Eat, Pray, Love

pleasure in their lives, asking them what their pleasures feel like, and then writing a report on
this topic. (Double-spaced and with one-inch margins, perhaps? To be turned in first thing
Monday morning?)
When I realized that the only question at hand was, “How do I define pleasure?” and that I
was truly in a country where people would permit me to explore that question freely,
everything changed. Everything became... delicious. All I had to do was ask myself every
day, for the first time in my life, “What would you enjoy doing today, Liz? What would bring
you pleasure right now?” With nobody else’s agenda to consider and no other obligations to
worry about, this question finally became distilled and absolutely self-specific.
It was interesting for me to discover what I did not want to do in Italy, once I’d given myself
executive authorization to enjoy my experience there. There are so many manifestations of
pleasure in Italy, and I didn’t have time to sample them all. You have to kind of declare a
pleasure major here, or you’ll get overwhelmed. That being the case, I didn’t get into fashion,
or opera, or cinema, or fancy automobiles, or skiing in the Alps. I didn’t even want to look at
that much art. I am a bit ashamed to admit this, but I did not visit a single museum during my
entire four months in Italy. (Oh, man—it’s even worse than that. I have to confess that I did go
to one museum: the National Museum of Pasta, in Rome.) I found that all I really wanted was
to eat beautiful food and to speak as much beautiful Italian as possible. That was it. So I de-
clared a double major, really—in speaking and in eating (with a concentration on gelato).
The amount of pleasure this eating and speaking brought to me was inestimable, and yet
so simple. I passed a few hours once in the middle of October that might look like nothing
much to the outside observer, but which I will always count amongst the happiest of my life. I
found a market near my apartment, only a few streets over from me, which I’d somehow nev-
er noticed before. There I approached a tiny vegetable stall with one Italian woman and her
son selling a choice assortment of their produce—such as rich, almost algae-green leaves of
spinach, tomatoes so red and bloody they looked like a cow’s organs, and cham-
pagne-colored grapes with skins as tight as a showgirl’s leotard.
I selected a bunch of thin, bright asparagus. I was able to ask the woman, in comfortable
Italian, if I could possibly just take half this asparagus home? There was only one of me, I ex-
plained to her—I didn’t need much. She promptly took the asparagus from my hands and
halved it. I asked her if I could find this market every day in the same place, and she said,
yes, she was here every day, from 7:00 AM. Then her son, who was very cute, gave me a sly
look and said, “Well, she tries to be here at seven.. .” We all laughed. This whole conversa-
tion was conducted in Italian—a language I could not speak a word of only a few months
earlier.