Kate Owens

I left my apartment early Saturday morning on the sole mission of finding my “space”. Before departing, I had marked upon my map the site “Israelo Cemetario” as a potential candidate. Considering I have the worst sense of direction of anyone I know, within 15 minutes I was genuinely lost. I decided to keep walking anyways and wait for another location to inspire me, rather than stop and check directions. Desperate for “the space”, I went on for another 30 minutes… but of course whenever you actually try to look for something it can never be found. At this point, I was ready to just give up and start focusing on how I was going to get myself home. But of course, as indecisive as I am, it took me another 10 minutes to pick the perfect place just to sit down and consult the map.

This place ended up being the “Pazalle Porte Romana”, which consisted of four streets merging into a center circle with a few benches around half of the perimeter. The benches rested against the backside of the Boboli Gardens and faced out to the circular roadway. The only real point of interest was a big pink building surrounded by palm trees with the words “Classic Hotel” and the occasional passerby. I quickly realized that this spot had potential as my space. I spent the next hour and a half writing and sketching as well as documenting every single person who passed by me (which included an Italian runner wearing the shortest shorts every and a maroon turtleneck sweater, a guy who looked like weird Al-Yankovich, and a mean old man who I smiled to and didn’t smile back).

During this time, there were three groups of people who chose to sit at one of the benches with me and coincidently all of them upon sitting immediately whipped out a tourist map. It was here that I realized the most interesting part of my space was that no one really aimed to come here. Those that stopped instead were simply drawn to its allure of being the ideal map-consulting stopping point.