From Tuscany, with love, but without our kids. (With guilt, though. But just a little.)

Boston Globe

18-07-2025

Here's the airplane.
Here's us
on
the airplane.
We landed!
The kids are in the front of my mind all the way to Florence when they're forced to the back seat. I've discovered the cheapest rental car place in all of Italy:
Ace Rental
. Months earlier, we reserved a Fiat 500, a classic Italian car that fits neatly in your pants pocket.
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'You need extra insurance. And an international driver's license. And 459 more euros.'
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I looked at the man, you scab, you thief, I said with my eyes.
'OK, 400,' he said.
I looked at my wife, 34 weeks pregnant, fanning herself in the airless office, and gave the man my credit card.
Inside a church in Siena.
Bart Tocci
We drove to Siena, a beautiful city of just over 50,000 people, famous for Palio Di Siena, the biannual lawless horse race. Inside the Duomo di Siena, the city's massive cathedral, it's cool, quiet, the intricate dark stonework revealing details inside details.
'
We
built this,' I whisper to my wife, holding up an eyebrow, the corner of my lip, and my Italian stone mason's hands.
The boys would love this
, I thought. They would hate everything else; the flight, the six-hour time change, the no sleep, the long hike, the line to get in … but they would love this moment.
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We drove to Poppi for our friends' wedding.
'Everything is sepia colored here,' I remarked to my wife, driving through the Tuscan hills, the late afternoon sun playing off long grass.' Or maybe it's because I'm wearing sepia-tinted sunglasses!' I removed them, laughing at myself, looking for a reaction, her eyes on the road.
Siena, Italy.
Bart Tocci
Our comfortable logistics conversations had no place here. The kids didn't need to be
here
at this time,
there
at that time, we were not all out of milk. And without our schedule and to-do lists, what did we really need to talk about?
We reached a tacit agreement that we wouldn't bring up the boys every time we thought of them. But this got easier: Once we arrived at the venue, put our belongings in the room, and stepped into the gathering reunion, the kids again slid to the background.
Friday, we lounged by the pool. Taylor's belly buoyed by the cool water, my spirits buoyed by old friends, one couple moved to a shaded corner to Facetime their child.
Should we do that?
No, they're in daycare.
'Another Moretti?' Someone asked. Yes. This is vacationing in your waning 30s: most of us drinking spritzes like we're in our 20s, a few of us now sober, the rest of us pregnant.
Would you look at that view? The foliage? The cypress, the olive tree, the castle on the hill? Built a thousand years ago, would you appreciate it, dammit? And look around you, see all these friends that you've known for 20 years? You better enjoy this or so help me. The cliches don't lie.
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It goes by fast. Enjoy every moment.
The pressure to enjoy parenting, like the pressure to enjoy a sunset or an expensive meal or a wedding in Tuscany with old friends.
Blink and it's over.
The view in the Garfagnana region of Italy.
Bart Tocci
After three nights of wedding joy, an extrovert's dream, I drove my introvert wife to the mountains. We stopped in Florence, just to see everyone else in the entire world.
We walked.
'I'm tired,' I said, 'you must be tired. How are your feet?'
'They are swollen, thanks for asking.' Buy me leather. Feed me gelato.
I ate pasta with meat sauce, varieties of which I could simply not stop consuming. Taylor had a basil-mint pesto fusilli with crumbled toasted almonds, capers the size of olives, some kind of cheese. Baby loved it.
We drove northwest: the Apuane Alps. Goats, small vineyards, those little three-wheeled trucks that I could carry up my front steps like a stroller. Our agriturismo had a restaurant and breakfast and a pool where Taylor soaked her feet.
What are you most looking forward to about having a girl? We asked each other. And Taylor said I don't know why I'm crying, it doesn't make sense. Her body is doing things without her command again. How do you think parenting will change? What will life look like? Significant time with the two of us so rare it feels loaded. Should we be having a significant moment right now? How about
now?
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A day trip to Carrara, famous for its marble, the Italian stone from which Michaelangelo brought David. An outdoor museum in the mountains, with old giant cutting tools and marble livestock and more places for a toddler to critically injure themselves than one could count.
We traced the marble's story from the mountain, where whole blocks of the white stone were cut, slabs the size of Volkswagens loaded onto carts pulled by oxen, driven through treacherous mountain roads — roads that did not seem less treacherous these several hundred years later — all the way to Florence and Rome.
We stopped for lunch and 2½ hours later, we left. 'No cappuccino? No dolce?' Our server asked, a little miffed. 'No, grazie.' We had already stayed two hours longer than our kids would have allowed, and total peace. No spilling, no crying, no hitting, no asking about that man's buttcrack, clearly visible from the back of his seat.
This is a place where you take your time. Except on the road: Everyone is in such a hurry because they took so long to eat.
I drove the stick shift Fiat 500 as if I paid 400 extra euros for the car. Hard on the gas, hard on the brakes, hit the apex of the turn, my wife holding onto something, anything, not saying a word, not mad, just concentrating like me. 'It's a good thing I trust you,' she said.
Despite my deftness, I was passed multiple times in the most appalling ways, on the most dangerous roads with the most fruitless outcomes. Whipping around a corner, a tiny minivan on my tail, now at my window, a man with white hair and four passengers rips past me, over a hill.
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Naturally I thought about death. Who would take care of the boys? Would they remember us?
We made recordings on their Yoto player so they could hear our voices. Wild that my last words to these boys could be me reading, 'Goodnight Brew: a parody for beer people.' Maybe I should have picked a more serious book? I would simply have to return alive.
We stopped in Forte dei Marmi, a beach for rich folks, dipped our toes in the Mediterranean, the mountains behind us, you'd think they were snow-capped — it was Carrara marble.
'Are you glad we came?' It was our last dinner in Italy, the week we had looked forward to for a year was here and gone.
Guilt asks a simple question: Why do I feel guilty?
And my initial answer was, because I left my kids so I could have fun without them.
But now, I feel motivated, refreshed, excited to return to our normal, chaotic life.
Of course we were glad we came; but now we were glad to be going home.