The Great Italian Road Trip.

Whenever a major trip lands on my calendar, which admittedly isn’t very often, my mind immediately jumps back to a piece of advice my grandmother gave me. On the eve of a month-long adventure to Japan, she said, “You will not come back the same person.”

Her words echoed back to me as we loaded up the car, getting ready to carve through Switzerland, scale the Alps, and drive all the way to the very bottom of the Italian boot (and back up again). I carried that expectation with me every mile of the way.

Sure enough, sitting at my kitchen table now with my trusty tutto bene mug feeling both exhausted and enriched, I can feel the weight of that truth. I come home bearing new stories, a growing collection of tiny Polaroids, and a mind so packed with memories that I barely know where to begin sorting them.

Looking at the map, the intention behind the trip was clear from the start. For our maiden voyage in Italy, we set our sights on the rugged desert roads of Puglia, chasing coastal towns, sunsets, and orecchiette before looping back up to the north with a pitstop in Rome, followed by a few days biking through the town where Call Me By Your Name was set.

With four full weeks mapped out ahead of us, we were ready for the adventure. Cue the Raffaella Carrà!

That was the postcard version, but we also got to see the other side, which revealed itself in the most unexpected way. The local Italy came to us thanks to the unfiltered reality of road-tripping in an EV. Instead of standard highway rest stops, our charging stations led us off highway ramps, down deserted boulevards, and straight into the hyper-local, at-times bizarre corners of a country that no travel guide would ever feature. We found ourselves in shopping malls in Brindisi, industrial zones in Cerignola with shirtless men on a porch staring at us, slot machines next to the bathrooms in San Benedetto, a truck stop that felt like a Tarantino rejected draft, too eerie even for him, servers with tattoos and sad eyes, a hotel outside of Rome hosting a party for a vacuum company (if I understood correctly, which…), a shopping center near Mount Vesuvius where we tried to get an iced coffee and they gave us a shot of espresso with an ice cube dropped in, and a bouncy castle at a luxury shopping center outside of Milan with Italian kids saying, “Dai! Dai!”

That’s the paradox of travel. We set out looking for the postcard, but what actually changes us is the unglamorous, accidental reality of being far from the familiar—the quiet observations, the clumsy exchanges, the details that feel cultural to me but are commonplace for a local. It’s these unscripted moments that make my grandmother’s wisdom ring true. For us, an electric battery became the mechanical catalyst that stripped away the tourist buffer, balancing the picture-perfect scenes with the authentic texture of what makes this country feel like home.