Ancient History Between Us

Chapter One Cammie

Chapter One

Cammie

Despite my eight-month streak of daily Italian lessons on LingoLegend, I’m nowhere near fluent enough to trauma-dump on this taxi driver.

Luigi doesn’t know how lucky he is. When he asked what brought me to Italy, a question I’m sure he’s posed to many tourists on many airport pickups before, I doubt he knew the can of worms he was opening.

In my effort to meet him halfway, I use my broken version of his native tongue to come up with “la scuola con la mia mamma.”

It’s a major oversimplification, though I’m not not here for school with my mom. In a way. Ish. But the answer satisfies him, or more likely, he senses that we’ve reached our multilingual conversation limits. He gives me a friendly smile and a nod of understanding before turning up the radio.

As we wind through the city of Naples in stops and starts, I imagine an alternate universe, one in which I’ve long since passed whichever LingoLegend level covers vocabulary like “daddy issues” and “existential crisis.” One where I’m able to answer more truthfully and comprehensively, after taking a long drag off an imaginary cigar.

Luigi, mio amico…how much time do you have?

We pick up speed, and outside my window, the scenery transforms from busy city streets to an open highway.

Urban architecture gives way to hillsides scattered with terra-cotta rooftops.

Air scented with car exhaust and sunbaked pavement is replaced with a salty sea breeze that whips my hair around my face in a frizzy red cloud.

As I try to tame it into a braid, my gaze settles on the deep blue waters of the Bay of Naples glistening under the midmorning sun, and in the distance, Mount Vesuvius herself keeping watch over it all.

It all started in AD 79, my Italiana alter ego continues.

The thought has a smile pulling at the corner of my lips, while the view sends goose bumps up my arms and legs despite the summer heat.

It would be a little dramatic to begin the story of what brought me here with the two-thousand-year-old eruption of the volcano I can barely believe I’m finally setting eyes on.

But it wouldn’t be inaccurate. That infamous event was the explosive flap of butterfly wings that led, all this time later, to me, Cammie Lovett, crashing onto these Mediterranean shores with an overstuffed backpack and even greater abundance of enthusiasm.

A fluttery feeling starts in my stomach, anticipation with a little nervousness mixed in, when Luigi’s cab exits the highway and we begin winding through the narrow streets of a small town.

It’s a maze of one alley after the next, lined with storefronts and cafes and other businesses.

The taller buildings must have apartments on their upper floors, as clotheslines full of drying laundry crisscross between balconies overhead.

I wonder if these are the same views that greeted my mom when she first arrived in this area a little over twenty years ago.

If she felt the same fluttery feeling, too.

I’m not the first young American woman with my red hair, sense of adventure, and last name to be drawn here by Vesuvius.

Dr. Alexandra Lovett came to Italy as part of her PhD studies in archaeology and to get practical experience in her field.

On what was anticipated to be a perfectly boring cultural resource management job in the countryside between Naples and Pompeii, Mom claimed her spot in the history books by stumbling upon a particularly impressive remnant of first-century Vesuvian destruction now known as Villa di Bronzo.

Archaeologists have been excavating the site ever since, unearthing the structure and all the ancient secrets it holds.

This spring was the twentieth anniversary of Villa di Bronzo’s discovery, which makes this summer the twentieth with an active dig site and field school there.

It’s Mom’s first time back at the place that made her career, after spending most of my life working on other digs around the world.

She’s taking part in a documentary being made about the villa, as well as in a special celebration of the anniversary and some guest lecturing at the field school.

And she’s brought me along for the ride.

A ride that, currently, is slowing to a crawl.

I was almost too wrapped up in watching the scenery and people to notice, but we must be getting close, even if this doesn’t look like the open, rural landscape I expected.

Even less expected is Luigi’s sudden transformation into a stunt driver, as he steers us up and over a curb with a series of violent jumps and bumps.

A “whoa” barely has time to pass my lips before he brakes hard and I lurch forward against my seat belt.

“Siamo qui!” he announces with a cheery finality as he slams the cab into park, and I look around us in confusion.

“Qui” is, from what I can tell, the tiled sidewalk in front of a shop selling…

vapes and cheese? Fuma e Formaggio proclaims the sign above the doors in lit-up LED letters that flash in a rapid, migraine-inducing rotation of orange and green.

The front window shows a display of colorful vape pens and cartridges interspersed with wedges of cheese in all different varieties, providing me with more questions than answers.

The most urgent of which is, Why is Luigi taking my suitcase out of the trunk?

I scramble to unbuckle and meet him at the back of the cab.

“Uh, hi—scusi, signor. I think we…non siamo qui?” I gesture to the storefront before making an X with my hands. “I’m supposed to go to Villa di Bronzo? Or it might show up as the Villa Russo Research Residency, which I know is kind of confusing but—okay, just, uh, hang on. Un momento, per favore!”

I lean in to the back seat and dig through my backpack to extract my phone.

I don’t have any cell signal, but I took screenshots of the info packet Mom emailed me about the place we’re staying, just in case, and I vaguely remember it saying something about navigation systems not always recognizing the address.

“Aha,” I say triumphantly when I locate the page, skimming it to find that my memory was accurate, and underneath the warning is a bulleted list of written directions from the Naples airport to the villa. “Backup directions! Uh…directioni?”

That sounds like a fake word, even to me. Luigi’s blank expression confirms it.

“Non é qui,” I try again, pointing to the shop, then pointing to the screenshot with words he won’t be able to read, but at least it includes a picture of our destination, in which there are neither vapes nor cheese. “é qui. Sí?”

“Not…here,” the older man says back to me, each word punctuated like its own sentence. He follows my pointing till his gaze is on my screen. “Is…here?”

“Sí,” I say with an emphatic nod. “ ‘Villa Russo Research Residency.’ La scuola con la mia mamma, remember? Non é”—I look at the lit-up sign and immediately regret it, shielding my eyes from the unpleasant strobe-iness—“ ‘Fuma e Formaggio.’ ”

Luigi goes back to the driver’s side and retrieves his phone to show me his screen, which still shows his navigation app, confidently declaring that we’ve arrived at the address I gave him.

“So weird, I know.” I nod and put my hands out at my sides with palms up, imitating his what-the-hell expression. “But we can try these directions?”

Luigi squints as he leans in to consider my screen again, giving a puzzled hum that does not sound promising. I’m going to be stranded here—left to survive on toxic chemical vapors and cheese that I’m not convinced is any less toxic, given its surroundings.

But I’m pleasantly surprised when he gives me an encouraging smile. “Va bene,” he says, and I think that’s a good thing but don’t want to get ahead of myself until he follows it with a “We try, sí?”

“Sí!” I cry, putting my fists in the air in a victory that’s not at all sealed yet. “Va bene!”

“Un momento.”

My happy fists slowly fall as my maybe-hero steps into Fuma e Formaggio. But I keep my hopes high, telling myself un momento is nothing. I’m only allowed to start panicking if he hasn’t come back in, like, five momentos.

My trust in Luigi as a cabdriver grows when he returns after no more than two minutes with something vape-related I can’t identify and a shrink-wrapped plate of at least a dozen varieties of cheese cubes for sampling.

But he becomes a friend for life when he holds the latter in the air toward me and announces joyfully, “Snack!”

The journey is, at least metaphorically, all downhill from there.

Luigi recognizes one of the street names and manages to get us there as a starting point.

But these directions, I quickly come to believe, were written as some sort of test, meant to weed out the weakest of minds and/or spirits before they ever make it to the Villa Russo Research Residency.

“ ‘Drive over three potholes. Just past the third, turn east onto Via Pomodori.’ Okay, feels like we could’ve skipped the pothole part.

And ‘turn east’? Sure, let me whip out my compass real quick,” I mutter the last bit under my breath, then watch for the Via Pomodori street sign in order to point it out to Luigi, relieved to see there is only one possible way to turn.

I’m in the passenger seat, so he can easily see all the hand-talking I’m doing to overcome our language barrier.

It also gives us both easy access to the cheese plate.

With a few more strange landmarks and an unnecessary commitment to describing everything in cardinal directions, it feels like a miracle that we ever make our way out of the town center and into the farmland and rolling hills I was expecting.

“ ‘At the abandoned tractor’—what?—‘continue south for three kilometers.’ ” I don’t bother to semi-translate that one, giving Luigi a thumbs-up instead, since it conveys the same message: Keep doing what you’re doing, champ.