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The first and only time I went to Italy I was sixteen, and on a six-week trip of Europe with a large group of girls who had fundraised for the trip through Girl Guides (Scouts). Using the blitzkrieg method of Old World sightseeing favored by many generations of North American young people, we “did” Italy by spending a day-and-a-half in Venice. It was high summer and with the callousness of youth, I wrote Venice off with a few lines in my travel diary: “It’s like a museum covered in pigeon poop. The canals smell of sewage, and there is a haze hanging over the water. No oilies as of yet.” This last bit was because our uniforms apparently made us look like an enormous gaggle of young stewardesses and so we attracted camps of hopeful, slick fellows most places we went. Despite their absence in Venice, I came away with an impression of the place that might have turned me into the sort of traveler who discouraged Kevin. The recent garbage strike in my hometown of Toronto has made me realize you can catch a city on a bad day (or month) — but even in 1993, years before my perfume obsession began, I was hypersensitive to smells, good and bad. As far as I was concerned, Italy stunk.

It was puzzling, though, that my parents kept returning there. “Table wines are cheaper than Coke,” my father explained, when I asked why they kept going back. (Perhaps this brief, thrift-related response helps clarify that my parents are not of Italian descent and therefore returning to visit the mother country; Scotland is the land of our fathers.) Since my parents are not enthusiastic photographers, I tried to determine the attraction of this region listening to stories of their travels…

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