Italy Roundtable: Happy Anniversary to Us!
This is the anniversary installment of the monthly Italy Blogging Roundtable, a project organized by travel writing powerhouse Jessica Spiegel, and including professional travel writer Melanie Renzulli, art historian and general brainiac Alexandra Korey, Tuscan uber-blogger Gloria, and me. (If you missed the previous months, take a look here.) This month we celebrated by adding a bunch of chairs to the table and inviting bloggers to join in on the conversation, picking one of the topics we’ve tackled over the past twelve months.
Anniversary
Remember when Fred Flinstone would get chased through the house by Dino and the same roughly-hewn stone armchair, tv set, and grandfather clock would flash by in an eternally-repeating background loop until Dino would finally jump him and despite having hoofed it for at least long enough to have covered several city blocks, Fred would be prone on his living room floor only about a foot from where he started?
Well, some years feel like that.
And then there are other years. Those years where you look back over your shoulder to where you were just twelve months before and you realize that so much road has passed beneath your feet that you barely recognize that place, that person, and that life. Those are the precious years.
This past year has been one of my precious years. The earth has made a single revolution around the sun and during this same time my existence has gone through a revolution of sorts, as well. Like all revolutions, my personal uprising has left its share of scorched earth and burnt bridges, but this is a small price to pay for the newly conquered lands which have opened up to me, with horizons that stretch wider than I could have ever imagined just a year ago, and peopled by friends and colleagues who challenge me, inspire me, encourage me, and make me laugh until I snort.
Among these, I feel unbelievably fortunate to count the ladies of the Italy Blogging Roundtable: Gloria, who was one of the driving forces behind my decision to start blogging over two years ago; Jessica, whose interview of Lonely Planet writer Alex Leviton on the Eye on Italy podcast led me to co-author an iPhone travel app; Melanie, who passed me my very first gig writing for a printed travel guide (which led to me very quickly concluding that writing for printed travel guides—heretofore my Holy Grail–actually kind of sucked and I needed to take my eggs out of that basket); Alexandra, who is articulate and savvy and rigorous and whose tiny doppelganger sits on the corner of my desk and silently raises one critical eyebrow whenever I plow through a piece of lazy writing. And I sigh, and delete it, and work harder.
All of these are people I met online (though half of the Roundtable I have had the pleasure of also meeting in person), which reminds of a time not so long ago—last year, I think–when I was convinced that “online relationships” were somehow more ephemeral and superficial than “real relationships”, a sign of our unraveling social structure and just one more step towards the implosion of modern humankind. A mere year later I realize how wrong I was, as I have formed so many online connections—both professional and personal, and often a bit of both—over the past twelve months which have enriched my life enormously and strengthened my sense of connection, not weakened it.
Each time we’ve opened up the Italy Blogging Roundtable to outside bloggers, I’ve realized just how many people I’ve met online through writing and blogging. So many of the contributors are people whose writing I read with pleasure and with whom I often have a rich correspondence. Last month we extended an invitation to bloggers to participate in May’s Roundtable by writing about one of the eleven topics the five of us have touched on over the past year, and we had a number of wonderful pieces (you can see all of them in Alexandra’s post here). I especially loved Linda from Travel the Write Way’s poignant account of Why I Write about Italy, Diana from A Certain Simplicity’s freeform poem on The Elements, and master racconteur Kate from Driving Like a Maniac’s two contributions: Why I Write about Italy and Gifts. A huge thank you to everyone who participated and a huge thank you to the ladies of the Roundtable…same time, different place, next year!
Curious to hear what Alexandra, Gloria, Melanie, and Jessica had to say about this month’s topic? Check out their blog posts, and leave your comments.
- ArtTrav – Predicting our future: a first date at Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden in Maremma
- At Home in Tuscany – Celebrating your wedding anniversary in Tuscany
- Italofile – Anniversaries in Italian History: Dates Every Curious Traveler to Italy Should Know
- WhyGo Italy – A Decade with Italy
‘Master raconteur’. Wow, I’m honoured. Thank you so much for the mention and for extending the invitation out to all of us. If I’d had time, I’d probably have written something on every one of those titles (and still might, if I’m honest). I know Alexandra said that she wished I’d written something about driving in Italy, but there’s so much of that in my archives that I could have pulled out about 10 posts on that title alone!
So many of my closest friends nowadays are people that I originally met online, and I love that fact. Putting faces to names at TBU was amazing, and I plan to continue that trend as much as I can: online relationships = marvellous!
You know that the main reason why I insisted you started blogging again was that I couldn’t take any more boring blog data for my linguistic studies right? 🙂
I’m glad you had a precious year, and I hope this year is another one.
btw loved the Fred Flintstone imagery at the top!