ITALY. Across the Years just moving around

When I first travelled to Italy, it was not really a trip to Italy at all. It was part of something much larger – a long journey across Europe that lasted more than three weeks and, looking back now, belonged to a completely different era of travelling.

Today people often fly somewhere for three days, see two attractions, take photographs, return home and say they have done a city. Back then travelling still involved movement, transition and distance. You felt countries changing around you slowly. Landscapes shifted outside the windows. Road signs changed language. Food changed. Architecture changed. Even the rhythm of the roads felt different from one place to another.

Our route led through Germany, France, Monaco, a small stretch of Switzerland near Lake Geneva, and then finally into Italy. Later we returned through San Marino, Austria and the Czech Republic before reaching Poland again. Altogether the journey lasted twenty-one or twenty-two days. At the time it felt enormous. Not exhausting, but expansive. Like a real expedition through Europe rather than a holiday squeezed between two flights.

And Europe itself was different then.

This was still the early 1990s. Tourism existed, obviously, but it had not yet become fully globalised, accelerated and permanently online. Venice was crowded, but not yet swallowed by tourism in the way it is today. Airports were not yet extensions of shopping centres. There was no cheap flights. People still travelled more slowly because the world itself moved more slowly.

I sometimes think that younger travellers today would find it difficult to understand how much anticipation existed around those journeys. Travelling across Europe still carried emotional weight for people from my generation. Countries felt more distant psychologically, not just geographically. Even the simple act of crossing borders still mattered.

And then there were the practical differences.

I travelled then with an analogue camera and a handful of film rolls. Every photograph cost something. Every frame mattered. You did not photograph food, hotel corridors or twenty versions of the same street because you physically could not afford to waste film. You chose carefully before pressing the shutter. Afterwards you returned home, developed the photographs and only then discovered whether they had worked at all.

Today I travel with several cameras, multiple memory cards, backup phones and cloud storage.

Back then travel felt slower, quieter and somehow less documented.

Italy itself appeared gradually during that first journey. It was not a single dramatic arrival. It was entered after days already spent on the road. Germany first. Then France. Monaco. Switzerland. Then finally Italy.

And what is strange is that my strongest memories from that first trip are rarely the officially important ones.

Of course we visited the classic places everybody associates with Italy. Venice. Florence. Milan. Siena. Lake Garda. Rome. The Vatican. These were almost obligatory stops for anyone wanting to see Europe.

But memory works differently from guidebooks.

I remember Venice most vividly, but not because of St Mark’s Basilica or the Grand Canal. I remember Venice because that was where I ate my first real Italian pizza.

At the time my idea of pizza came mostly from Pizza Hut and from Polish interpretations of Italian food. Then suddenly, a few minutes away from St Mark’s Square, I was served something entirely different. The crust was thin. There was almost nothing on top. Anchovies were spread across it in a way that felt shockingly minimal compared to what I knew. I remember being genuinely surprised that pizza could look and taste like that.

And strangely enough, decades later, that memory survives more clearly than entire museums.

When I look at photographs of Venice now, I mostly notice how crowded it has become. In the early 1990s it still felt different. Tourists were there, naturally, but the city had not yet become the almost continuous human flow it sometimes resembles today. There was more emptiness between people. More silence in side streets. More sense that Venice still belonged partly to itself.

We stayed in Lido di Jesolo near Venice, which in my memory became the perfect image of an Italian seaside resort from that period. Endless market stalls beside the beach. Bright plastic souvenirs. Heat radiating from pavements. Tourists walking slowly in the evening air after sunset. It was not refined or elegant. It was simply alive.

Lake Garda stayed with me because of something even smaller.

We stayed in a hotel beside the lake with a tiny swimming pool. Out of the entire group, only my friend and I actually swam in it. At some point I accidentally left my swimsuit behind there. I still occasionally joke that according to superstition I should one day return to retrieve it.

Florence survived in my memory mostly through colour. The cathedral façade with its green-tinted marble looked unlike anything I had seen before. I remember Ponte Vecchio too, though probably less through history than through atmosphere. At that age I still travelled mainly through impressions rather than understanding.

Milan remained associated almost entirely with the Duomo and with pistachio ice cream purchased somewhere near the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. I still remember how intensely green it was. Strangely, despite returning to Italy many times afterwards, I never went back to Milan.

And then there was Siena.

Siena genuinely surprised me because it felt truly medieval in a way many historical cities no longer do. Narrow streets. Stone everywhere. A city carrying its age openly. Yet at the same time I remember elegant display windows filled with beautiful Italian clothes. That contrast stayed with me. Italy often feels like a place where history and modern daily life were never separated from one another. Antiquity, fashion, religion, art and ordinary routines all exist together naturally.

Rome, however, barely stayed in my memory after that first journey.

We visited all the expected places. The Vatican. The Colosseum. The Roman Forum. Yet the city itself blurred together. Looking back now, I think Rome was simply too large and too layered to absorb properly during an organised coach tour moving constantly between destinations. At that point I still travelled according to itineraries rather than instinct.

Years later I returned to Italy with my mother because she had always wanted to see the country herself.

That journey feels emotionally different in my memory. Less about Europe and more about sharing places with somebody else.

Again we travelled through many classic Italian locations, but the memories that remained are strangely specific. Pompeii. Ancient grooves in the stone streets left by cart wheels. Preserved mosaics. Heat reflecting from old walls.

And then Vesuvius itself.

We climbed to the crater and stood looking down into it. What I remember most clearly is seeing smoke rising from inside. After walking through Pompeii earlier that day, it suddenly became impossible to think of Vesuvius as something historical or symbolic. It felt alive.

We also took a boat towards Capri, and I still remember the light on the water and the cliffs rising straight out of the sea. I do not remember much about the route itself anymore, but I remember that slow approach to the island surprisingly clearly. Some landscapes stay in your memory long after the details around them disappear.

I also remember the Vatican during that trip because John Paul II was still pope then. I still have a photograph I took of my mother waving towards him as the papal car passed by. That image feels now like part of another historical era entirely.

That entire journey became fixed permanently in time because of how it ended.

We returned to Poland on 11 September 2001.

That evening I sat at home watching CNN broadcasting the attacks on the World Trade Center. It is strange how memory works – one moment you are still mentally inside a holiday, still carrying the atmosphere of Italy, and the next moment the entire world has changed direction.

Then many years passed again.

When I returned to Rome later, everything about the journey was different. We flew there. We stayed near Cinecittà. We travelled by metro and public transport instead of coaches. It was a shorter trip, but paradoxically I experienced the city much more deeply.

For the first time I stopped feeling obliged to follow the programme exactly.

At one point another woman and I separated from the group entirely and ran instead towards the Palatine Hill. I photographed ruins there obsessively. Some of those photographs still appear on my blog today.

That was probably also the moment when my relationship with photography itself began changing.

Earlier photographs had mostly been records. Evidence that I had been somewhere. But by then photography had started becoming part of the way I actually experienced places.

The Galleria Borghese affected me enormously during that trip.

By then I already knew Bernini’s work. Like many people in that period, I had gone through the Dan Brown phase – Angels & Demons, later Inferno – but in my case it also pushed me towards genuinely engaging with Roman art differently. The Galleria Borghese stopped being simply another museum. I still remember walking through those rooms feeling that this was somewhere I absolutely needed to return to one day.

And then there was the carbonara.

Near Cinecittà our guide knew a chef personally. One evening he asked what kind of carbonara I wanted. I answered: Make it the way you would make it for yourself. That sentence stayed with me because it perfectly captured a certain kind of travel experience – the moment when you stop eating tourist versions of things and begin encountering something more personal and authentic.

Years later came the journey that perhaps changed my relationship with Italy most fundamentally.

This was already after the pandemic. The world had changed again. Travel had become digital, self-organised and immediate. Originally I was supposed to fly directly to Bari to meet my brother, but because I believed there were no longer direct tickets available, I decided instead to travel through Rome.

And honestly, that decision changed everything.

I realised I wanted the journey itself again.

I wanted to cross the Apennines by high-speed train. I wanted to watch Italy from the window rather than simply arrive somewhere. So I flew to Rome, stayed there first, then travelled south to Bari by train before returning again afterwards.

This was no longer the Italy of organised tours.

I rented apartments myself. I organised routes independently. I travelled alone at times. In Apulia I rented a car and drove through the region myself. Together with family, who I joined there, we hit the road. On late evenings I learned how stressful Italian parking can actually be. I learned how travelling changes when you are no longer moving through places as part of a group but constructing the experience yourself in real time.

We visited Castel del Monte, Alberobello and Matera, the extraordinary city carved directly into rock that many people recognise now from James Bond films. Although I was staying the nights in Bari, most of the time I was not there. If there, I was stuck in the morning traffic, having to cross the entire city sitting behind the wheel. Only on the last day, I took a long walk through this city.

This trip was also special because one of our travelling companions was a brave two-year old. She changed our rhythm of travelling completely. For the first time the journey was no longer organised entirely around adults, museums and sightseeing plans. Suddenly we had to think about naps, breaks, shade, food and all the small practical things that come with travelling with a very young child.

And yet she accompanied us everywhere surprisingly bravely. Today I know she remembers almost nothing from that trip, but at the time it felt strangely special watching somebody so small slowly experience travelling for the first time.

I also remember how much attention the tiny blonde girl attracted. In southern Italy especially, a fair-haired, blue-eyed two-year-old child looked unusual enough that people constantly smiled at her, spoke to her or openly watched her with curiosity.

And somewhere during that journey I realised that I no longer travelled to see Italy.

I simply travelled inside it.

Rome during that last trip felt entirely different from all my previous visits. For the first time I was completely on my own, with my own rhythm, my own plans and the freedom to decide what to do with each day. I even started shopping in local supermarkets to organise my own breakfasts. Unlike most Italians, I do not really eat sweet pastries in the morning, so I quickly realised I would have to provide for myself rather than adapt to the typical Italian breakfast of coffee and cornetti.

This time I consciously entered the Colosseum for the first time.

Which is ironic, because ancient ruins themselves had never been extraordinary to me. As a child I spent weekends playing among the ruins of Leptis Magna in Libya. Antiquity was never abstract in my life.

And yet entering the Colosseum still gave me chills.

Not because it was ancient. Not because it was impressive. But because of the symbolic weight of the place itself. Some locations exist not only physically but psychologically inside civilisation. The Colosseum is one of them.

Returning to the Galleria Borghese years later felt completely different from my first visit.

Weeks before the visit I booked a private guided tour with a young art historian working there. Instead of moving quickly through crowded rooms, I spent those hours almost one-on-one with somebody who genuinely knew the collection in depth. It changed the experience entirely.

I was no longer simply looking at sculptures and paintings I recognised from books or films, but listening to somebody explain details, gestures, symbolism and the way Bernini’s works were designed to be experienced in space. It felt slower, more focused and much more personal than my earlier visits to museums during organised tours.

During that trip I also went back to the Vatican Museums and, for the first time, deliberately paid for one of the expensive skip the line entries because I did not want to spend hours standing in queues. In reality it turned out to be rather disappointing. We moved through the museums quickly and surprisingly carelessly, and afterwards, recalling photos of my previous visit, which I keep on tis site, I realised how many things had simply been skipped.

Still, there was one clear advantage to it all. I was able to enter St Peter’s Basilica almost immediately afterwards. And that visit stayed with me much more strongly than the museums themselves. This time I spent more than two hours inside, slowly photographing sculptures, details and fragments of the interior instead of simply walking through the basilica as part of a group. The scale of St Peter’s overwhelms you when you enter it, but many of its details only really become visible later, while going through photographs at home.

At the same time the trip also became physically difficult because I caught covid.

Ironically it happened during the part of the journey that mattered most to me photographically. The worst days came during my return from Bari and my time in Rome. I remember medication, exhaustion and trying simply to remain upright long enough to continue exploring the city.

I stayed in a kind of condominium apartment arrangement rather than a normal hotel. At one point the woman cleaning the building checked on me and made me coffee. That small act of kindness remains just as vivid in my memory as many monuments.

And perhaps that says something important about travel too.

People often imagine memory as a collection of famous places. In reality memory is usually built from fragments. Pizza in Venice. Pistachio ice cream in Milan. Smoke above Vesuvius. A chef preparing carbonara properly. Searching for parking in Apulia at night. A woman making coffee for a sick traveller in Rome.

Today, when I think about Italy, I do not have one defining image or one sentence that summarises the country. Italy for me is not a single idea. It is decades layered on top of one another.

It is antiquity and photography. It is Bernini and motorway service stations. It is high-speed trains crossing the Apennines and analogue cameras with limited film. It is organised coach tours and independent travel. It is my mother waving towards John Paul II and me standing alone inside the Colosseum years later.

But perhaps more than anything else, Italy became a way of measuring how travelling itself has changed over the course of my life.

The remarkable thing is that Italy itself often feels strangely constant. The Colosseum still stands. Florence still looks like a city constructed from art. Siena still feels medieval. St Peter’s Basilica still overwhelms visitors.

What changed was everything around those places.

Technology changed. Photography changed. Tourism changed. Europe changed. Travelling became faster, easier and infinitely more accessible.

And somewhere between analogue film rolls, coach tours, Eurostar trains, digital cameras, high-speed railways and rented apartments, I changed too.