I went to Italy in 1987 disdainful of boys and scared of sex.

My disdain for boys dated back to high school. I went to an all-girls’ prep school and had the requisite crush on the football star, but when an actual boy showed actual interest in me, I was horrified.

I was the Jewish girl who would never lead a cheer, play field hockey, or be nominated as the May Queen. I wrote passionate, indignant, occasionally thoughtful opinion pieces for the school newspaper, which attracted the attention of a nice-looking, preppy rich boy who favored madras shorts and Ralph Lauren polos with the collar turned up. He had just broken up with the girl who led cheers, played field hockey and would definitely be nominated for May Queen.

The preppy rich boy asked me to the prom, and during the weeks leading up to the big event called me regularly, praising my latest Op-Eds. He told me that I was a locked door and he was the key. I didn’t like being compared to a door, and I didn’t like the subtle (or not so subtle) sexual reference. I felt like he was just buttering me up with all that talk about how smart I was, and I just wanted him to keep his key far from my lock.

On prom night he took me to the Liberty Memorial, presumably to see if he could steal a kiss. But my contempt for him must have been so palpable that he abandoned the idea, and me, as soon as we got to the dance hall.

I loosened up in college, but seemed to gravitate to a string of unavailable, uninterested, and unrequited loves. It was as if deep down I held a contempt towards men and sex, and had a complete ineptitude when it came to the rituals of dating.

The situation wasn’t helped by my choice of major, semiotics, which seemed only to confirm my suspicions towards sex. We watched movies like Psycho, how Hitchcock’s camera devoured the ripe body of Janet Leigh, how her sexuality and promiscuousness would ultimately lead to a terrible, bloody death in the shower. We learned about the gaze, the other, the objectification of women. Sex seemed a very sinister, shady business.

My semiotics professor encouraged me to take a semester abroad in Rome. Maybe he thought Rome would be the antidote to my overly analytical mind.

Indeed, Rome brought out in me a lack of criticalness that verged on derangement. From the Pantheon to the piazzas, I loved everything. And everybody seemed to love me. The men, that is. The men at the bakery, the men behind the bars, the men picking up the garbage. I walked the streets in my baggy jeans and sneakers, provoking whistles and wanton looks from swarthy men who seemed completely oblivious to the rail-thin Italian beauties who strode the cobblestone streets effortlessly in their spiked heels. For some reason, they preferred my limp brown hair and pale fleshy body. Suddenly, I was exotic.

And suddenly, they were all exotic, too. No longer did I turn up my nose at their supposed baseness and brashness, or think I was smarter, better and above it all. I was intrigued by everything. It was like one of those beautiful, languorous foreign films where nothing happens, but watching it you’re mesmerized, and every mundane word seems pregnant with meaning.

There was Ferdinando, who looked like an old-time movie star with his shiny black hair and deep brown eyes, his reserved manner, and quiet smile. When I discovered that he was a 41-year-old mailman who still lived with his parents, I was unfazed. There was Romolo, a blond-haired, blue-eyed stud who, if he lived in the states, would not have given me a second glance. When I discovered he was an unemployed drug addict, I decided to try my luck elsewhere, but didn’t hold it against him. There was Marco, the assistant director. He had deep blue eyes and long black hair and wore a black turtleneck underneath a stone-colored trench coat. When I learned he was engaged, I pretended I had no idea what fidanzata meant.

And then there was Fabrizio—a mechanic and a socialist with a fascination for the Sandinista rebels of Nicaragua. He would come to the wine bar where I hung out, dressed in his royal-blue coveralls that never showed a bit of grease or grime. He would never drink more than a single glass of red wine and never seemed to speak to anyone while he was there. When he finally got up the nerve to approach me, he began by saying that all Americans are obsessed with money. It was an odd way to pick up a girl, telling her she was materialistic and money-grubbing, but I told him that as a semiotics major I read a lot of Marx, so we really weren’t so far apart in our views.

For the next few weeks, Fabrizio and I would meet at the wine bar, have a glass of wine, then go off to dinner, movies, drives, and lots of make-out sessions in his beat-up Jeep, the floor of which had eroded so much you could see through to the street. Fabrizio was a gentleman in every way, paying for my meals and carrying my shoes as we walked along the beach and even acknowledging that some Americans weren’t capitalist pigs. He was attentive but not subservient, sweet but never cloying, and sexy without being scary.

I had come to Rome determined to visit all the major basilicas, see all the Caravaggios, cross all the bridges that traversed the Tiber, and walk along all the city’s winding roads. So as nice as my nights were with Fabrizio, it was time to move on.

The other men had seemed to understand that I was a young American student in Rome for a few short months who just wanted to have fun without obligations. Fabrizio didn’t. At first I simply avoided him by not going to the wine bar for a while. When I finally returned one night I found him standing outside, drinking whiskey from a lowball glass.

I gave him a contrite smile as I walked past him. I ordered my wine and talked with my friends, trying to ignore him but aware that he was staring at my back. After a few minutes he approached my group, but before he could say anything I turned and walked out the door. A minute later, he walked outside, and before I could walk away he said, “Mi tratti come un ogetto!”

I looked at him quizzically, having no idea what he was saying. So he repeated it: “Mi tratti come un ogetto!”

Tratti. That means treat. Ogetto? I was drawing a blank. “Ogetto?” I asked him.

“Ogetto!” he shouted. When I looked at him still confused, he said it again, this time holding up his glass and pointing to it. “Ogetto!” Then he walked away.

I turned to my friend. “I treat him like a glass?”

“No,” my friend said. “You treat him like an object.”

So there it was, the final word of my beautiful, languorous foreign film that was so pregnant with meaning.

Thanks to Fabrizio, I learned that sex, by its very nature, is not sinister or shady. It’s people like me who make it so.

Photograph of man by David De Lossy/Photodisc/Getty Images.

Tags: American student, Italy, movies, Ogetto, Rome

Six months ago, I was living in New York City with my husband and two kids, toiling alongside my tribe of New York media working women. I had an amusing job that paid for various indulgences, and deflected the indignities of subway rides and wartime urban anxiety with regular acupuncture, pedicures, and moderately priced wine. Then I was offered a contract to write a book in Italy about the notorious trial of exchange student Amanda Knox, accused along with two young men of murdering her British roommate, in what Italian authorities have called a drug-fueled orgy.

Hard as I tried, I couldn’t convince my bosses at People magazine that I deserved a six-month leave to hang out in Italy, in the middle of the worst economic season in our lifetimes. Before I packed my office in May, one of my editors opined that it must have been a pretty easy decision to make, leaving Rockefeller Center for Italy and all, but in fact, I spent the spring months coiled in a knot of acid reflux and mortal dread, arguing with myself, my husband, and friends about the merits of shucking the golden handcuffs. In the end, choosing security felt too much like a concession to my irreversible march into middle age.

We packed the kids and the puppy and arrived in Umbria in July. The idea was to soak up Italian life and culture for the book's setting, interview the trial players, and give the kids a chance to learn Italian. Notions of roasted figs drizzled with gorgonzola and sunset Prosecco toasts also beckoned, confirmed the day before we got on the plane, when New York Times writer Helene Cooper penned a piece about her annual summer vacation in Umbria, replete with precisely those images. Clearly, we were the winners of the summer-in-Italy lottery. Our friends were green with envy.

We have been here almost three months. We’ve tramped through dozens of churches and more Roman and Etruscan ruins than many an archaeologist, daily going up and down flights of steps and steep cobbled hills in the rust- and ochre-colored town of Perugia, where we live. We have been to Rome, Venice, Florence, Bari, even a bump on the rocky heel of the Italian boot where the Ionian and Adriatic Seas collide. We've tried to roast figs, with varying success, in the alien Italian electric oven, but we’ve tended more towards pizza, as that's pretty much what the children want to eat.

We live in a little stone duplex with a gravelly garden, covered with vines, at Via Beato Egidio, alongside the ancient city walls. (I’m still trying to figure out who the beatified Egidio is.) A medieval tower and paleo-Christian church are the nearest play spaces. There are more charming houses than ours for rent in this college town, but we chose this place mainly because of its proximity to a little school down a long flight of steps. As any parent will know, it is crucial, when dragging children out of the house in the morning, that the steps lead down. Ease of delivery hasn’t made the experience any easier for Felix, 10, and Lulu, 6. Apparently you can’t just drop children into a new language and have them quickly “soak it up” as I had imagined. On the contrary, it feels like I am committing a form of child abuse. They mutinied after one week, and refused to go. Lulu, who can now adorably pronounce "bellissima" just as I had once imagined, writes in first grade scrawl, "I HATE ITLE.” Felix is slightly, but not much better off. The mothers of his classmates mobbed me for play dates after the parent meeting last week. At Enzo Valentino Scuola, the fifth grade class and parents are beside themselves with excitement at the prospect of the class trip to meet a class of pen pals in Grand Rapids, Mich., in April. It turns out they desperately want their kids to learn English before that voyage, and here, in their midst, is a boy who speaks not just English, but American. That is, to the Italian kids, supercool. Through the Hannah Montana, Hollywood lens, America remains as shining a beacon here as ever.

My friends in New York City think I am living the glam expat dream, the one that so many of us writers really do share: Let's pick up stakes and move to a Mediterranean paradise, right? We did, and it is indeed beautiful. But, there is a lot more to making this kind of decision than meets the touristical eye or the imaginative mind. The dollar has plummeted; we don’t have a car; Italian houses have washing machines but no dryers, so our clothes are starting to mold as winter sets in. We haven’t figured out the Italian pediatrician; swine flu looms in all the Italian newspaper headlines; we don’t have a tutor lined up yet; and Lulu isn’t learning to read. On the other hand there are new friends with pet donkeys at their villas, and Giotto, Pinturichio, and Etruscan arches everywhere we look.

Our challenge now is to decide—and fast—whether to really bite this fig, as it were, and stay here until June, so the kids truly learn some Italian, deepening the gulf between ourselves and New York life, or to use the plane tickets we have that will fly us back to NYC and familiar shores before Thanksgiving. On sunny mornings in the garden, after a cappuccino and a chat in my amateur Italian at the coffee bar near the scuola, I am inclined to try to stay. On dark, rainy mornings, when the kids complain about their sense of confusion, and I dare not look at the bank account, I long for home.

Tags: Amanda Knox, Bari, Enzo Valentino Scuola, Florence, Italy, Rome, Venice

Do you ever feel like running away from it all? Do you sometimes wish you could dump the laundry, the dishes, or the morning commute and head off to the Trevi Fountains? Instead of sitting hunched over at your desk, can you picture yourself barefoot on the back of a Vespa, hair mussed up, zooming round the piazza on your way to an ice cream? Does Italian food and wine taste better in Sienna than Seattle? What is it about the sensuality of Italian life that appeals to so many women as they wake up to yet another gray day’s routine?

I’m wondering aloud, because in the past week I have had two pieces sent in by American women who headed to a change of scene in Italy. One went as a single student, the other as a married mother of two. I’ll be posting both pieces today and the life described in both of them made me long to hop on the next plane to Rome.

What do you think? Do you shout Viva Italia! Or does another country’s culture make your heart beat faster? Let me know at emma@thecomebackbook.com

Photograph of gondola by Medioimages/Photodisc/Getty Images.

Tags: Italy, Rome, Sienna, Trevi Fountains, Vespa