My first trip to Italy felt like a long-awaited pilgrimage. Since boyhood, I had been captivated by the stories of ancient civilizations—none more than Rome, with its emperors, its ruins, and the sheer weight of history pressed into stone. To finally set foot in Italy was to watch those imaginings step out of books and take shape as streets, monuments, and a living culture all around me.
As if history weren’t reason enough, the food alone would have made me fall in love. Simple, quality ingredients combined in ways that no other place seems able to reproduce, every meal a reminder that often less is more.
Venice felt like walking inside a dream. By some stroke of luck, I avoided the crowds I had been warned about, and the canals and gondolas revealed the city’s timeless, almost fragile magic. Florence, with its Renaissance masterpieces and soaring architecture, felt like the very heartbeat of Italian creativity, with well dressed residents, and students singing in the streets. Cinque Terre offered yet another face of the country—villages painted in vivid colors, clinging to cliffs above the sea. Though its shops and restaurants, shaped so much by tourism, dimmed the spell a little, even though the raw scenery remained unforgettable.
And then there was Rome. Standing before the Colosseum, wandering through the Forum, and tracing cobblestone steps of the Via Appia, I felt the echo of all the years I had spent imagining this place. And in that, Italy revealed itself as a country where past and present coexist seamlessly, and where beauty seems to drift in the air like something elemental.
