And that was it. She was out of options.

We started to panic. Our bus was leaving in about an hour and a half, and all of our valuable possessions (including passports, wallets, etc.) were locked firmly behind the door. We tried to call the police, only to be told tersely that they couldn’t legally open it. We called Alice again, and she said that our only chance was to call a technician, but that since it was Sunday evening, all of them were probably closed. Donatella silently disappeared sometime during this fruitless conversation.

We sat in the dusty, tiny staircase deep in the sloughs of despair. No one would or could help us. We were faced with the equally unattractive options of leaving all of our valuables in Alice’s dubious hands and heading back on our bus, or paying to spend the night in Venice, home to some of the most expensive hotels in the world.

Then, miraculously, in our moment of darkness, Donatella reappeared with an anonymous bald man holding (if you can believe it) a ring of spare keys. He walked up to the door, inserted a key, and it swung open perfectly. I promptly burst into tears. Donatella realized the gravity of our situation and turned out to be quite sweet (though why calling the man with the spare keys wasn’t dreamed up three hours prior is beyond me). We made our bus and everything ended well.

Clearly, this situation wasn’t life or death; no one was hurt, and the only real threat was exorbitant expense. But it throws into stark relief the Italian versus American attitude towards problem solving. The Italians with whom we interacted were lackadaisical, unhurried, and unconcerned with the details. The police didn’t even pick up for several rings.

But in accordance with the traditional Italian mindset, everything worked out. We had time for a quick glass of wine, made our bus, and returned with a story and closer friendships, bonded through commiseration and subsequent relief. Maybe it taught us to worry less, to demand less from the people around us. Maybe it taught us that tears in stairwells become laughs over dinner, that deep friendships are forged in times of ridiculous adversity. Maybe it taught us simply that, as my Italian professor says, “life is not perfect,” and that acceptance of this fact will make it a lighter and happier place.