David Lean’s 1955 film Summertime, starring Katharine Hepburn, is set entirely in Italy. We watched it while getting ready for our own summer trip here. Hepburn plays Jane Hudson, a single American woman who has saved for years to travel to Italy alone. The film treats her as an “older woman,” which is apparently what you were at 47 in 1955.
When Jane arrives, she tells someone about a woman she met on the boat. This woman was traveling to Europe ostensibly to see things and acquire some culture, but deep in the back of her mind she was searching for something:
“A wonderful, mystical, magical miracle.”
When she is asked what this miracle was supposed to do, Jane says it would help the woman find “what she’s been missing all her life.” Jane is, of course, describing herself while pretending to describe somebody else. The miracle she is looking for is excitement. Joy. The part of herself she fears she sacrificed to work, responsibility and the passing of youth. Now that I am on the very very far edge of my forties, this felt uncomfortably familiar.
A wonderful, mystical, magical miracle.
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