On the Sources of Cultural Identity I picked Italy because I was studying Western art, and NYU had a villa in a hilly olive orchard in Tuscany. I also picked Italy because, as I stared at the poster tacked to a corkboard in the study abroad office, I remembered, with a sting, years before: the dark Manhattan living room of some rich friends from high school (cloth tartan wallpaper, heavy silk curtains, and a gaggle of Cavalier King Charles spaniels silent in their crates), sitting akimbo on the floor like kindergarteners as we smoked and ate potato chips and watched the 1999 remake of The Talented Mr. Ripley , a film that takes place in a lusciously stylized 1950s Italy. They continually paused it to compare notes, with gusto and pleasure, about their visits to the Spanish Steps and the Amalfi Coast, their suites at the St. Regis on Via Vittorio. I stared out the windows at silent, bustling Madison Avenue below us; having never been to Europe, let alone for an expensive vacation, I had nothing to add to these bursts of memory. In the jazz club scene, my friends joined the actors in the chorus of Tu Vuò Fà L''Americano --a song that pokes swinging fun at an Italian''s blundering attempts to seem American--bopping their heads and waving their arms, blissful at the sound of their own Italian singing. I was bitterly conscious of my invisibility, and mesmerized by the apparent expansiveness of their worlds compared to mine.

* Italy was a good choice for me because I absolutely, whole-hog, madly, truly adored it. I arrived in Florence for a year''s study gauzy with jetlag and wordless except for cappuccino and ciao , smiling like a drunk as I toddled down the pebbled path to my host family. Within a week I felt at home among the curving cobbled streets and smoky cafes, the musical loops and rhythms of the language. I picked up Italian with preternatural speed. Learning and speaking it gave me conspicuous, almost embarrassing joy. I felt musical and buzzed, a little wild, very free. I learned vocabulary and grammar like that , jumped two levels in class before the end of the year. My accent was thrillingly good, nearly perfect.

I ate in far-off restaurants where you didn''t see Americans or hear English, and relished learning new phrases from waiters. I learned slang. I spoke aloud to myself around the house. I watched Italian movies, listened to Ligabue and Giorgia CDs, copied Italian newspapers into my journal. I understood why my New York high school friends were transformed into flirty, neon versions of their best selves while singing along to tu vuò fà l''Americano, l''Americano, l''Americano . And my own fluency, which quickly surpassed theirs, was transporting in deeper ways, too: speaking Italian so well let me feel Italian, and feeling Italian meant not feeling American. Which is to say, suddenly removed from America''s insistence on reminding people of color of their coloredness, I experienced racelessness in the way I imagine white people often do. It was a remarkable--and fleeting--liberation.

Fueled by my fluency and a real--if temporary--sense of self-determination, most of my Italian memories are terrific: I eagerly embraced the local look, throwing out my American wardrobe and spending my cotton-soft lire on clothes from Miss Sixty, Benetton, and Diesel. I did my eyeliner like the Italian girls, heavy, black, and swooping. I wore Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue perfume. Modeling Italians, I swore off cappuccini after morning. I grinned at the buoyant freedom of eating pizza Italian style--an entire pie per person. I got myself a cute Florentine boyfriend with curly blond hair and blue Superga sneakers, and we drove his old Porsche to Castiglioncello, his big, rough hand resting lax on the stick shift. We stayed in a yellow house near Marcello Mastroianni''s place, watching Italian vacationers dip in the cool Ligurian Sea, their tan bodies shining like brass in the August sun. On Capri, my girlfriends and I took taxis to Marina Piccola.

We ate cheese, tomatoes, and bread, and we drank chianti. We catnapped in black bathing suits; daydreamed of swimming, slick as dolphins, to the yachts harbored in the turquoise water; rolled onto our sides to watch guys roughhousing in the waves; and walked in flip-flops with beach-heavy, relaxed legs up the long steps to Chiesa di Sant''Andrea, a white breadbox of a church, to imagine our wedding days. In Rome, I felt allied to the ruins, as if among kin, while I crossed the same flat stones as Caesar and the Vestal Virgins. I ate an achingly delicious wedge of lasagna at a hole in the wall near the Vatican. At Christmastime, I popped roasted chestnuts into my mouth and sat alone in the crisp evening air near the Trevi Fountain, listening to the Americans and Germans, smug about how to the manner born I was, and the fact that my emotional allegiance was to Italy. I took the bus to the Villa Borghese and spent afternoons there, a thick white book of Italian grammar and copy of Grazia in my tan suede bag, and never tired of circling Bernini''s Apollo and Daphne, with Daphne''s mouth soft and open like half a white peach and the inferno of stone leaves overtaking her fingertips. Same thing, The Rape of Proserpina, with her marble thigh warm and doughy, the tender underside of her feet almost caught in Cerberus''s bite, and Pluto''s fingers full of shadow so that they look dirty, the knuckles and cuticles black as the fingers of a mechanic. I savored the overlap between daily life and the ancient: how I passed Michelangelo Buonarroti''s childhood home while walking to the gym, how Dante might have lingered on the same bench where I read the paper and ate strawberry gelato at sunset.

* This bounding glee, my jubilant, carefree absorption of Italy and my enmeshment with the culture was so euphoric that it could not last. A weekend in France reminded me who I was, and of the limitations race imposes on us even when we briefly forget them. Ready for a foray into another country, my roommates and I boarded a silver train at Florence''s main station and felt like sophisticates as it raced northwest, blue passports and a little worldliness in our hands. From vinyl seats we looked through scratched-up windows out to the horizon. After a moment, my roommates dropped their eyes to their books but I continued watching Italy. Seeing the chalky hillsides and the crystalline cubes of distant marble quarries, I imagined Michelangelo, on whom I had an art-student crush, just over the hillcrest with his leather belt of chisels. I watched the ocean appear and disappear, and imagined that the yachts lined up like piano keys were a good omen--a promise of a stylish, lucky future. I memorized little cardboard-cutout train stations and the shape and color of the clothes hung to dry between apartments.

I watched the coiffed, chic adults with sweaters tied gently over their shoulders as they strolled; bowlegged old men in hats; old women in long plain skirts; Italian teenagers with ratty, flared jeans and topknots, nose rings and throaty laughs to match their cigarettes; Italian guys hopping on Vespas, one''s slim arms around the other''s slim waist, both leaning into an accelerating curve. I wanted to merge with all of it. I wanted to become Italian; to shed the America that seemed to stand between where I happened to be born and who I actually was. Italy felt like the real universe the way Manhattan does when you first arrive. Our train pulled into Gare de Nice-Ville and we stepped into the chilly French air. "Hello, France!" we called out. I remember being refreshed by Nice''s new foreignness. For breakfast, we ate scrambled eggs as silky as custard and milky coffees served in big bowls.

We sensed a hedonism in France that would have been frowned upon in Florence, and, being twenty, decided to each buy a bottle of red wine and drink it, topless, at the beach. The ocean was uninviting on an overcast October day but, once drunk, we waded in happily, our feet wobbling on rocks and the seawater leaving a patina of French salt on our calves. Our cheap hotel room was on a courtyard and kitty-corner from windows of a family''s apartment. At night, the window shone gold from the lights within, and we listened to the sounds of their big dinners, pondering whether the husky French words were more beautiful than Italian. What struck me like a gong that weekend, though, was the presence of brown-skinned people--more in one walk to the beach than I''d seen in two months in Florence--and how segregated they seemed from white French life. It reminded me, Oh yeah, race is a thing. And, I''m Black. To be sure, seeing Black people made Nice feel more like America in good ways.

Nice became, through the presence of a Black population, a diverse city that was part of our shared globe, not just its own world. But, also like America, I could sense and see that Nice was a place where blackness meant something suspect, where it existed at a remove from "normal" or "true" French life. These Black and brown Niçois were mostly Africans. They stood in skinny clusters, dressed in tracksuits, bald-headed and smoking at bars where soccer matches were played on high-mounted televisions. They sat on folding chairs in Internet cafes, legs jangling, and chattered a carbonated seltzery mix of French and African tongue into little black flip phones. They walked with bags of groceries on each hip toward whatever lay outside the city center, their hair wrapped in cloth. They did not, as far as I saw, hang out with white French people in public. I struggled with their presence in my own way.

On the one hand, simply having Black people around made me less of a visual oddity and helped me feel acclimated on some instant, preverbal level. On the o.