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Time Travel in Italy - Italy
by elizabeth monroy | Date >
2006-09-08 | Country : Italy | City : florence
| Area : tuscany |
| I was nineteen when I arrived in Rome for my first of many abroad programs to Italy. It was 1979 and I will always remember the sense of awe I felt when I entered Saint Peter’s Square. It was amazing! With every day my hunger to know the Italian language, culture and its warm and friendly people grew. I finagled another abroad program to Italy the following year. Yes, I was addicted. The food, the lifestyle, the people and being blonde, the men, motivated my thirst for knowledge. I wanted to know everything. Suddenly the piazza’s, churches, and ruins became my class room. I remember one night in front of the Roman Forum. All at once it came to life. I felt I was back in the time of the Caesars. Was it a vision, a hallucination, a past life memory, or was I momentarily transported into back in time? I felt inspired and motivated to learn more.
Upon graduation from my university in Texas, I quickly moved to return to Italy to obtain my laurea (Italian Degree) in Florence, Italy. I studied Art, Literature and Cinema. I had been a fair undergraduate student excelling in theatre, literature and the things that interested me, but now everything interested me and with great ease I became..well scholarly. It was over twenty years ago I had the idea to create an abroad study program for students, but one that was quite different than the current educational models. I wanted to somehow incorporate the richness of the past and bring that energy into the future.
As fate would have it on a trip home I met my future husband, a physician and my life took an entirely different, yet beautiful direction. We met our spiritual teachers and I spent twenty years travelling the planet with him, offering a higher form of healing, based on the principals in a book we wrote together called The Pathway Home. It was about physical, emotional, mental and spiritual evolvement.
Last year my husband finished his work on this planet and I found myself a widow at forty-five. So I decided to return to the city of rebirth and start my life anew. The educational project that had been put on the back burner for so long began to reappear. But I was different. I had a deep knowledge of spiritual principals and a degree in mental health counselling. I had become an accomplished author and artist. So naturally my concept of an educational program had to evolve.
After my first few days in Florence I was strolling across the Piazza del Duomo the central cathedral of Florence, when I heard Elisabetta, a name I hadn’t heard in years. I turned around and saw one of my oldest friends, Alfredo. We had planned to start the school together twenty years ago. I told him I had the concept of a new renaissance rolling around in my head for months and he told me that he had been approached by a friend several years ago to start a movement of sorts which they had called the new renaissance.
Well, that feed my imagination and I arose to the challenge. Florentines have often been accused of being very closed people and remaining stuck in the past. Too often you hear artists in Florence complaining about the lack of support or even interest in any thing new. But one thing was for certain the creative energy of rebirth was still very much alive. I could feel it in the monuments and statutes as I strolled through Palazzo Vecchio which is in what I consider the heart of Florence. When I stare up at the Medici palace or absorb the beauty of the priceless works of art exhibited in the galleria. At night there is a supernatural presence as the shadows of these sculptures flicker upon the gallery walls. Symphonies, brass bands and poets entertain passers by and the inspiration is in the air.
So the question became how to extract the highest essence of the past and translate it into a deeply creative and educational experience. I have a good friend a Kiwi, from New Zealand. He is half Irish, and half Maori, an aboriginal race. We always joke that time is not linear but elastic and damn if I don’t feel it at times. Especially in the stillness of the night as you make your way home through the curvy medieval streets of Florence it almost seems as if you have passed into a parallel Universe. You hear the clip clop of the horses’ hooves pounding their way over the cobblestones and think is that a tourist taking a ride or…could it be Lorenzo passing by. Truly the old and the new converge.
I think to fully experience the true Florence and your own personal rebirth you have to be willing to let your imagination run wild. And what better place than Florence? It excites the creativity that has remained dormant in all of us living in sterile environments with modern boundaries encasing our conscious thoughts. One of my favourite movies is Somewhere in Time. Christopher Reeds plays a writer who travels back in time to find his soul mate. But his professor warns him that the environment must be aged, to excite the imagination, in fact it is only when a modern object, a penny, appears from his jacket pocket that he is catapulted back into his own time and space continuum and the reality of his barren world.
So perhaps for the mature traveller, the student of life I would suggest a different type of travel, not just linear travel but in those rare moments when you find yourself in the proper atmosphere allow the creative capacity of your mind to wander and take a time travel trip into the past, extrapolate the highest essence and translate it into something artistic to enhance your own journey of the soul and experience the profound power of rebirth Florence still so graciously gifts to its’ aware visitors.
Elizabeth Monroy
www.newrenaissanceflorence.com
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