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Losing Myself in Florence
“The most dangerous thing a person of color can do is forget they’re a a person of color — especially in unfamiliar places”
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
In 2010, I was a sophomore studying abroad in Florence, drunk on all the city had to offer: a language people spoke more with their hands than their mouths, small but filling plates of pasta, gray-haired women unshuttering their windows to let in the morning sun, hills that seemed to grow overnight and shrink during the day, the kinetic juxtaposition of white-marbled 13th-century cathedrals and dark-skinned immigrants washing into Europe’s “boot” like the waves they nearly died on to get there.
A friend and I traversed the narrow cobblestone streets, wine in our hands and excitement in our hearts. The previous week, we’d met two French art students at Bebop, a club where my friend had weekly gigs. The two art students — one extremely shy, the other unabashedly not — had taken us to a funhouse of sorts, where the top floor was made of beds, with crayons and markers…
