When I tell my granddad that I’m going to Rome to stay in the gut-renovated Hotel D’Inghilterra for work, he says, “Give me a minute,” and goes into his bedroom. We are in the foyer of the carriage house he shared with my grandmother until her passing two years ago—the bedroom is just to the left of the front door. I stand there for a minute not thinking of anything much at all, expecting nothing and enjoying, as I often do, the black-and-white tile on the floor and the robin’s egg blue runner (my grandmother’s signature color) that crawls up the stairs. He returns holding a pair of slippers. Once white but now a dusty gray, the terrycloth set is not quite tattered but definitely peeling in places, and there are stains. Emblazoned on the top lining, the cursive text a faded gray, is the logo of Hotel D’Inghilterra.
He and my grandma stayed there once. When I push him for details, he asks to think about it because he can’t remember and then sends a “necessarily vague” email: “Late in the last century we planned a trip to Rome and discovered the D’Inghilterra, which had proximity to one of Rome’s most fashionable shopping streets, the iconic Spanish Steps and, important in those pre-cellphone days, an American Express office. We spent an idyllic week there and when we left I took with me the complementary bathroom slippers which I wore at home for many years and then saved to remind me of that special time and place.” In his memory, the hotel was utilitarian and serviceable, white and gray.
To say that my grandparents lived a blessed life would be to put it lightly. They were two people well-matched in ambition and values, who through a combination of hard work (he running the family construction business, she as a formidable educator) and good fortune were able not only to travel extensively but also make sure their grandchildren could do the same. Italy was a regular destination of theirs for the obvious cultural reasons, my grandmother having studied art history, and the first time I left the country was not with my parents but with them, age 10, to see Rome, Florence, and Venice. My grandfather describes my twin brother Jack and I as “copacetic travel companions” and generously makes no mention of my wetting myself in my sleep on the flight over. (My grandmother, anticipating such an accident, had packed a change of clothes for me in her carry-on.) I did my first travel writing on this trip as we were each assigned to record accounts of each day in black leather journals after dinner for us to show our parents upon return (who, in turn, lost them.) When I returned to Rome with my grandparents six years later, age 14, I found another first favorite in that I drank limoncello and was drunk.
And so I became even more excited for my own impending trip. I packed the slippers, with the vague idea of making some sort of TikTok with them, everything being copy. My trip would be different from those of my grandparents’ in that I would be there for work, the hotel would look nothing like it had, and I would be by myself. A lone traveler, something neither grandparent chose to be after they got engaged in Paris, on the Eiffel Tower in 1963, age 22.