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He leaves you like husbands always leave in bad novels, abruptly, with a trail of lies that are impossible, after all those sweet years, to believe. Let's say that for weeks and then months you can barely eat or sleep or work. You lie in bed while an Italian phrase keeps playing over and over in your head: Mi hai spaccato il cuore. You have broken my heart. You have cloven it in two. The Italian phrase at least takes you out of your English-speaking mind for a moment, out of the ugly present and into another realm of possibility. There is another world out there. Where they take long lunches and drink good coffee and wine and stay up too late after dinner. Where you will not run into your husband at the grocery store and will not have to hear his girlfriend leave a message on the answering machine at the home where you still live. Let's say you have a few friends you can stay with in Italy, and you speak the language well enough. You can go there to forget. And then a fantasy flickers and you think maybe an Italian man might not be such a bad idea, either. So you book the flight and for the next few weeks you stare at the trim folder and believe it's your ticket to somewhere much farther away than Florence. To forgetfulness, to contentment, to your old self in a new place. Finally, the day comes when you leave messages on all your machines that you are completely unreachable and you take off for Italy. You arrive in Florence and your dear friend Lucia meets you, walking with you along those narrow cobbled roads to the Piazza della Republicca for a late-night glass of spumanti secco, and you recount, as best you can in Italian, the details of the break-up. She makes a gesture flicking her fingers under her chin that Italians use to say, economically, forget him, he wasn't worth it, life goes on and you'll be better off. She tells you he was a nice, intelligent man but he never had the love of life you have anyway, the sense of la bella vita. She uses another swift gesture to tell the waiter to bring another round. You wander Florence for a few days, taking in the ice cream-colored marble, the terra cotta, the Brunelleschis, the Boticellis and the Michelangelos. You walk past markets and boutiques, you bicycle up to Fiesole, and the view everywhere is lovely but you always have the sense that something is following you close behind. Your Italian friends are in love this year and it isn't convenient to stay long at their houses, so you make a plan to get far away from Florence, too. And so you go to Ischia. Maybe you'll see Naples, Capri, Pompeii and the Amalfi Coast, too, but your sights are set on Ischia. Something about a volcanic island with natural hot baths and long pebbly beaches sounds about right. Everything will be stucco white and washed with Mediterranean light. Everything else will be far, far away. From Napoli you take the rickety metro to Pozzuoli, a fishing town destroyed by earthquakes and hastily rebuilt by people who know it is going to crumble again anyway. Everyone in Pozzuoli wants you to spend the night there, to tourist there, and they're sad when you ask only when the next boat leaves for Ischia. The people you briefly encounter in the bars and shops in Pozzuoli don't know what to call you, a single American woman in your mid-30s. You are certainly old enough to be a signora, and ought to be married. But there you are, sola, with no wedding band. Signorina? You don't fit. The 8-year-old girls call you signora, because you're older than their mothers. They ask you where you're from, and where your children are hiding. Where is your husband? He left me, you tell them, and they're startled by your response, uncomprehending. You look down at your shoes and say, "He died," because that they can understand. They nod solemnly and wave you off to the ship. The air is fresh and cool on the top deck, the sun sinking behind the silhouetted island in the distance. Traveling by boat is romantic, pulling you away from shore, leaving a vast emptiness of water between your old life and an entirely new place. But as the engines warm up and the horn sounds and the ship belches black smoke, you realize you can't out-distance your sorrow, it hangs in the wet air and covers your face with salt water. When the boat pulls up to Ischia's crater-round harbor, it is night. A bus circles the island on a windy road and drops you off seven miles away in Forio, the largest town. There, motorbikes race through the streets, tourist cafes have all-German menus and souvenir stores sell stuff you would never dream of hauling home. You hate Forio: It is not the charming village you expected, you can't get a good meal anywhere, the red wine is sour and the only saving grace is the pensione your hippie guidebook recommended, which is peaceful and cheap and clean with large tropical plants in an open-air stairway and a signora who is gracious enough after she grudgingly agrees to include breakfast in the price of the room. In the morning, after caffe latte and a good roll, Forio isn't nearly so bad, and the signora recommends visiting St. Angelo, a smaller village with plenty of beaches three miles away. You climb aboard a bus filled with German pensioners in mismatching floral shorts and T-shirts and pass several of the thermal baths on Ischia, places that offer all manner of soaking and sweating and rubbing, amusement parks for the arthritic. Finally the bus disgorges the last passengers onto a pedestrian-only zone, and noisy, tourist Ischia turns into the lovely Mediterranean haven you were dreaming about. In St. Angelo, you find a boat taxi that takes you even farther away, past the restaurants with sun umbrellas for rent, to a free pebble beach where you can spread out your cloth, lie down and forget all the advice of American dermatologists for an entire sunny morning. From time to time you swim in the deliciously clear water, reveling in the freedom to swim and swim forever without hitting a wall or smelling chlorine. Sometime after lunch you spot a building nearby with large palm umbrellas and a sun terrace on top and wonder, since it has no name, if it's a private club and whether you could go sit under one of those nice big umbrellas yourself. You hesitate, but decide, what the hell, you are a Blond American Divorcée and no one is going to complain if you tie your beach cloth around your waist and go sit on their patio and dry your hair in the sun. So you walk right in, making use of their shower on the way, and order a lemonade. The waiter, who is tall and dark and, yes, handsome, is all too happy to give you whatever you like. You feel lovely sitting there on the terrace, drying off, and the square-bodied elderly German women doing the side-stroke in the water below feel beautiful, too, which is a nice thing about Ischia. Then you realize what you really need is a salad and some good bread and a glass of white wine, which is so light on Ischia it might as well be water. After the coffee the waiter shows you to a comfy lounging chair on the terrace, where Germans are sunning themselves in the all and all, and he tells you to have a nice nap. Afterwards, he says, you can try the sauna and the fango, which after some confused description you realize is a mud mask with apparently special radioactive healing powers. You go along with the plan: the nap, the sauna, which steams straight out of the volcanic hillside, scented with fennel; the fango spread all across your face and shoulders, left to dry and crack in the sun. When the fango is done, you have another sauna to rub off all the mud, and your skin is in fact unbelievably soft, and you race into the ocean for a refreshing swim before coming back to a hot pool in a hidden grotto. As the waiter climbs in with you, you begin to dimly realize he is not doing all of this for a better tip. N E X T+P A G E+| Your fantasy lover - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ILLUSTRATION BY RAFAEL LOPEZ