Costruzione del mondo

In December, we were still landing and figuring out which kitchen drawer should hold the oven mitts and measuring spoons. Once we crossed into 2026 and put away our holiday decorations, though, something changed. Terraforming and attending to the basic needs of making life habitable organically shifted to world-building: watering newly-germinated relationships and making plans. Menu plans, weekend plans, travel plans, they’re all part of transitioning from ad hoc survival to intentional living. For months, the daily thrills of improvising overshadowed any longing for the comforts of weekly routine. Now, at long last, there are predictable joys—Tuesday butcher, Thursday market, Friday movie, Sunday fishmonger—anchoring us amidst the still-topsy-turvy of just about everything else.

We spent Christmas in Berlin with dear friends, a trio that trailblazed their way to the Continent in similar fashion, only two years sooner. A dual-citizen husband and child plus a wife who didn’t speak the native tongue but jettisoned the familiar and soared forward with gusto nonetheless. They became our living vision board: their contentment despite difficulties, their shared thriving even as they flirted with isolation, inspired us onward. On Christmas, over a meal of frühstücks klassiker (breakfast classics), heisse schokolade (hot chocolate), and damn fine sekt (local sparkling), we raised glasses to realizing ambitious what-if plans, some hatched in COVID years. What if they came to Verona that first month and helped assemble IKEA furniture? What if we flew north with our stockings and played Pictionary on Zweiter Weihnachtstag (second Christmas Day) in jammies? What if we booked our kids for Bavarian summer camp together?

Knowing we’ll savor Veronese Decembers to come, it was no sacrifice to no-frills our way via RyanAir into bitter cold Berlin for fêting with besties in mittens over hot glühwein at Charlottenburg Palace. Even though one day was spent skating in a night club turned ice rink beneath a canopy of disco balls, EDM, and LED tannenbaums, it was the utter normalcy of their life that struck me most. They’d done it! They copy-pasted their family into Berlin, but updated with a brand-new operating system. They sloughed off the unnecessaries and folded into the unknown with equal aplomb. I returned to Verona inspired to follow suit.

Something else that Berlin imprinted upon me: the importance of uncomfortable truths. Here, there, and everywhere were 11,000+ Stolpersteine (stumbling stones) brass markers embedded on streets stating that an entire Jewish family was deported, disappeared, murdered. Other plaques depicted exactly where the Berlin Wall cleft a city in two. Berlin’s statues and monuments didn’t just appear in post-war reconstruction to paper over the bombings and atrocities with pretty sculptures. Instead, they function like a monk’s hair shirt, the constant reminder against feeling too comfortable; ‘never forget’ as a constant irritant, not an occasional hashtag.

The graffiti above: Heute läuft’s noch gut / morgen nicht mehr / Das Glück findest du nicht im Glückskeks — Today it’s going well / tomorrow not anymore / You won’t find happiness in a fortune cookie

For the past few weeks, a rusty old boxcar sat beneath Verona’s Arco di Gavi adjacent Castelvecchio, across from caffès where tourists sip spritzes under heat lamps. Il Vagone della Memoria is an actual railway wagon used by Nazis and Fascists during the Holocaust. In freezing cold January, this temporary museum effectively communicates the story about thousands of Italian Jews deported to concentration and extermination camps while on-lookers went about their day. It’s refreshing to reside in a place that doesn’t turn away so easily from its own faults.

I lived twenty-plus years in Richmond, Virginia, the former slave trade hub and Capital of the Confederacy. I stood with my children to witness the removal of Civil War monuments once touted as proud landmarks along the city’s most prestigious avenue. Meanwhile, one of the South’s largest slave cemeteries sits ignored between I-95 and a parking lot. And the historic route taken by slave ships is marked along the James River by a self-guided walking trail better known as muddy single-track connecting mountain bikers to the Poop Loop, so called for proximity to the water treatment plant. That’s how the USA honors its ugly past.

I didn’t pick up and come here because of some bone to pick with America. It’s more like walking away from Bluetooth speakers with the phone in your pocket. That star-spangled propaganda signal just doesn’t quite reach anymore. The combination of physical distance and time away have profound side-effects: clarity and courage. The clarity to see what’s happening in the States and the courage to speak of it are not new to the artists, writers, and thinkers I admire most, but for someone who’s fashioned more party punches than protest signs, it’s less familiar ground.

The American President is a fascist now, my first cousin hanged herself over Thanksgiving, and I’ve been estranged from my father since the 1991. These are uncomfortable truths. I bought a 1975 Olivetti manual typewriter for correspondence and poetry, but I didn’t come here to rhyme spaghetti with confetti and gussy up my Instagram with Italian stationery porn. When I couldn’t just drive to New Jersey to grieve with my family, I christened the Olivetti with a difficult poem. You don’t have to read it, but I absolutely had to write it.

The children came to visit. All of them. Sebastion arrived in time to bring in New Year’s, laughing into 2026 as we watched local TV celebrate Capodanno. Laughter because, duh, of course the countdown was in Italian and our non-native tongues needed more like quindici (fifteen) seconds to march backwards from dieci… nove… otto… to Buon Anno!

Days later, our girls and I rendezvoused at the train station. I recall some monumental hugs in my life, but, after six months, that first daddy-daughter squeeze in the cathedral-like atrium of Milano Centrale gave twinges of divinity. Amy Lee collected number five right from the airport and, despite the odds, once again we were whole. As my filmmaker pal Dan Bush likes to say abut talent under contract, “Until James Franco is eating a breakfast burrito on my set, I still don’t believe it.”

With ages spanning 12-23 and lifestyles ranging from early-bird to night-owl, museum-fiend to pub-crawler, the all-together moments were rare but precious. Fortunately, since we’d stayed tight these past months with steady video dates and check-ins, winter break didn’t carry the burden of daily emotional weightlifting. Seven humans sharing one apartment makes its own tension, yet a pervasive lightness saw us through the few minor fits and tears.

We toasted the six-month mark at Shah Jahan, an Indian restaurant south of the city. Fittingly, we bid farewell to Virginia with a family meal of chaat, biryani, vindaloo, and kulfi at Lehja, our favorite restaurant in Richmond. Over naan with our newest dear friends, an Italo-American-Korean quartet whose citizenship journey is uncannily similar, I announced my first big news here. I’m a student!

On a lark, I rejoined LinkedIN Premium. Well, not so much a lark as a gulp from the bills after a few decadent weeks about town with the family. I love being a casalingo (housemaker) and all, but the money is meh. Project work for Decanter on Barolo, Artful Living on world holidays, and Scott’s Miracle-Gro (!) on Dry January afforded some pocket euros, but nothing like a salary. Within a day, I saw this:

In short, it’s a professional training course offered at Accademia delle Professioni in partnership with the Scuola Italiana di Ospitalità. Supported by the Italian government, Veneto Region, and European development funds, it’s how the EU is positioning itself to evolve as the tourism sector grows: empower professionals to meet the tsunami of tourists with knowledge, grace, and empathy. After 400 hours of daily classes (4 days in Italian, 1 in English), there are 400 hours of apprenticeship.

Amy Lee and I wholeheartedly believe in the power of manifestation. During that January full moon in Cancer, we put our manifestations on paper and left them under glasses of water to catch the moon light. Among mine was written the desire to serve as a bridge between Italy and those visitors for whom the spark of discovery reignites a desire to live fully. Northern Italy’s food and wine, geology and agriculture, art and history, tourism and hospitality, are entry points for curiosity and this course touches on them all. I applied, completed two interviews, and found myself selected as one of fifteen candidates.

Nearly three weeks in, I’ve found my groove and a crew of international friends representing Italy, Albania, Ecuador, Brazil, Venezuela, and Japan. A few came by last week for a little study group over Prosecco and merende (snacks). It hit me as I was falling to sleep—over that day, for the first time, I’d spoken more Italian than English.

The more I let go, the more it seeps in.

203 days in Italia.