by Lisa Brennan-Jobs, initially appeared in Vogue, February of 2008
COPYRIGHT (c)2008 THE CONDE NAST PUBLICATIONS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
At 24, Lisa Brennan-Jobs fell hard for a handsome Italian and his aristocratic world—until she realized what she would be giving up.
At 24, Lisa Brennan-Jobs fell hard for a handsome Italian and his aristocratic world—until she realized what she would be giving up.
Millions of presumptuous girls, intelligent or not intelligent, daily affront their destiny, and what is it open to their destiny to be, at the most, that we should make an ado about it?”
—HENRY JAMES, PREFACE TO PORTRAIT OF A LADY
We met on the wide sidewalk of the Via Cavour where it intersects the Piazza del Duomo. Marco* was a friend of a friend. I’d just arrived in Florence. As I reached out to shake his hand, a voice in my head, low and calm, said, You’re going to date him, but you’re not going to marry him. I’d never heard voices before, and I couldn’t imagine a reason for such an admonition on a weightless Italian afternoon. I was 24. He was good-looking in jeans and a blue collared shirt with a button undone, tan and a little gray at the temples. He was slim, and he spoke clear English warmed by an Italian lilt—perhaps I would date him, I thought—and he smiled, and his warm brown eyes sparkled, and we shook.
Marco took me to summer dances in crumbling villas, a Mozart concert in a candlelit church. I had landed inside Cinema Paradiso, but better—it was real.
