Gilbert's Idea of Italy

In Eat, Pray, Love (EPL), Elizabeth Gilbert, while describing Sicily, finally comes to a realization regarding Italy, which has been conquered, abandoned, re-conquered, suppressed, and conquered again, and it has to do with beauty: "You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight" (115). This is what Italians do and what Americans are, perhaps, too busy to do.

And this is why Gilbert seeks out Italy as her first destination in EPL - she wants to learn how to find pleasure in life. It sounds so much easier than it really is! In our day-to-day lives, when we must hurry to work, hurry home, hurry to make dinner, and end up just plain exhausted, when do we see this elusive beauty? When do we experience it? It is not often that we can just be long enough to absorb a perfect afternoon...to sit, surrounded by flowers, and try to pinpoint each different flower amidst all the smells.

The Italians, in Gilbert's mind, can do this; they can live in the moment. For me, the perfect way to describe their state of mind is the siesta - that wonderful break in the day after lunch. They don't let work get in the way of pleasure. Americans are generally consumed with work. We say we are happy, that this work makes us happy but maybe, just maybe, we have not learned how to experience real pleasure. I don't know, but it's food for thought.

Later, when she leaves Italia, Gilbert writes, "I came to Italy pinched and thin. I did not know yet what I deserved. I still maybe don't fully know what I deserve. But I do know that I have collected myself of late--through the enjoyment of harmless pleasures--into somebody much more intact. The easiest, most fundamentally human way to say it is that I have put on weight. I exist more now that I did four months ago. I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when I arrived here. And I will leave with the hope that the expansion of one person--the magnification of one life--is indeed an act of worth in this world. Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody's but my own" (115-116).