A Florentine Renaissance

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My best summertime memory this year was….

I feel like I wrote a lot this summer about my favorite memories, and I didn’t want to simply repeat myself in this Finish the Sentence Friday post.

Instead, I want to share memories of a long ago summer, a summer that I always think about more this time of year: the summer of 2001.

It was the summer I knew I was meant to be a teacher.

And it happened in Florence, Italy, the heart of the Italian Renaissance {literally, “rebirth”}, and a city that will always remind me of my own life transformations and changes and rebirths, both literal and metaphorical.

In that summer of 2001, I had just completed my third year of teaching. My first year of teaching, like most teachers’ first years, was tough. Late nights of grading and lesson planning. The shock of dealing with blatant disrespect and nastiness from students. Parents questioning my teaching, and not having the confidence yet in my teaching to assert and defend myself. Seeing my passion for history collide head-on with teenage apathy. Through my exhaustion and the never-ending workload of that first year, I primarily saw the negatives. I wondered if I had made the right choice in becoming a teacher.

In fact, years later, after enduring hours of unmedicated active labor with my first child, I would turn to my husband and say, “This isn’t as bad as my first year of teaching!”

I think that sums it up right there.

But things got better, as they generally do. I began teaching AP European History. I had a room full of students excited to learn and eager to work hard. I began planning a trip to take my students to Europe the following summer so they could see Versailles, and Vatican City, and the Uffizi Gallery and David and the Sistine Chapel…

I am still surprised today that so many parents trusted this young, untenured, but passionate 26-year-old to take their children across the Atlantic for two weeks in the summer of 2001.

But I am so glad they did.

Though we did have some hiccups along the way {if my lovely fellow chaperone is reading this, which I’m pretty sure she is, she knows what I am talking about!}, we had a fantastic trip.

The memory from that trip that is still so vivid for me is from an afternoon in Florence {the most beautiful city in the world.}

We gave the students free time for the afternoon, but informed them that at 4:30, we {my other chaperone and I} would be at the Uffizi, and they were welcome to join us to tour this museum featuring the works of Botticelli, da Vinci, Michelangelo, and other Renaissance masters.

These were sixteen-year-olds, who could have spent their free time shopping, or lounging in the Boboli Gardens, but every single one of them showed up at the Uffizi. I told them I would guide them through the museum, or they could go on their own.

These were sixteen-year-olds, who probably would prefer touring a museum with their friends, not with their teacher. But every single one of them stayed with me as we walked through the Uffizi and discussed Renaissance art.

So there I am, in the hot Italian summer of 2001, in Florence, reading out loud from my Rick Steves’ tour of the Uffizi, with fifteen students huddled around me. They’re listening closely, laughing at Steves’ jokes, commenting on the paintings, and relating the paintings to what they had learned in my class.

I’m in the most beautiful city in the world. I am teaching a subject I absolutely love. I am with amazing and intelligent and inspiring students. I can see what they have learned and how it has transformed them. I remember thinking, “This is what I am meant to do. I am home. I am meant to be a teacher.”

This is probably my favorite memory from my fifteen-plus years of teaching.

I am so lucky that at age twenty-six, I knew I had chosen not only my career, but my vocation {from the Latin voce = voice}. Teaching would be the way my light, my gifts, my breath, would speak to the world.

But there’s more to this memory, to this city, to this place that showed me my home.

A few days after our Uffizi visit, my then-boyfriend sent me an email informing me that he had secured tickets for us to the Degas exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts for the day I returned home.

I thought, doesn’t he realize the LAST thing I will want to do upon my return from Europe is tour another museum? Doesn’t he realize that in a few days I will tour the Orsay Museum in Paris, where you can’t walk three feet without running into a Degas?

Another memory intrudes… I remember our first date… at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

The next day I told my students, while riding on a gondola, now in Venice, “I think my boyfriend is going to propose to me when we get back home.”

My students were so excited, they all made plans to be at the museum the day after we returned home. Luckily, jet-lag and teenage inertia took over and they did not show up.

And indeed, the day after I returned home from Europe, from this trip across the Atlantic that had revealed to me my home, my vocation, my boyfriend proposed to me in the Impressionist wing at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

tuscanyThe following summer of 2002, I am in Florence again, this time on my honeymoon with my husband, my dear friend and partner. Another secure home. Another new adventure.

In the summer of 2003, my husband and I return to Florence, trailed now by 36 high school students.  Some are my students, some are his students, all joined by a passion for history and an eagerness to explore the world.

In the summer of 2005, I am once again in Florence {have I mentioned how much I love this city?}, this time with my husband, my parents, and my sister. The city that holds my memories of teaching, of my honeymoon, of my love of history and art, now brings a new meaning ~ it’s in the hotel in Florence that I learned I was pregnant for the first time.

The Foundling Hospital

The Foundling Hospital in Florence
{Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons}

Though that pregnancy would end in miscarriage {and, sadly, it is also the last time I was in Florence}, the month of pregnancy forever left its mark, as the hormonal elixir of progesterone and oxytocin had worked its magic, and created a mother.

By the following summer, I was decorating a nursery and laundering onesies and preparing for the arrival of my daughter. A rebirth, indeed.

I love that my journeys of teaching, of mothering, of wife-ing {why is there not a verb for spouse-ing?} are forever intertwined with my travels to this beautifully rich city. Like travel, these other journeys are stressful, they require lots of planning, they show us the beauty of the world, they introduce us to amazing people we have never met before, and they involve laughter, turbulence, sickness, and joy. We journey away, and we find our way home.

And that’s why my favorite summer memories will always take me back to Florence. And its beautiful associations with Renaissance and rebirth.

 *****

This post is part of the Finish the Sentence Friday linkup. You can read more summer memories posts here.

If I’m not responding to comments quickly, or reading all the other FTSF posts today, it is because this very Friday, maybe as you are reading this, I am in my classroom teaching my students about the Italian Renaissance. And taking them on a virtual tour of Florence. And of course, the Uffizi.

What was your favorite summertime memory? What places in the world do you feel connected to?

Finish the Sentence Friday
Sarah Rudell Beach
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