Ancestry and identity: A transitional motorcycle tour in Italy

Carefully spinning my hair into the low bun that would keep it safe from the wind, the bark of the V-twin rubbing its eyes felt like a warm embrace as I completed my last travel rituals. Fighting a belligerent cold clutch, I traveled upward and away from this town where I had gotten it all wrong. The only goodbye wave I received was from a flag in the morning breeze.

The cutting mountain air roiling past my inadequate windscreen slowly softened into smoky, hazy soup as I touched the eastern coast and swung north. The mixture seeped into my perforated jacket, soaking my airbag vest, and despite my usual disdain for humidity it was strangely comforting. Maybe the ash from the burning farmland picked up some grace as it floated through the pink churches in the distance.

I finally reached my destination for the night, where I had switched the polarity of my previous accommodation to an ultra-modern, clean, airy room. Laughter from a nearby pizza parlor lifted the silence of the last few days and almost brought me to tears. I immediately cued up the Chill Beats YouTube channel and a shower, pulling off the pounds of leather, plastic, and denim. Thoughts swirled in my head while I stripped the disappointment from my skin. How did it come to this?

The seed of an idea is planted

Only a few months earlier I had been hiding from the sun on my aunt's balcony in Ventura, California, staring at the BMW R 1200 RT parked below on the street. The BMW was rapidly becoming too heavy to be enjoyable, which was a shame after 20,000 good miles together. My fear of the sun, the weight of the bike, and my soon-to-be-planned Italy trip all shared a root cause. I was some number of months into my gender transition, and hormone replacement therapy was changing my body in both delightful and dismal ways, one of them being a marked decrease in muscle mass, and another being sensitivity to the sun.

My aunt asked me about it with love and interest, but relations with my immediate family were becoming increasingly rocky, on account of my transition. As we talked, my aunt laid out our family tree, and that's how the trouble started. This long list of relations in a faraway land had me suddenly dreaming of acceptance without condition, dinners and hugs and stories to knit together all the years we had missed. My realizations about my gender identity had shone a light into the dark room, but the floor was still full of holes and I ached for a self-worth that I didn't need to build brick by brick. Envisioning was at once romantic, intoxicating, and perfectly in line with the stories my mom used to tell me about fabled Italian relatives.

Hardly needing a reason to take a trip to Europe and needing even less of one to do it on a motorcycle, I was sold. I lined up a flight to Rome, a route, and a rented Ducati to ensure my credibility. I was counting down the days, then counting down the kilometers.

Riding back to a place I've never been

Cresting one last Abruzzo peak, my great-grandfather's hometown in sight, I started the serpentine descent on my Multistrada 950S. The bike had yet to win me over but that hardly mattered as I rolled down the long road to the bottom of the ravine. After pulling my side cases off with the turn of a key, a trick that has yet to get old on any motorcycle, I unpacked into my cellar Airbnb. For a town with one restaurant and general store, I was gobsmacked to find a stay, no matter how musty.

Before heading back outside, I weighed personal safety against truth and hid my increasingly conspicuous chest with my armored jacket, letting the stubble that made my insides squirm do its best biker man impression. After all, I would have time to show the real me to my family once I met them, right? Without my cosmetics bag I’m a little hopeless anyway. I trudged back up the long hill. On the ground, as is sometimes the case, proved to be a worse place than on the motorcycle. The lush purple and green Apennine mountains that heralded my journey were, at five feet away, an impenetrable wall of shrubs. The courtyards and gardens in the small towns I had swept through had been replaced by fenced-off dogs barking and growling at me as I climbed on.

In the shadow of the colossal rock that gave this town its name, I wandered the nearly empty, cobbled streets. I started to feel that I had made a mistake, and a mild panic set in. I was relieved to climb further and find a circle of a few old men conversing in the small town square overlooking the nearby lake-filled valley. As the sun started to gently set, I worked up the courage to introduce myself in what I'm sure was subpar Italian, and tell them that I was a Del Peschio by blood, that my great-grandfather was from this town.

I watched one man's face as he paused, considered, nodded, and told me, unimpressed, that many people had this name here. I no longer felt that I made a mistake. I knew it.

Determined to salvage this part of the trip, and sure that someone in town would be interested in talking to me, I asked the shopkeeper at the lone drugstore (that shared business with the adjacent hamlet) if he knew any of my relatives. An excitable man with slick black hair, his love of the Ramones fit perfectly his last name, Ramón. Maybe the biker jacket was helping me here.

After a lovely chat about travel and the joys of our countries, he promised to put in a word with my family that I was here and looking to say hello. I climbed the local attraction, the rock, and sat on a bench, wondering what I would have found in common with d'Andrea, the man who left this no-stoplight town behind. It would come to me, but it didn't immediately.

I had an edible hamburger at the restaurant/drugstore and admired the shockingly clean Yamaha TDM900 that a man parked nearby. I deeply enjoyed marveling at a machine that was probably commonplace in Italy but new to me. Apparently new things or, in this case, people, were not as much appreciated by extended family.

With every step back toward my room, I felt humiliation rise in me. To reach out now and finally know where I stood would be rational, but I was not in a rational state. Why hadn't I arranged to meet anyone in advance? I realized that I dearly wanted my dream to be true and to investigate it was to risk shattering it. I was scheduled to stay another day. I was not going to stay another day. With my messaging apps bereft of greeting for the rest of the night I had no distraction to booking a new place in a new town. It was something sweet to engage in the ritual of leaving and I focused on planning, packing the side cases with a haphazard system, doing my best to fill both equally. The sun reappeared after a cold night. It was morning in the town of Pietraferrazzana and I needed to leave.

Riding a Multistrada through Italy

Over the next few days, I slowly processed what happened. Riding had always been a good substitute for feeling, but this was not sustainable if I wanted to enjoy the months of pay stubs I was lighting on fire. I tried my best to enjoy the Multistrada as it ferried me through Perugia, Londa, Bologna, Parma, but it was proving to be competent and rarely more. Unlike my trusty R 1200 RT, which seemed to do everything with a sort of authority, the Multi almost felt like a Disney version of an ADV tourer, scrubbed of its grit or seriousness, scored with safely heart-string-tugging numbers.

Desperate to avoid feeling like a failure, I started dreaming again. I imagined myself riding my 900SSie, back when my self concept was simpler, if more opaque. A spartan, singular machine that was hewn from emotion, I think it matched the "old" me pretty well, in retrospect. Could I learn to love this modern bike? Would I end up looking back wistfully at its dull gray color (please say this trend is dead) and its too-wide handlebar?

No, I wouldn't. It reminded me perhaps too much of myself as I was then. A bit middling, trying to appease, and feeling unresolved about its identity. It reminded me that I'm not a fireball anymore. No one compliments my forearms, gapes at my ambitious current projects. I cannot hide my flaws behind energy and charisma, posing grimily by my SuperSport as it slowly sinks its kickstand into the tarmac with antisocial intent. But then, neither can that machine. It was obliterated by a beige Toyota Corolla turning suddenly across my lane. Or so I believe. After an agonizing few seconds of physics that crumbled and snapped a few of my bones in my back and hips, I couldn't turn around to see what became of it without risking further injury. In a heartbeat, its place in the world changed, though its ergos would have proved hell on my newly rearranged spine had it survived. Is there a Ducati for me now? I hear the current Monster finally let go of some long time baggage, something I can relate to.

Reaching Milan a week in, I met up with a friend I had inducted into the cult of motorcycle. I envied her clarity of self as a femme, binary trans woman who forged her own path. I didn't envy her difficulty understanding trains or the rental Suzuki V-Strom 650. It was easy to forget about my episode in the south as we rode together for a week around the Alps and environs, jetting up mountain passes and feeling the unique joy of going wide open on derestricted sections of the autobahn before settling at 100 mph (on account of our womanly instinct for safety, of course). I was shocked at how well Viana acquitted herself in a foreign country after only a few hundred miles in the states. Our time together was the highlight of my trip. Parting was eased by the Multistrada's electronic preload and damping adjustment, which made two-up transit to the train station more manageable. But there was no electronic setting to help missing a friend.

Conclusions, of journey and thoughts

Slinking down the west coast back toward Rome offered too much time to think. Quiet towns by the sea were no more welcoming than, with exceptions, the cities on my way up. I managed to squeeze in a visit with a dear Italian friend who works on bikes and he never fails to outdo his previous restaurant choice. It was evident that in this life my best chance at joyous company (outside my wife and child) was with my friends, and especially the ones who ride. As I drew nearer to the conclusion of this rollercoaster of a journey, I felt obligated to do something with the pile of dirt I had created while digging into my family history. Could I plant a seed there before shoveling it back in?

In the same way that my 900SS livened up some of my darkest days with its exuberance, I knew there was something in that town beyond the people, something to take away that didn't sting. I thought back to the bench on the massive stone. I thought about the roar of Termignoni pipes as I hunkered down on the Los Angeles freeways. I thought about the day in my therapist's office when I made a joke about wanting to be a woman. It came to me.

He's dead now so I can't ask him why, but my great-grandfather sat on the same massive stone and decided that the life he would find in America, a country that at the time hated him on principle, was worth the pain and struggle of leaving everything he knew. If nothing else, he and I share the resolve to pursue what's best for ourselves and our families, even if it requires giving up the comfort of the known, breaking ties, and forging new ones. If I have an outstanding quality, it's my persistence. Maybe I got it from you, d'Andrea. Thanks for that.

A day before returning the milquetoast marvel in Rome, I decided that, this being a vacation, I was going to find a place where I could stop cowering behind the biker facade for a few minutes. Away from the picturesque rows of cypress trees and eye-narrowingly expensive tolls I clambered down a cliffside trail in the small town of Porto Santo Stefano. I pulled off enough clothing to not regret the return climb, but not so much as to give any errant nonna a heart attack and waded into the Mediterranean.

The sea didn't care about my past, and at that moment, neither did I. As time slowed to a crawl and disappeared, I no longer felt the urge to be done with my trip or resolved about my family. It was enough to watch the small boats crisscrossing the horizon and hum "Volare." I was happy to make my own connection to Italy. I was glad I got to see it on a Ducati. It was enough to just be floating in the waves. I turned and swam back to shore.