Flirting in Italian Read Online Free PDF

wearing in the air-conditioned plane. Everyone else is doing the same dance, wriggling and writhing as they cross the tarmac, shrugging off jackets,stuffing them into carry-on cases, the older English men and women putting on the straw Panama hats and ribboned raffia boaters they’ve brought to protect their white skin from the scorching Mediterranean sun.
    Sod that!
I can’t get enough of it. By the end of these two months, I want to be suntanned and golden from head to toe. I tilt my face up to the sky—it’s as bright a blue as the water that borders the Tuscan coastline—and revel in how glorious the warmth is. I was definitely meant to live in this climate. My body’s sucking up the heat, flourishing in it; I feel like a sunflower, turning my face to the sun, blooming and blossoming, petals opening wide.
    I’m smiling as I enter the long, low white terminal building and navigate through corridors hung with huge framed photographs of olive groves and bright green oil in bottles, of sleek white yachts, of luxury hotels with striped loungers around bright blue swimming pools. The line at Passport Control is very brief for EU citizens, and the airport’s so small that by the time I emerge into the baggage hall, luggage is creaking around on the conveyor belts, unloaded from our plane. I see my suitcase and dive for it, pulling it off the belt. Already, my denim shorts, which I’m wearing over opaque black tights, are feeling heavy in the humid air, saturated with moisture, itchy and uncomfortable; I long to pull the tights off, at the very least, but then my shorts would be too—well, short. I bought them specifically to wear over tights—they’d be a bit too much like hot pants if my legs were bare, and I’d feel really self-conscious. I like my legs, but I’m not tanned or slim or tall enough tocarry off hot pants anywhere but on a beach. God. Clothes are
hard
.
    A girl passes me, looking visibly uncomfortable, her pale skin coated with sweat and her light red hair sticking to her forehead. She’s dragging a matching pair of cases, a carry-on and a larger suitcase, in a cheap beigey tartan print that’s a bad rip-off of a recent Burberry design. To be honest, it looks as if she bought them at a cheap market, or a pound shop; I can see the binding on the carry-on’s already fraying, and clearly a wheel on the main suitcase is broken, because it’s squeaking and bumping unevenly, and she’s having to haul it along like a sack of potatoes. The Alsatian dog that’s supposed to be drug-sniffing the passengers but is lying on the cool tiled floor by the exit door instead opens one eye at the noise as she lumbers past, cocks his ear, and slumps back to sleep again. His handler, chatting with a customs official, is completely uninterested in any of us travelers.
    “Uffa!”
mutters an Italian businessman in front of me as the smoked-glass double doors fly open onto the arrivals section, and his attempt to stride through the crowd of waiting friends and relatives is thwarted by the redheaded girl. Her suitcase seems to have completely broken down; a beige wheel is rolling across the tiles, disappearing under people’s feet, and she’s come to a halt, trying desperately to lift her suitcase by its handle, blocking the stream of people now flooding out behind her. No one helps; they push around her, cursing, until finally she manages to haul both her cases through the crowd, shoulders slumped. I feel really sorry for her, but I’m busy looking for the person I’m supposed tomeet; the paperwork said that we would be met at Pisa by Catia Cerboni, the lady who owns Villa Barbiano and runs the course, and that she would be holding up a card with our names on it.
    Of course she’ll be here; why wouldn’t she? The flight was on time—there’s no reason she wouldn’t meet it. But it’s impossible, when you’re alone in a strange country where you don’t speak the language not to be even a little bit nervous