When we landed in Rome and finally reached the hotel, it was close to four in the morning. Maybe it was jet lag, maybe it was the excitement of being there—in the city my namesake founded. I was named after Remus. Whatever the reason, I wasn’t tired.

I slipped out alone and walked a few blocks in the dark to Piazza del Popolo. The pigeons scattered when I stepped into the square, lifting all at once. They rose together, the way birds do when startled by something unfamiliar. There was hardly anyone there. I sat on a bench and watched the sky lighten without drama, as if the city were letting me in slowly. Buildings didn’t announce themselves. Their edges simply separated from the night. Stone emerged a little at a time.

Rome didn’t rush. It had waited centuries; it could wait a few more minutes.

Later, the city belonged to both of us. And there was Lynn—dark hair, a big heart, and an Irish smile that arrived before she did. Italy seemed to recognize her immediately. People lingered when they spoke to her. Shopkeepers softened. Waiters joked. She listened closely, leaning into conversations even when language failed her, absorbing tone, gesture, intention. She was beginning to pick up Italian then—not fluently, but bravely—and each day she relied less on the translation book. Real exchanges began to happen. She was alive to it, and Italy responded in kind.

We moved through the days without urgency. Simple meals. Long walks. Pauses that didn’t need explaining. Lynn kept notes. Sometimes I’d look over and see her writing—not as a way of documenting the trip, but as a way of staying present, of catching what might otherwise slip past. What we were doing, without quite naming it, was letting Italy work on us.

The moment that remains clearest came later, on the water.

We boarded a small rowboat with maybe ten other people—no engine, just oars and the steady sound of wood against water—heading toward the Grotta Azzurra, the Blue Grotto. From a distance, the opening in the rock looked manageable. Up close, it didn’t. The boatman gestured calmly. Everyone understood at once: heads down, bodies tucked below the gunwales.

For a moment, it was genuinely frightening.

The rock passed inches above my face. Daylight narrowed to a thin slit, then disappeared altogether. The mind does what it always does in moments like that—it races ahead, imagining outcomes, measuring risk.

And then we were through.

Inside, fear vanished as if it had been switched off. The water wasn’t just blue; it glowed from within. Not reflective, not shiny—luminous. As if light itself had dissolved into the water. No one spoke. The boatman dipped his hand into the water and lifted it slowly, and it shone on his skin—silver-blue, alive. Every movement wrote light and erased it at the same time.

The cave didn’t feel like a place you visited. It felt like a threshold—into another world that had always existed, hidden behind a narrow opening and a moment of trust.

I looked at Lynn. Her face was completely open—not smiling exactly, more like receiving. In that moment Italy wasn’t a destination or a history lesson. It was something immediate and alive, something that had claimed her quietly, without argument.

When we rowed back out into the sunlight, the world resumed its ordinary shape—noise, movement, gravity—but it no longer felt ordinary. Something had shifted, not dramatically, not in a way you could point to, but in the way a compass shifts when you realize north isn’t where you thought it was. I understood, without quite forming the thought, that this trip wasn’t about escape or rest. It was about attention. About allowing beauty, history, and chance encounters to rearrange the internal furniture. Italy had opened a door, and neither of us was in a hurry to close it. We didn’t know yet where the days ahead would take us—only that we wanted to keep moving forward, together, alert to whatever might appear next.