There are many things my Italian-born mother does not like about traveling in Italy. “Number one, when I go around Italy, I need to hear music,” she says. She wants to feel like she is in the movies;  to be Sofia Loren, to splash around the Trevi Fountain in a strapless dress; to ride around on a Vespa with Gregory Peck. “When your father and I pulled out of Venice on that cruise, they played the opera from Pretty Woman. It was perfect. Without the music, Italy is…” She trails off. “Next time, I’m bringing headphones.”

On our last trip to Italy together, she bought a ticket so she could wait on a slab of stone outside the gates to the Roman forum, while I went inside to find the rostrum near where Julius Caesar was killed. “Number two, it breaks my heart to see everything crumbling, and one day it’s going to be gone.” She haggled with a vendor over a paper parasol; she did a perfunctory loop around the Coliseum.

From Rome we went to Sorrento, where she stretched out on a chaise in bright capri pants, looking more at home in Miami Beach than on the Bay of Naples. She rolled her eyes behind Ray-Bans at the loud conversation of the women next to her, in bikinis, making Nutella sandwiches for their children as they ran around. “Oh my God, just go have your party then,” she grumbled to herself. She turned back to the bay, and to Vesuvius beyond, in gold light.

“You have to understand,” she told me, “I grew up with all these Italian people that ran away from there. They never wanted to go back. It’s not like we lived on the Via Veneto.” She came to New York with her parents when she was five, to escape the profound poverty of Southern Italy after World War II. My grandparents never returned. 

“The one image that I always go back to, from when I was little,” my mother said,  “was going on the train to Naples to get our visas. I remember staring out the window. It was the first time I saw the ocean.” 

On that last trip, we took the train from Naples to Paola in Calabria, on the coast, and headed inland to my mother’s town, Mongrassano, in the mountains. “I just remember the glistening water over the Mediterranean, the sun. That is the only thing I will go back for, to see that water again.” My mother has always said that she could never again live far from the ocean; almost daily she walks the boardwalk down at the beach in Long Island. 

“Number three,” she said. “Going back to the small towns, you see how nothing has changed in years and years. In Mongrassano, everything is the same. It’s not like there is anything they can do. They patch it here and there. In my mind, it hasn’t changed in 60 years.”

Yet somewhere along the way, Italy, in my mother’s mind, has changed; it has become that gleaming paradise of American movies, where the sun always shines, no one is unhappy, and nothing crumbles to dust. 

“Like Three Coins in the Fountain,” she said. “It wasn’t disappointing in the movies.” 

We will go back to Italy someday. “But I’m only going to Sorrento,” my mother warned. We’ll sit in the sun and look out at the green sea, and Vesuvius across the bay, and listen to the women belt out the soap opera of their lives before we go home again. 

Happy Mother’s Day to my inimitable mother.