Autism, Florence and My Personal Renaissance

In the fall of 1974, midway through my life as a young man, I found myself “lost, in a dark wood,” experiencing a profound sort of culture shock.

I was in Dante Alighieri’s hometown, Florence, Italy, but my shock had nothing to do with Dante, Florence, or Italian culture. Life on foreign soil suits me. I have spent some of the best and most important months and years of my life abroad.

Instead, my shock involved finding myself surrounded by a group of bright, happy-go-lucky Americans, close enough to my own age, on an unforgettable adventure in Italy.

We were the Gonzaga-in-Florence class of 1974-1975. We called ourselves Gonzaghini. For eight or nine months we would be nearly inseparable.

We began our time together with a bus tour, visiting Brussels, Amsterdam, Munich, Heidelberg, and Salzburg before descending into Italy. We celebrated Christmas together in Bethlehem on a sometimes-heartbreaking tour of Istanbul, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Palestinian refugee camps. The rest of the year we studied Italian language and culture in a renaissance palazzo; ate wood-fired pizza at long zinc counters; learned about art, architecture, and the wonders of spaghetti carbonara; took day trips to Siena or Pisa and holiday trips to Venice, Naples, or France. Weekends we drank wine and the giant, watery cocktails that were touristic predecessors to the Aperol Spritz. We lived together in rooming houses, or pensioni, scattered around the city center. We studied. We explored. We chattered in bad Italian. We walked past masterpieces of art and architecture every day. We were awestruck by churches like Santa Croce, San Miniato, and Santa Maria Novella. We encountered names like Giotto, Ghiberti, Cimabue, and Botticelli. We visited the Uffizi gallery, for free, whenever we wanted, and made our own art with pencils, oil paints, and clay. And though we probably had our ugly moments, we learned to live respectfully in a culture that wasn’t ours.

Peter sits on the terrace of the Palazzo Antinori. 

In short, it was a year that enriched and changed the life of every participant, including mine—but one I would look back on for nearly fifty years with a mixture of gratitude, joy, confusion, and sorrow, because I spent most of that year alone, or alone in a crowd of buzzing, happy people.

Which is why, in my mid-sixties, I went to a psychologist and learned the reason for my struggles.

I am autistic. I just didn’t know. Nobody did.

Before I continue, a caveat. There is a saying in the autistic community: “If you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person.” We’re all different. Here you’ll meet only me. That said, I’ll risk some generalizations.

At its most basic level, autism is a social difference. Autistic people often have trouble with core aspects of the “neurotypical” social world. We can find eye contact painful and small talk bewildering. We sometimes struggle with social cues that come easily and naturally to most people. As lifelong outsiders, we are usually empathetic (contrary to the stereotype) and seek fairness, but we can be bluntly honest.

Some of us are introverted, others “too” loud. Many of us learn we should probably not talk quite so much about our “special interests.” (My first big one was Chuck Berry. I “discovered” him as a child, and still tend to bore my family with remarks about the man, but eventually I was able to focus the same intensity of interest on the defective products that injured my clients. Neurodivergence has its benefits!)

Most autistic people try to “mask” in some fashion, to hide our differences so that we are accepted more easily. We practice smiles in front of the mirror. We learn to talk about nothing. But even when masking, many of us appear “quirky” or “socially awkward.” My rare efforts to “fit in” at Gonzaga and elsewhere still make me cringe.

Unfortunately, at some point our autistic differences cause us pain and isolation in the larger world. Some of us run into trouble as early as preschool, others in middle school. I was a late bloomer. Protected by circumstance, my own autism didn’t hit the fan until I went away to college, mid-year, at age sixteen.

I was the youngest of seven in a dysfunctional but loving and supportive Irish Catholic family. I was cheerful, bright, creative, and odd. I repaired rosaries for pleasure and profit, wrote books and newspapers, and learned enough Latin at age seven to become an altar boy. I stunk at sports and most boyish things, but I had built in playmates at home—a luxury many autistic children don’t enjoy—so I was never lonely.

Elementary school was a drag. I was a wizard in first and second grades, then skipped into fourth. My wizardry dissolved immediately and I began life on the fringes. But I got a reprieve in high school. I found a tiny, private high school, diverse in every way, run by an tough but loving African American woman and staffed with smart young teachers. The student body included a fair collection of misfit toys, and I thrived—so much so that one of my teachers convinced me it would be “cool” if I graduated early and started college at age sixteen.

It wasn’t cool.

My three semesters at a state university were quietly disastrous. I started college in January, full of hope, but I might as well have landed on one of the moons of Jupiter. Classes were easy. The social world was a complete mystery. I understood immediately that I had no idea how to make friends in this strange new world. I was so flummoxed I mostly hid in my room, or visited bookstores and record stores. At night, to make it seem like I had places to go and things to do, I took long walks through downtown streets alone. In three semesters I made just one friend and, worse, unintentionally rebuffed the attentions of several young women. (Lost as I was socially, I looked like a little rock star.) I wrote scathingly funny and unfair letters to siblings about the happy people around me. I described them as snobs and somehow defective. Looking back I see they were just kids, having fun.

I had hoped Gonzaga would be different. I entered the program resolved to fully participate, make friends, and become part of the student community.

Florence was incredible in those days, fully recovered from the war and the 1966 flood, overflowing with great art, great food, and small family run businesses. It was also remarkably inexpensive. A perfect Neapolitan pizza cost about a dollar. A traditional Tuscan dinner might cost three or four. The real beauty—the green, white, and pink marble buildings, mosaics in the Baptistery, Michelangelo’s Pietá, the evening passeggiata, and the beautifully frescoed churches—were mostly free. Even museums like Uffizi, Palazzo Pitti, and the Bargello were free to us as students. We could go whenever we wanted. We could admire a single painting and leave. And modern travelers will be envious to learn that the city and its museums, streets, and piazzas were uncrowded most of the year. No lines! No reservations!

Peter and his sister Ann (left) visit Piazza della Signoria.

Gonzaga students were housed and fed in different rooming houses, or pensioni, scattered around the historic center. My sister Ann and I were lucky. Our tiny Pensione Costantini was on via Calzaiuoli, a pedestrian street between Piazza del Duomo and Piazza della Signoria. It was the main venue for Florence’s nightly passeggiata, the pre-dinner ritual where Italians fill the streets to walk, gossip, and window shop. The Costantini was perhaps fifty meters from the front steps of the duomo, Giotto’s bell tower, and the ancient, octagonal baptistery—sights we enjoyed several times a day walking to class in the Palazzo Antinori. To top it off, food at Costantini was delicious, and since the majority of the young women foolishly avoided carbs, guys like me often got double helpings of spaghetti al sugo or gnocchi.

Our classes took place in a palazzo owned for centuries by the wine making Antinori family. Courses were perfectly designed to augment our experience in Italy and beyond. A class called “The History of Florence” was actually a detailed investigation of Italian history, and Erika Bizzarri’s art history class introduced us to masterpieces we would see in Florence and throughout Europe and the middle east.

Most of us also took classes in drawing, painting, and sculpture. Two of my oddball efforts still hang on my walls—a comic self portrait featuring dark seas, a leaning tower, and my trademark leather jacket; the other, still unfinished, is a satirical take on art history class, showing the projected image of a cartoonish Madonna and child, with Mrs. Bizzarri’s silhouette pointing out a “curious lozenge shape,” (a curious expression she used, often, when describing, well, the “curious lozenge shapes” she found in most paintings). I also retain a photograph of a funny clay sculpture of Abraham, Isaac, and the angel the sculpture teacher warned was “sacrilegious.” Oh well! I got an “A.”

Peter with his mother, who visited Florence while he was there.

At my pensione I was comfortable. Our group was small, and included my sister, the very funny Thomas G., and the kindly Fr. Thomas R. I felt like I belonged and talked a lot at lunch and dinner. (Probably too much. I remember several of the young women rolling their eyes. “So immature!”) Father R. engaged me in long, philosophical conversations after dinner. God bless him. I would occasionally go for pizza or beer with Tom G. or Norman L.

Still, I always noticed when my classmates whispered their evening arrangements and then snuck off to parties and gatherings I was never told about or attended. When I saw the evidence in online photos forty years later, I teared up. Yet undiagnosed, I still couldn’t fathom why my life had unrolled so differently.

When I did learn about evening plans, I showed up. A core group of students gathered frequently at a place we called “Mingo’s.” (Ann’s Italian boyfriend laughed when he heard this. He explained that “Caffè Mingo” identified the brand of coffee served there, not the institution. It was like calling an American place “Folgers” or “Yuban”.) If I arrived at Mingo’s early, one or another student might engage me in strained conversation for a moment or two, but it never lasted. Once their friends showed up, I became a silent observer. Still, I remember the people who tried to connect with special appreciation.

Peter and his high-school friend Greg (left), who met up together in London.

I also went regularly to the little bar café where students gathered between classes. Usually I read or did homework, but I remember a few times people who included me in conversations. I worry now that I treated these “conversations” more like interviews and simply answered questions I was asked. I hope I participated more fully than that.

I’m now able to look back to moments when I didn’t understand what people were trying to tell me with their eyes, their small talk, or their behavior. I can also identify times I was unintentionally rude, when I failed to respond in the “normal” and expected way and may have hurt or confused people who were trying to befriend me. The misunderstandings go both ways. Autistic people fail to understand neurotypical ways, and the neurotypical people fail to understand the autistic.

But we learn. As autistic people we learn to make small talk. We learn to look you in the eye. We learn to reciprocate a friendly gesture. We learn, perhaps inexpertly, to read the social tea leaves. It’s a matter of survival. Long before I learned I’m autistic I told people it had taken me decades “to learn to operate my hard-to-operate personality.” But in the end, I learned well enough to have a good life and an oddly brilliant legal career founded on my autistic strengths—because whatever “deficits” autistic people have in the neurotypical world are balanced by equal and opposite talents and strengths.

And my new understanding of what it means to be autistic in a neurotypical world has made sense of years that hurt and confused me for so long. I have been able to “forgive” myself, and “forgive” those I mistakenly thought had trespassed against me.

I will never have a second chance with people I ran across during my first three semesters in college. I don’t even know their names.

And things got worse for me after Gonzaga, when I disappeared into bigger cities and universities, had my own apartments, and became even more solitary for a couple of years—frighteningly so.

But my Gonzaga story has a happier ending. I knew those people. Their names and faces were seared into my brain stem from countless hours of observation on bus tours, in class, or in cafés. I just didn’t know who they were, and they didn’t know me.

Armed with hard-earned social skills, I have taken advantage of several opportunities to reconnect with my fellow “Gonzaghini,” in person, or online. I’ve learned they are nice people, unusually accomplished, with interesting lives and careers, fully ready to engage. Several have become a regular part of my life online, and the one who tried hardest to break through whatever shell I presented in Florence has become a close friend. If a former classmate I haven’t yet met again reads this and remembers that quiet, skinny, long-haired guy, feel free to reach out so we can chat and connect, probably for the first time.

The “culture shock” I felt in 1974 is gone. Fifty years later, I feel like a full member of the class. And when we Gonzaghini do get together, it’s obvious how much our year in Florence meant to each of us. We remember our days there with nostalgia and gratitude. We return when we can. We know we were lucky to experience the city before globalism turned it into a sort of Disneyland of the David and the Aperol Spritz.

After the rough patch of college, my life unrolled beautifully, if differently. I spent three years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the African nation of Togo, where I was forced to learn a new set of social skills from scratch, and ran with a crew of friends for the first time since high school. I built an oddly successful career as a product liability lawyer and put my autistic and other talents to work for catastrophically injured people. I married a remarkable woman who understands and loves me despite—or because of—my quirks. We raised three amazing children who are now blossoming into adulthood, and spend as much time with our wonderful and talented granddaughter as she and her schedule allow.

And I feel personally lucky that a sliver of life that had confused and saddened me for decades finally makes sense and no longer hurts. The “midway” part my journey through life ended decades ago. I am no longer young. But I am no longer lost, the woods are no longer dark, and for the first time, the way forward is perfectly clear.

Peter O’Neil is a husband, father and grandfather, a retired attorney, musician, and author of the book My So-Called Disorder: Autism, Exploding Trucks, and the Big-Daddy of Rock and Roll. He is available to speak to book clubs or anywhere else about the value of neurodiversity in the workplace and beyond.