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Visiting Ulli
by Cheryl Levine

I boarded the train at the Santa Lucia station in Venice and headed north, towards the city of Trieste, to visit Ulli. We had met in an on-line forum on Italy and, in particular, the Italian language. She was learning English; I was studying Italian. We wrote long emails to each other in the languages we were hoping to acquire more fluently. She would correct my Italian, and I her English. Through these communications, we shared our love of art and architecture, good books, and tagliatelle with wild boar sauce.

When Ulli learned I was traveling to Venice, she urged me to take the two-hour train ride to visit her in Trieste. She was waiting for me at the train platform, smartly dressed in a slim skirt and blouse, handbag hanging from her folded arm. “We’ve lots to do in a short amount of time,” she declared as we left the train station. I told her what my daughter said before I left home: “Let me get this straight. You’re getting on a train alone and traveling to a city you don’t know to meet some stranger you met on the Internet. If I told you I was doing that, you would kill me.”

Ulli threw her head back and laughed. I felt like I had known her forever.

We had prosciutto, mozzarella, and melon for lunch at Trieste’s well known cafe, Buffet da Pepi. We walked the streets of the city, admiring the Classical architecture, so different from the Baroque and Rococo present in other parts of Italy. For our last stop, we hopped in her little Fiat and drove along the Adriatic Coast to visit the grounds of the stunning Castle Miramare, a famous landmark with sweeping views of the sea below it.

If not for Ulli, I would never have visited this beautiful castle in this beautiful city.

PHOTO: Miramare Castle, Trieste, Italy by Lev Levin, used by permission.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Miramare Castle is a 19th-century castle on the Gulf of Trieste between near Trieste, northeastern Italy. Built from 1856 to 1860 for Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian and his wife, Charlotte of Belgium, it was designed by Carl Junker. The style reflects the artistic interests of the archduke, who was acquainted with the eclectic architectural styles of Austria, Germany and England.  (Source: Wikipedia)

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I enjoy the challenge with travel writing in finding an angle to what the traveler is seeing, hearing, experiencing. In that way, one is not merely stating the facts but digging deeper into the true meaning of travel.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Cheryl Levine is a former newspaper columnist and freelance editor. She has had essays published in Dreamers Creative Writing Magazine, 24PearlStreet blog, and Silver Birch Press, and has read for Grub Street’s Tell All Event in Boston. She is currently working on a memoir dealing with a range of intersecting topics from her Italian-American heritage, to parental abandonment and its effects on identity, to scary medical diagnoses. She lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts.

PHOTO: The author during her travels.