Drink Wine and Be Beautiful
Italian Tales of love, betrayal, longing, desire – and hope
Italy serves as the backdrop for stories of Italian women and expatriate women living in Italy.
A freak snowstorm in Rome changes the travel plans of two women, touching their lives in ways they could never have imagined. An ambitious Italian professional working in Brussels rails inwardly at her privileged boss, until fate presents her with a rare opportunity. A long desired trip to Bali, Indonesia serves as a needed chance for introspection. A cautious housewife in Rome thinks back to a fateful missed connection in Florence. A first-time mother feels debilitating guilt for not bonding with her newborn, until an elderly neighbor provides her with a new perspective.
The twenty-one stories in this collection follow women’s lives as they confront betrayal and love, alienation and community, despair and-ultimately-hope.
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EXCERPT:
Missed Connections
Florence
LAURA OFTEN THOUGHT ABOUT IT as she went about her housework.
It was never obsessive, as in I can’t believe the opportunities I squandered when I had the chance. But a little voice lodged itself in the back of her mind and taunted her, causing her to question her decisions, before she sought to lose herself in the immediate tasks that kept her fingers busy and her mind concentrated.
It was better when the house was full of noise and activity, the nagging doubts held at bay.
Laura looked up from sewing Francesca’s end-of-school-year play costume. The old backpack lay at her feet. A long life of travel, decades-worth of train trips and flights, had finally caught up with it. Split at the seams, it revealed a crumpled piece of paper that had been slumbering deep within.
Earlier that morning, Laura smoothed the paper gently on her lap. A sob caught in her throat. Thick black letters, scrawled in a confident hand, caused her heart to beat faster. A name. A contact. A wish.
A light breeze tousled her hair. She looked up. Swallows hurtled through the blue sky, unmarred by even one cloud. Just like a similar May day on a train, so many years ago.
LAURA PRESSED HER FACE to the train window. Brunelleschi’s dome dwarfed the skyline, its red tiles distinct against the bright blue May sky.
Pietro had promised to take her to Florence that week, her first visit.
With her semester abroad in Brussels wrapping up, she’d come to visit him before her last weeks in Belgium and her return trip to Michigan. Now she wished she’d secured a summer internship in Europe, rather than her camp counselor job in Ann Arbor, yet again.
For Laura always erred on the side of caution, a shadow forty-year-old trapped inside an attractive twenty-year-old’s body. Even the year abroad seemed out of character, too adventuresome for the cautious woman she strove to be.
Everyone sensed it eventually. Her classmates, her friends, past boyfriends. Laura was bright and pretty, but eventually others tired of her for what she lacked: that spark, that effervescence she noticed in girls she longed to count as friends, and in men from whom she instinctively withdrew.
That absence of a spark attracted her to Pietro. No one would call Pietro wild or spontaneous. No danger lurked within. Pietro was a shadow forty-year-old, too, with the added benefit of being Italian, and thereby, exotic to Laura.
The train pulled into the Santa Maria Novella station. She watched the people scurrying on the busy platform. “Firenze,” she read aloud from the sign, trying to roll the “r.”
“Not bad,” said a voice beside her. “You must be here for Italian courses.”
She detected an Irish accent. A tall figure hoisted his bulging backpack to the overhead rack. With his back turned, she observed broad shoulders, sandy blond hair, and sinewy arm muscles straining with the effort. When he turned, his bright blue eyes caught her momentarily off-guard. A hint of danger.
Laura offered a tight smile and returned to the book that had fallen open in her lap.
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Something tells me you’re headed to Prague. The border guards ask you if you’ve read it before they let you in.”
Laura met those eyes. She knew the type—the flirt, the dangerous one. “Yes, I’ll be going to Prague with some friends, but I didn’t know it was law. I’m sorry it’s such a cliché for you.” She narrowed her eyes. “Tell me, what does a worldly man such as you read while he’s on a train?”
He smiled sheepishly, producing a comic book.
“Dylan Dog, I see. Perhaps you shouldn’t be lecturing others.” She flipped silently through its pages. “At least you get points for originality. It’s in Italian. Or do you just look at the pictures?”
His smile was slightly crooked. It made him even more handsome.
“No points. Mum’s Italian, so I’m Irish-Italian. It’s not really hard to read in my madrelingua. What’re you doing in Italy?”
“Visiting my boyfriend in Rome.”
“Ah … an Italian boyfriend. I never recommend that.” He offered the crooked smile once again. “Unless he’s Irish-Italian, of course.”
Laura couldn’t help but smile, too.
“I’m Riccardo.”
“Laura. Nice to meet you.”
“So where did you meet your Italian?”
Clearly Laura would get no reading done, but truth be told, the words had been swirling on the page the past hour. It had been a long trip; she didn’t mind company. “In Brussels during my semester abroad. Pietro was there for an EU accounting project.”
“You live for excitement, don’t you? You go to Brussels for your semester abroad and you find an accountant. Living life on the wild side, aren’t we?”
Author Bio:
Kimberly grew up in the suburbs of Boston and in Saratoga Springs, New York, although she now calls the Harlem neighborhood of New York City home when she’s back in the US. She studied political science and history at Cornell University and earned her MBA, with a concentration in strategy and marketing, from Bocconi University in Milan.
Afflicted with a severe case of Wanderlust, she worked in journalism and government in the US, Czech Republic and Austria, before settling down in Rome, where she works in international development, and writes fiction any chance she gets.
She is a member of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association (WFWA) and The Historical Novel Society and has published several short stories and three novels: Three Coins, Dark Blue Waves and In The Shadow of The Apennines.
After years spent living in Italy with her Italian husband and sons, she’s fluent in speaking with her hands, and she loves setting her stories in her beautiful, adoptive country.
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