Terra Cognita by Chad Davidson

I’m a huge fan of Chad Davidson’s poetry, so I had high expectations for this book of travel essays. Terra Cognita did not disappoint me. This collection of nine essays, each focused on a different city in Italy, does what travel and writing about travel are meant to do—simultaneously explore an unfamiliar, foreign space and an internal mind. Davidson discovers truths about self through reflection and contrast with the external, the new and challenging. These essays are contemplative, transportive, and transformative. Davidson overlays descriptions of the city and travel experience with contemplations of home, history, family, work, tales from the Italian writer Calvino’s Invisible Cities—all woven together delightfully. Each of the essays highlights a different city and different theme—”Postignana / On Ruins” “Assisi / The Imperfect” “Pantelleria / On Elegy” “Bologna / On Relics” from which the excerpt below is taken. Buy here.

I am thousands of miles away, down an alley just south of the main square, hugging the right hip of the Basilica di San Petronio, squat and imposing, if also unadorned, plain in its massiveness, in the center of Bologna. Some part of me, at least, is almost always there, in some version of Bologna I overlay on my surroundings, half-Italy and half-everywhere else I find myself. In one sense, this kind of pseudo-travel is miraculous, imaginative, expansive. On the other hand, the Bologna I’ve conjured, the comforting past now twenty-seven years ago: that city is not quite the capital of Emilia-Romagna but a copy of it fossilized in memory, not perfected or modified into something unrecognizable but, rather, preserved, cordoned off as an exhibit available only on request, contingent on the schedule of the docent, me. Cost of entry? Five thousand lira.

That’s a one-time fee, though, and I paid it long ago. A weekend night at a pizzeria in the hills around the city. Friends from language school (Dorian from Hamburg, Ben from Portsmouth) and two Italians (Gigi and Jenny” who ran a bar down the street from our language school. There was some debate about money, one of those absurd, awkward moments with new friends—we foreign students had known each other for only a few weeks, had known the Italians for even less—try to pay more than they should, the ham-fisted humility and mock shock that makes us say, “No, of course not; keep the money,” and “No, no, no; we insist.” The fact that the amount was inconsequential—five thousand lira, even then, came to less than four dollars—made the entire scene more comical, our throwing the note to the Italians, the Italians tossing it back. That exchange of the 5,000 lira, we knew, was hardly monetary. We were each, with the same measles note, purchasing nearness, yes, but nearness to otherness. Amazing how little it cost. . .