bizniss trippin

I landed in Brescia on a grimy, sweat-yellow Tuesday and I wasn’t at all sure the interview would be worth the fuss. But the afternoon cooled off as the train got into the foothills, and me along with it. The track started following a narrow valley between limestone ridges. The steep hills on either side threw everything into a sort of premature twilight, blue and melancholy—even those places still in full sun were suffused by it, as if the rays had retained their light but not their conviction. I got into Bolzano around five. It’s a compact city that fills a little stelliform valley. It's circled in a cosy sort of a way by high, fir-forested hills. And beyond these I caught the odd glimpse of the Dolomites themselves—mad, jagged, vicious looking things, bare as the moon.

The city, like the surrounding South Tyrol area, is an elegant jumble of Austria and Italy. Italianate palazzi stand next to Germanic constructions topped with spires, green-tiled and glossy as dragons' tails. People talk with their hands, but stop their cars at pedestrian crossings. Their universal capacity to switch language mid-sentence is frankly unnerving. The area was only ceded to Italy after World War One, but this resilient biculturality seems to have endured much longer than that, regardless of where the borders were pegged out after this or that scuffle. It was fun to visit. In the city itself, the dominant language is Italian. In the hills—I took the cable car—the balance tips towards the Germanic, all poppyseed pastries and toddlers in lederhosen, and I had to rummage for my bittes and danke schoens. I took the narrow-guage railway that rattles between a half dozen villages along the ridge, and watched the Dolomites revolve in the changing perspective, like turning a paperweight around in the light to see the design inside.

And the prospects? The whole thing looked a lot like last year, with a business class upgrade. Same size city, same degree of wealth, same proportion of foreigners. Nicer apartment in a nicer part of town, more spending money, nicer parks for frisbee and nicer paths for cycling. All very nice. The question is, do I want to live inside a souvenir paperweight? The place was quite delightful, but it struck me that I would get more pleasure from showing visitors around, and seeing how much they approved of my choice, than I would from actually living here, because it’s not what I want now. I think I could spend a very enjoyable year living in Bolzano—but not this one. I’m about to send an email turning down the job, and I shudder at this wilful rejection of a perfectly good and comfortable situation. But I shudder more when I think about a life of seeming contentment at the expense of the genuine article.