Being Geek Chic is a blog about one woman navigating the male-dominated industries of production and tech. It's written by Elizabeth Giorgi, Founder, CEO and Director of Mighteor - one of the world's first internet video production companies. Learn more about Mighteor here.
I am a different person right now. Different from a year ago. Different from 6 months ago. Different from 60 days ago. I have getting completely, totally, frighteningly lost in Italy to thank.
Imagine this: I get on a train at Milani Garibaldi on a Thursday afternoon heading to a piazza that is supposed to be on one of the old canals of Milano. The pictures I had seen on various travel blogs made it seem like the inspiration for a scene in a Disney movie - how could I not go?
It’s a beautiful northern Italian day. Low 80s. Hardly a single cloud in the sky. Less humid than usual. I’m in my trademark black outfit. Skinny black jeans. Unusually hemmed black tee. Black sunnies. I pull up some directions to this beloved location on Google Maps and I confirm with the train conductor to see if I’m headed in right direction. When he assures me, I waste no time buying the ticket and boarding the train.
Alt-J in my ears, I zone out for 5 stops, careful to listen for the familiar bing noise that comes over the speaker right before arriving at the next station. One. Bing. Two. Bing. Three. Bing. Four. Bing. Five. Bing. Get up and get off that train. Transportation is simultaneously the hardest and most universal thing about travel.
When I get off the tracks, I put my music away so I can pay attention to the careful directions I read online when I still had WiFi. No WiFi anywhere here. Believe me, I check. Incessantly. To the point where my phone battery is almost dead from scanning for hot spots. Instead, I must rely on my memory and gut instincts. Go right, past the fields of green and then turn right when you see a bus stop. There should be a T in the road.
After 25 minutes of walking and no right turns and no Ts in the road, I knew something was up. Sweaty from that 80 degree sun that no longer felt delightful and completely alone in the middle of nowhere, I started laughing. I was trying not to panic. I was desperate not to cry. I was hoping I wasn’t getting wickedly sunburned. Every single degree of the 360 degrees of space around me was just grass. Dying, beat down, fields of grass making way for autumn as summer slowly passed.
Where in the actual hell was I?
Totally lost.
It was just a field. Surrounded by empty nothing. I had walked so far, I couldn’t even see the train station anymore. This place was so random, so remote, that it could have easily been the set for an abandoned farming plot of a lost community out of a dystopian novel. So now what? Seriously, now what? There was no one to ask. There was no using my smartphone. There was only walking back.
So I started walking back.
Here’s my advice: If you have never forced yourself to be ALONE, truly alone, for at least three days - you MUST do it.
And here’s why.
When you are forced to spend that much time alone (or in my case, 34 days alone), you are forced to see your life from a new perspective. You are forced to see yourself from a new perspective. Ideally, you’ll be so far from home that your phone won’t operate properly so you can’t reach out for comfort when you get lonely. You’ll be so committed to this journey that you won’t allow yourself to pay the exorbitant data fees for using your phone. And hopefully, you’ll be ready, even if you aren’t ready. And you might get lost. Actually, you will probably get lost. It will suck. It will be scary. But it is the big fish you have been trying to catch. It is the thing you were looking for and didn’t even know it. Because when you reel that in, you can see what you were hoping was on the line.
Maybe that metaphor is out of control, so let’s put it more simply: Even though limited access to my phone, loneliness, unconnectedness and fear were the very things that bit me in the ass when I was standing out in the middle of that field, they were also the things that forced me to dig deep and actually see myself. Not a reflection. An inflection. An inner observation of my real worth. My real strength. My real will.
I walked the long ass walk back to the train station and waited for a train headed back to Milano.
I never found the piazza. I did find a bit of myself.
There are two sorts of people who wander into Bar Luce, the Wes Anderson cafe, in Milano, Italy:
1. People who know what Bar Luce is.
2. People who don’t know what Bar Luce is. But they’re thirsty and it’s there.
As someone who planned her entire Italian getaway around getting to Milano as soon as she could so she could see the filmmaker’s thoughtfully designed cafe, I was clearly part of the first group. It was a silly little comedy to watch the intermingling of the second group with the first. The second is actually quite baffled by what’s going on, but seemed charmed that anyone could care so much about mint green tables and pink chairs. But for me, it wasn’t about the mint furniture, or the perfect pink fonts or the delicate layout of cakes - it was about something that Wes Anderson himself said about the place:
“I think it would be an even better place to write a movie,” Anderson says. “I tried to make it a bar I would want to spend my own non-fictional afternoons in.”
You can see now why it was so important to me. Plainly, it is:
1. The closest I will ever be to walking onto a Wes Anderson set.
2. The perfect setting to write a movie, as stated by Anderson himself.
3. In Italia. Perfecto.
It became this weird mecca. A place I must see. A necessary cornerstone in my healing process over the last 6 months. Again and again when people would ask what I would do in Italy for such a long time, I had been saying rather proudly: I’m going to Milan to write a movie. At Bar Luce. The Wes Anderson cafe.
And I did. I freaking did. All 98 pages.
No one questioned me. Why would they. I am nothing if not a person who does exactly what she says she is going to do. Plus, it seems like something a dramatic and artsy person like myself would embark on for no better reason than it sounds like a good idea after going through a dramatic break up. People have done far stupider things in reaction to heartache.
And while so much of it was perfect, there were some unexpected oddnesses to the whole ordeal. Turns out, Milano is not a city where people hang out in coffee shops working on their computers. Maybe that’s all of Italy. Either way, the idea that anyone would sit around and attend to… work… instead of having an espresso and moving on with their life is sort of comical to the Italians. And the adorable pink bow tied staff at Bar Luce were no exception. I appreciate this committment to efficiency. But I also don’t know how to function in such a paradigm. I love to write amongst the hustle and bustle of humans meeting and reading and networking and drinking. It’s productive and real and there is an energy to that. The temporary nature of the way Italians drink their coffee makes it much harder to enjoy all that.
And so instead, Bar Luce became a multi-day destination. Or, in my case, a multi-day, multi-meal destination where I would break conventional Italian norms in pursuit of increasing Final Draft page counts.
Here’s how I did it, should you ever want to embark on a similar quest: I would strategically arrive around 11 AM so I could reasonably consume coffee and then order lunch an hour later. While this isn’t traditional and probably made the wait staff feel like I was a total weirdo, it worked for me. It allowed me to be there for considerably longer and gave me the chance to people watch for the extended periods I would normally want to observe other humans. Frantically typing like a mad woman, I laid out each of the scenes of my next film. For the record, the film tells the story of a young photographer trying to understand the meaning of intimacy in the 21st century where so much of our lives are laid bare, including our bodies.
It would be unfair to say that the setting made my script better, but it felt like a worthwhile journey to experience. Writing a film can take months, but forcing myself to do it in a week in a limited number of visits to Luce gave me a sense of purpose that can sometimes go missing in the creative process. When you don’t have anything holding you to a deadline, it can be challenging to force yourself to impose an artificial one.
And that’s what Bar Luce did for me.
So yes, I wrote a film at Bar Luce. What you’re really wondering about is the sugar packets and cakes. I know. You can see my instagram video tour of the place here. Like a Wes Anderson movie, the style of Luce is entirely immersive. Everything about it oozes specialness. Sweetness even. The exact color of the pink. The floor and it’s distinct style of both being tacky and not tacky at the same time. The way it surprises you with its size and high ceilings. The adorable pink bow ties around the necks of all the staff. Even the tiny little single chair seating options with their pivoting desk spaces feel distinctly their own, like a throwback you didn’t even know you wanted to return.
It’s hard to imagine not knowing that it’s a special place.
In my week there, it was fun watching people realize it is.
And most importantly, it really felt dear to me to be able to write a film there. To do the thing that someone I admire so much suggested one do. There are very few “wins” when you’re living a creative life and this was definitely one for me.
