TUSCANY: February, 2003 (Part 3)

The following morning I climbed a steep, narrow pathway up, up, up to the Basilica of Santa Margherita, which was situated at the top of the town. I explored the inside of the church, lit a candle and sat in silence. My prayers, my meditations and my lit candles were wishes for a life of peace, purpose and creativity

For me, peace meant not panicking about paying the rent. Purpose was a reason to exist. I'd puzzled, cried and moaned for years about being blessed with a gift for acting, yet as my career had sputtered to an end I didn't know what to replace it with. Should I keep writing screenplays so I could join the millions of other writers in Hollywood with unproduced scripts? Creativity had to be more than the dinner parties I served up every month...didn't it?

My thoughts drifted away in the warm air of the cavernous basilica. Sunlight spilled across the nave from stained-glass windows on high. I was the only visitor. A spicy aroma of incense permeated the wood pews and brought to mind the masses my family attended every Sunday in the Orthodox Church. My brothers and I had no choice in the matter and tried our best to stay alert through long services held in droning Ukrainian. As payback we embarrassed my mother by wolfing down the after-service cupcakes. Fair trade, as we saw it, and the only merit churchgoing held for us.

In adulthood I discovered comfort in the ritual of Sunday morning services. I experimented with church. For a long time I attended an Anglican service, then I went to a "Self-Realization" temple, where all major religions are honored. William, raised Roman Catholic, rebelled and had nothing to do with organized religion. No, we wouldn't be wed in a house of worship.

I respected his perspective on the great unknown but sometimes longed for companionship in the wonderment of forces bigger than those we can see and touch. I needed to believe in something larger, in a kind of fate or destiny in order to find peace and purpose. William believed in talent, discipline and just a little luck, while my mind could drift for hours in mystery.

Back outside Santa Margherita, I studied the far-reaching landscape way below. Green and fertile earth stretched to the horizon. Squares of cultivated farmland held tiny houses with itsy-bitsy white sheets hung to dry across gardens and yards. From a height of over sixteen hundred feet, I looked at foggy clouds hanging over pastures. Birds twittered and hawks dipped low. I looked up at the moving sky. The fierce wind of the night before, still in action, had clouds scurrying as if in a sped-up film effect.

Should God have cared to listen to me, a tip of his head was all it would have taken. In such a place, it was easy to imagine a monastic life of peace and study. Here on the tip-top of Cortona, Emily Dickinson and I would take our leave. I wanted to marry that man back in Rome. I saluted God and took off back down, down, down to back my bags and bid farewell to the sisters.

On the train ride back to Rome I thought about my first trip to Italy.

TUSCANY: February, 2003 (Part 2)

After coffee served by my new best friend, the darling and chubby sister of mercy, I was out the door and in to the town of Cortona. February makes for excellent travel in Italy. The streets were empty but for locals. The downside is shuttered restaurants, as family-owned businesses use this time for their travel as well.

Nevertheless, the chance to explore in relative privacy is well worth the limited dining choices. I could always find one or two available eateries in any small town — and hell, it's Italy, the food's tasty. A bowl of pasta, a chunk of bread and a glass of wine are enough after a long day of hiking in brisk winter coolness. I mean, my mother's idea of a pasta dinner was spaghetti soaked in Campbell's tomato soup.

After a day of exploring I found my small restaurant of the day. As I sipped a Chianti, I examined the rough-hewn walls and uneven floors and reflected on how Cortona represented a hushed, enchanting and solitary adventure. I touched my index finger to an amber candle holder with its single flickering flame and waited for my linguine con tuna, tomatoes and capers.

My history as an actor brings with it the hazard of adapting too easily to circumstances, as if I were playing a part. In Florence, I missed William. From a bridge I pictured our future married life and considered the dignity I would find at the end of a tunnel as I moved from girlfriend to fiancée and finally, wife.

Here in Cortona, living in a convent, I slid into a mirage of independence and imagined myself as an Emily Dickinson type. I could live in a place like this. Mornings would find me shopping for foodstuffs at the local market, chatting away in melodic Italian. Afternoons I'd work on a novel and evenings I'd enjoy a simple meal before retiring under a mountain of quilts. I'd to read myself to sleep lit by a full moon shining through a small window cut into a stone wall.

Was I a woman teetering on schizophrenia? Who would want to marry that?

I finished my dinner and walked home along cobblestones streets to my room and the nuns. I stopped outside a bar advertising "Nutella Night." Anyone ordering a drink would receive a tasty and free Nutella treat. Nice combo, I mused. Beers and Nutella. Nutella. Could be my middle name.

TUSCANY: February, 2003 (Part 1)

From my train window I saw the destination high upon a Tuscan hill: Cortona. A medieval, walled town sitting like a curlicue atop a Dairy Queen ice cream cone.

I left the train station and stepped on a bus that wound its way up the hillside and dropped me in a town square. Here in Cortona I would spend four days living in a convent priced at thirty-five dollars a night.

Pure fantasy: me and the monastic life. I've boarded at a convent across from the Sistine Chapel in Rome. I've spent days in silent retreat at monasteries in California. Let me tell you, the relief of day-to-day chit chat is...well...relieving. Monasteries and convents tend to park themselves on idyllic landscapes, secreted behind walls and, though not glamorous, they're usually spotless, tiptoe quiet and often serve decent homemade grub.

After hiking up one small alley and down another I found the Cortona house of nuns and checked in like Maria arriving on set for a round of "The Hills are Alive." The nuns themselves were right out of Central Casting. A short, round-faced sister pinched my cheeks, slipped her arm through mine and led me down a marble hallway, up three stairs and around a corner. We stopped in front of a dark wooden door.

She unlocked it with a skeleton key and pushed it open to reveal my room, which held two single beds dressed in fresh linens. All the while she chattered away in Italian. I couldn't understand the specifics but was able to detect her pride when she showed me a private bathroom in sparkling tile with a large tub.

I was ready to move in.

After she left I dropped my bag, opened the shuttered windows and looked below to a cobblestone street. My stay was silent, peaceful and perfect...until a windstorm struck at four in the morning and those charming shutters hammered at the stone walls.

Once the storm settled, however, I slipped back into a deep sleep until dawn broke with the delicate voices of nuns singing morning prayers. The gentle sounds wove their way through stone hallways, up the stairs and under my door. I lay still in my bed with blankets pulled to my chin, watching sunlight creep through the shutter slats. It was a most delicious awakening.

FLORENCE: February, 2003 (Part 3)

The rest my time in Florence I spent gazing at Jesus and Madonnas in the Uffizi, lunching on a picnic in the Boboli Gardens, wandering around the Pitti Palace for more Renaissance art and searching up one street and down another for the Mercato Centrale.

I have a fascination for city markets, and the view didn't get much better than a two-story indoor market of stalls stacked with vibrantly colored vegetables and fruits. The reds, purples, oranges and greens looked freshly dipped from the palate of a painter.

I inhaled air pungent with the aroma of cheeses. Smoked meats dangled from the ceiling. Fresh-caught fish tinted in pale grays and pinks lay one after another, as if napping. Oh, I regretted that William and I were living in a hotel room. Grand as it was, it did not have a stove...a stove...I'd give up those white linens for a stove.

My lunch space at the market was shared at a rustic wood table with local workmen in from the street for glasses of golden beer and their sandwiches of choice, giant hot pork panini. The meat, crispy on the outside, pink on the inside and succulent in juicy drippings.

I took a last long walk around the city, which shimmered in the autumn light. It was comforting that as the world spins into advanced technology some things stay put...David, the Duomo, the Ponte Vecchio, Tuscan light, and pork sandwiches.

On my last night in Florence, rain poured down in sheets, creating pond-sized puddles. I sloshed in and out of a restaurant for dinner, and on my way back to the pension decided to celebrate and stepped into a dimly-lit taverna. I found an empty stool at the bar, ordered up a cappuccino laced with whiskey and looked around at the crowd of Firenzian hipsters.

Young couples laughed and flirted, moved close to light cigarettes and sipped from martini glasses while sharing casual winks. I wanted to join in. I wanted to converse, to have beautiful Italian sentences and witticisms drip off my tongue. To laugh or chat passionately about world politics and art and food and love. My satisfaction at traveling alone melted away as quickly as the foam on my coffee. My singular melancholy was as romantic as that of a spinster. Kate Hepburn at the beginning of "Summertime."

I finished my drink, slipped off the barstool and stepped back out the door as anonymously as I had arrived.

FLORENCE: January, 2003 (Part 2)

In Florence I wandered across the medieval Ponte Vecchio, which bridges the Arno River. Tiny art shops and clothing stores were crammed one after another on the classic Florence structure. In the setting sun, the view of lamp-lit houses and apartments alongside the riverfront was one of warmth. I smelled garlic and tomato emanating from home kitchens.

As I leaned on the ancient stone of the bridge and looked down into the calm water colored with ripples of light, I felt a sentimental pull to family. Whenever I saw a look exchanged between lovers, I missed William. This heart tug was a curiosity to me, a gentle reminder of companionship, partnership and friendship.

I wasn't filled with loneliness. To visit and to observe different parts of the world was all right by me. The sensation was one of floating in singularity, like a ghost. I liked missing William because I knew I could get to him in a train trip. If there were no one waiting for me perhaps I would have experienced profound aloneness.

I started to notice an interior split on this trip. My singular self, rubbing against the part of me that wanted to marry William. Marry William, I whispered over and over while studying the water. This was a different marry than the partnerships of my past. I used to see couples, old and young, bent to each other in serious talk or laughter in what seemed a married conspiracy, and used to believe they were acting. Putting on a show and faking it in public. Even with William's crankiness and my neediness I was beginning to glimpse a new reality. I was buying those couples and ending my cynicism. I was looking into the possible with fresh eyes.

I shivered in the Florence evening and moved on to find warmth in red wine and a dinner of tender chicken roasted in lemon juice. Ah yes, alongside a bowl of white cannellini beans coated in olive oil and topped with crisp pancetta. If there are people to look at, food to feast on, books to disappear into, and marble — for God's sake — marble and stone walkways, and if there's a man somewhere who's missing me, a fellow I have the privilege to pine over...what could possibly be wrong? Certainly nothing in Florence was amiss on this January evening.

The next morning I set out to find another friend, a fellow named David.

The David is only the David up close. In Italian cities and especially in Florence, there are replicas of this famed Michelangelo statue on every street corner or teetering in front of trattorias. He's on millions of postcards and in thousands of books, but I'm telling you: it ain't the David until you stand in front of the real gentleman.

This trip would be my second date with the man and he was in the middle of a major cleaning, surrounded by a partial wall and scaffolding. David stands thirteen feet high. He was sculpted between 1501 and 1504 out of a single piece of white marble. For all his brawn, David is nevertheless vulnerable. Poor David, since I last saw him, had been hurt. In 1991, a deranged maniac claimed he heard voices telling him to take a hammer and smash one of David's toes.

In the Galleria dell'Accademia, David's home, a long hallway leads to the statue. Lining these walls are other unfinished sculptures by Michelangelo. On my first visit in 1986, I dutifully examined these works while wondering where the main site was located. As my curiosity peaked, I turned a corner and sucked in a gulp of air.

Frozen in place, I tried to calm my heart and carefully, quietly...as though not to disturb anything...stepped forward. I stood awestruck for close to an hour as other tourists wandered around me. He's so real and yet carved in perfect stone. That is the genius. I'm not sure I even knew what genius was until David and I met. Every sinew in his arms, every muscle appears to breathe and have blood moving through it.

Starting in 2002, experts labored through the nighttime hours to give David his first bath since 1873. The statue had been covered in dirt and grime, much of it carried in on the clothing of his audience. It took a full two years to finish the restoration but many determined it was worth it. David now shone brighter and lighter and had a "healthy glow."

That was all well and good, but for me David glowed whether he was spotless or tarnished. I considered myself hugely fortunate to have had two visits with the man, and I was star-struck as my feet skimmed across the museum's floors to the exit. I landed on the cobblestone street still slightly dazzled.

FLORENCE: January, 2003 (Part 1)

The first time I traveled through Italy and stayed in pensioni, I savored waking to rich, dark coffee with foamy hot milk and a crusty chunk of bread served with butter and jam. Most pensioni included breakfast with their room rentals.

These years later, I was disappointed to find coffee machines in the dining rooms of the places I was staying at. These impersonal dispensers dribbled out caffeinated drink into plastic cups. On the side, guests could help themselves to a cellophane-wrapped pastry of some sort. An inedible and cheerless start to the day. I wanted Italy to stay exactly the same as I remembered but she wasn't cooperating.

I checked into a "Let's Go"-recommended pensione on my first cold but sunny morning in Firenze. The book mentioned a "delicious breakfast" but alas, it was also machine packaged. The room was tiny and musty and altogether dreary. A single bed with a thin mattress waited for me. I arranged another pensione for the second night and hit the street to get out of the place.

The guidebook did come through that evening, sending me into a lovely surprise for dinner. A small, working-class neighborhood restaurant filled with men at the end of their workday. White-tiled walls, small tables and a black-and-white floor. Black-and-white photographs of the city hung above the diners.

For the equivalent of a mere ten dollars I was served a meal of vegetable soup, rabbit cooked with spinach, and a full bread basket. Wine and water were included. Men gathered around tables in groups of four or five. They paid little attention to me, which was a good thing, but I couldn't help noticing the Italian custom of men going out and women staying in.

In the evenings,young couples met up in bars, but Sundays were for families. Entire families strolled the streets. The father held a ribbon-wrapped gold box from the panetteria, the wife alongside kept an eye on the youngsters and everyone exchanged greetings with neighbors. Only on Sundays would whole families gather in restaurants. I've been told tradition keeps Italian women running the home and Italian men running the street. As a woman on her own, I dined most evenings surrounded by men and wondered if this tradition would ever advance.

A tradition I hope doesn't change is that of the siesta. In Italy citizens disappear after enjoying a large lunch with wine. Shops close down, restaurants shutter, and folks nap. I like this. After a morning of sightseeing I spent my afternoons reading and snoozing. Eateries didn't re-open for dinner until seven-thirty, which left waning hours for museums, galleries or window shopping. Apparently, Spain is in a fierce wrestle to save its siesta tradition as Western hours descend on the workplaces of Madrid and Barcelona. This may well be the case in Rome, but smaller cities and towns still honor the sacred siesta.

ROME: January, 2003 (Part 3)

At the Excelsior I learned to stomach the curious glances from hotel staff as I paraded through the opulent reception area with my plastic bags of groceries or laundry (take that, overpriced hotel cleaning service).

Our January in Rome included nights pounding with thunder, lightning and rain followed by mornings of clear, crisp air in sunlight and a climate in the mid-fifties. I have never spent summer days in Italy and have no desire to do so. Winter is best for sightseeing without crowds or heat. I walked, bused or took the Metro every day.

Outside St. Peter's Basilica a life-sized Nativity scene stayed erected, as if the city were unready to call a halt to the holidays. I wandered through the cathedral and the Sistine Chapel, where Michelangelo's ceiling fresco had been completely restored to the vibrant colors of the artist's original work. The Vatican museum and its massive golden treasures made me think about a Papal rummage sale as a source of funds for all the sexual abuse lawsuits against the Catholic Church we keep reading about.

I jaunted over Roman bridges and into Castel Sant'Angelo, the mausoleum of the Emperor Hadrian and his family, now a museum with a fantastic view of the top of St. Peter's, the Tiber River and their surrounding environs. The sky, a brilliant blue under the warm sun, created the effect of having walked directly into a scene from a postcard.

I spent an afternoon in Campo di Fiori. Translation: field of flowers — and it is. A flower and vegetable market near Piazza Navona, the square is filled with restaurants, a fountain and outdoor cafes. I lunched on soup and salad while I people-watched. I have found that in design and fashion, Europe is a good two or three years ahead of the United States. I saw women in stiletto-heeled boots with sharp pointy toes and winter coats trimmed with fluffy fur-like boas. Styles we wouldn't see for a long time back home.

My days in Rome started with an alarm at eight in the morning. I walked William to the subway, then ambled about the city, sometimes up to seven miles in a day. Occasionally I had a workout in the hotel gym followed by a sauna. Very nice and very luxurious. I worked on my writing projects, took a nap, and found food for William's late dinners.

After two weeks of this schedule, I was anxious to get away to smaller Italian towns, and started planning my exit. William's work had taken on new pressures since Morocco. His workload, and stress levels, had doubled, and no amount of tasty pasta deliveries on my part could alleviate the strain.

I became an unwitting additional source of stress during his off-hours, peppering him with questions he was too exhausted to answer. I asked for computer help and he indulged my needs even though he was burnt as overdone toast. I cajoled, he missed the humor and ended up snapping at me. As delighted as I was to be in Rome with him, I wasn't really with him, and it was difficult to accept I couldn't make things better.

It is the nature of filmmaking to operate at a heightened state of tension. Escalated pressure is encouraged from the top, the idea being that the work is better, faster and more profitable as bodies accumulate under the strain. It is both a sick and exciting art form and it was taking a daily toll on us.

William would call me upon leaving the studio and I knew his trip home would take an hour — unless he got caught up in some last-minute details, when more unacknowledged hours would tick by. When this happened I sputtered and spewed my way around the hotel room until William arrived home, took one look and realized he probably should have called about the delay. Then I would take a very adult approach and burst into tears.

It was time to take a break. William didn't have time to worry about me and I couldn't do any good worrying about him,