The best love letter in all of Italy
There’s a story to this one…
I’ve never said the words: "It was like a scene out of a movie."
It was like a scene out of a movie.
Late at night in the fall of 2015, we wandered onto the Ponte Vecchio where a crowd was enjoying an impromptu guitarist singing beautifully in Italian and English. My husband sketched architectural details, while I took unobtrusive photos of strangers enjoying the perfect Florentine midnight. But off on the other side of the bridge, just as a beautifully plaintive “Hey There Delilah" began, a solitary couple caught my eye. In the midst of a hushed fight, they were entirely at odds with the moonlit evening’s magic. I seemed to be the only one noticing, and while torn, the writer in me had to know how it would play out.
Partway through what seemed to be the woman's final stand, the guy produced a two-page handwritten letter from his coat pocket and held it out to her, as if in prepared response. Her entire body shifted as she read. Rigid angles melted. By the end, tears streaked down her cheek.
Another woman, I presumed. Now I felt awful, witnessing the saddest breakup in all of Italy that night. I took a step to edge back around the central fountain, toward the music again. But as she handed him back the letter, rather than a bittersweet farewell, or a fist to his chin, she pulled him in to a kiss — a kiss that lasted almost the entirety of Simon & Garfunkel's "America." Sung in Italian.
He had clearly written the best love letter in all of Italy that night.
A marriage proposal, I presumed. I felt apprehensive about further invading their privacy, but I didn't exist to them.
The music didn't exist.
The bridge didn't exist. The quaking earth wouldn't have torn apart that kiss.
So I released one last shutter click. And here it is. Love on the Ponte Vecchio.
I immediately returned to the minglers on the other side. Half of me wanted to find the couple later to ask if they’d like the photo, to forever remember their happiest moment by. But my shrewder half knew that invasion would have destroyed it for them.
They're not going to forget. And perhaps, someday, they'll see it.
— Glenn Camhi. Shot with a Canon 5D Mk III, in Florence, Italy on Oct. 31, 2015.
