Too early in life, the male species began to fail me. As an adolescent, I was lied to, cheated on, harassed and assaulted. As a young adult, more of the same. Nevertheless, I ended up in a healthy marriage with a kind, trustworthy man. Sometimes I think it’s because of what happened that summer more than 30 years ago at the Vatican.
I was standing in St. Peter’s Basilica, feigning interest in a statue of Charlemagne while waiting for my best friend, Erin, who never needed to feign interest. She loved old churches and read every plaque. Minutes earlier, she had rushed outside to find a map of the Basilica, and I’d stayed behind. My skirt fell just above my knees, and I worried the fashion police wouldn’t allow me back in.
“Are you American?” a voice asked. Standing behind me in a blue blazer was a man about my age, tall and slender, with curly dark hair, a beard and mustache, warm eyes and a wide smile.
Oh my, I thought.
I already have a boyfriend, I thought.
His name was Fabrizio; he was a university student working at the Basilica for the summer. We chatted, and when Erin returned, I introduced them. “Have you been to the dome yet?” he asked.
“We just arrived,” I said. “We’ll go up later.” In truth, we were debating whether to pay the entry fee and hoof it up 551 steps.
“Find me at 2:30,” Fabrizio said. “I’ll take you on another elevator, so you need not pay.”
“Nice work!” Erin said once he was out of earshot. We were on a strict budget, so any break was a windfall. “Did you make promises? Do you have to sleep with him?”
“No,” I said, “you do.”
Erin and I were college students backpacking through Europe. Since age 15, she had been my sidekick and steady landing. Whenever I fell for another charming guy who knocked me to my knees, Erin scooped me from the floor, refusing to let disillusionment eclipse my innate optimism. She helped me believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that a good man was “out there.”
For the next hour, we roamed the Basilica while she read to me about Charlemagne and The Door of Good and Evil. Meanwhile, I wondered about Fabrizio. Did he have an ulterior motive for inviting us to the roof? I had heard countless stories about disrespectful behavior directed at female travelers, and earlier that morning, I experienced it myself.
On the crowded bus ride to the Vatican, Erin and I had been jostled apart; I’d found an aisle seat while she stood. I tried to ignore the slight, elderly man who was pressed against me — until his hand found the front of my shirt and groped.
I yelped and batted him away. When we reached our stop, I reported the incident to Erin, who said he’d grabbed her rear with his other hand. And that wasn’t the end of it — our short walk from the bus turned up a host of men ogling and catcalling.
Still, having spent only minutes with Fabrizio, something told me he was a good human, a benevolent soul.
When we found him at 2:30, he introduced us to his friend Antonio, and together they sneaked us into the service elevator, which took us to the roof. From there, they said, we could easily walk to the dome. As we strolled the perimeter of the rooftop, the men practiced their English, identifying landmarks. We snapped a photo together, and they invited us out that night.
“We’ll discuss it,” I said, and we walked a few paces away.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“I say we go,” Erin said.
“Me too.”
This was how, at that age, we discussed.
Back in our hostel room, we primped and laughed, electrified with anticipation. It wasn’t the prospect of romance but the notion of a departure from our guidebook.
Just before leaving the room, though, we balked.
“What if we’re being stupid?” Erin asked.
“Should we pull a no-show?” I replied.
They hadn’t minded when we’d mentioned boyfriends back home, but what if they hit on us anyway? Or worse?
Erin devised a plan. “We’ll leave a note saying if we disappear, we’ve been kidnapped by the men in the last photo on the film in my camera. Their names are Fabrizio and Antonio. They work at the Vatican.”
At “Vatican,” we burst out laughing and checked our reflections one last time.
Our guts told us to trust them.
Soon we were sharing the cramped back seat of Antonio’s Fiat while Fabrizio played tour guide from the passenger seat.
“First, we visit recent bomb sites!” he said.
“Um, sure,” we said. “Sounds fun?”
We had reluctantly scratched the Uffizi Gallery in Florence from our itinerary after a car bomb exploded there two months before. But four other car bombs had torn through Italy that summer, including two in Rome. Now, Antonio braked as we passed the Basilica of St. John Lateran, where one had exploded days earlier. When a traffic cop waved us on, Fabrizio suggested the other bombed church. An officer moved us along there, too.
“OK,” Antonio said. “We go for dinner!”
On the way, Fabrizio explained that the mafia had orchestrated the bombings. “They try to destabilize the government.”
Definitely not in our guidebook.
Minutes later, the boys ushered us down a dark alley into a dimly lit restaurant, where the owner kissed them both on the cheeks and led us to a back table.
“In what state do you live?” Fabrizio asked, dipping bread into olive oil. We were used to the question, but most Europeans we had met were unfamiliar with Arizona.
Not Fabrizio. His eyes widened. “Arizona! No! What city?”
“Tucson,” we said.
“Too-sohn,” he repeated, turning to Antonio. They conferred in Italian. “No, we don’t know Too-sohn. Can you spell it?”
Erin complied.
“Ah, Took-son!” they shouted. “John Wayne! Clint Eastwood!”
Turned out they loved Westerns and knew more than we did about our town’s film history.
In the car after dinner, Fabrizio popped in a cassette tape by an Italian singer named Luca Carboni. The chorus of the first song was in English. “Sexy, sexy, sexy, sexy, sexy, sexy, sexy” were the words. It was catchy, and we sang along.
When they announced that we would go to “the view” next, Erin and I raised our eyebrows. If they planned to make a move, this would be the spot. Antonio drove uphill and parked at an overlook. Nighttime Rome glittered across the river. We admired the panorama, took photos and returned to the car.
Next was Aventine Hill. We were alone as we traipsed up a quiet hill in the dark, our guides remaining silent about the destination. It didn’t escape us that this was exactly the kind of situation we’d been warned to avoid, yet we walked on. When at last we arrived at an old imposing green door, Fabrizio and Antonio held back, smiled, and nodded. Erin tried the latch. It was locked.
“Look in the keyhole,” Antonio suggested.
She stooped over and gasped, then moved aside to give me a turn.
Inside the hole, illuminated and framed like a nesting doll, was the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. It was the size of a thimble, and the most magical thing I’d seen in all of Europe.
There were more stops, more viewpoints, more sexy-sexy songs. Fabrizio promised to send me Luca Carboni tapes in return for country music. Finally, they drove us back to our pensione, where we exchanged addresses and kisses on both cheeks. For all the sexy lyrics, the evening never turned romantic.
Women, especially those who travel, are constantly warned to be wary of men, to remain vigilant — solid advice I had learned the hard way. But on that luminous evening, something shifted for me, something big and important about the power of intuition. It was a shift that helped turn me into a world traveler and prepare me, 16 years later, to recognize a different handsome man as a good human, a benevolent soul.
For a few years, Fabrizio and I kept our promise of sending cassette tapes and letters across continents. Eventually we lost touch. Then, after decades, he found me on Facebook. We had both become authors, and we agreed to send each other our books. Neither of us kept the promise this time, but it didn’t matter; whatever I needed from Fabrizio, I got long ago.
He sent me home with a souvenir I carried deep in my gut, through all my relationships, including a happy marriage. Love materializes in myriad forms, proffering various lessons, like learning how and when to trust. Thirty years ago, that lesson, one of the most valuable of my life, was delivered by a stranger in Rome who didn’t make a pass.
The post How I Learned to Trust (Some) Men appeared first on New York Times.