ROME: January, 2003 (Part 1)

I stood in line with Jesus.

It's the truth. I arrived in Rome on the night of January 7 to find my luggage hadn't made the trip with me. So I ended up waiting in the "lost baggage" line, only to find the actor James Cavieziel standing behind me. Cavieziel, not so famous at the time, would find himself very famous a year later when Mel Gibson's bloody opus, "The Passion of the Christ," opened worldwide to great fanfare.

The "Jesus movie," as we liked to call it, was being shot at Cinecittà, the historic Italian film studio where William worked. His office sat directly above some dressing rooms, allowing him occasional glimpses of the stunning Monica Bellucci, who was cast as Mary Magdalene. The coincidence of having traveled to Rome, on Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas, only to find myself entrenched with Jesus at the airport while my boyfriend ogled Mary Magdalene was not lost on me.

Meanwhile, it was evening, William was working, I was exhausted and hungry yet beyond excited because I was in one of my favorite countries in the world, albeit without fresh clothes.

Seventeen years earlier, I had spent six weeks traveling in Italy and fell in love with the small towns, the food and the people: dark-haired and short like me. Using a translation book I threw together Italian phrases and rattled them off like a local, or so I thought. I was never corrected and no one looked askance as I negotiated hotel rooms and ordered meals in restaurants. I simply pretended I was Italian.

That trip had me fleeing a collapsed engagement, and this current trip had me gallivanting toward marriage. The juxtaposition should have made for entirely different moods when I found myself traveling alone in Italy but, oddly, they didn't. When I was wrestling with the disappointment of a breakup, Italy embraced me with her rolling hills, marble walls and ocean air. On this expedition, as I perched on a single bed in a convent or climbed high above a Tuscan town or wandered rain-soaked streets in Florence, she gave me hope for the future.