Home, dolce home
I must have been Italian in a previous life, since I feel so Italian in this one. It’s been like this ever since I started studying the language in college and was struck by the sensation that it was more like remembering than learning. It just entered—or reentered—my brain and stuck. And back in 2000, when I arrived, almost by accident, in Panicale, a tiny hill town in my favorite Italian region, Umbria, I felt that same sensation with the force of a reawakening. I looked out at the view of the valley and the lake and knew I had returned home. So I did a crazy midlife thing. I bought a 500-year-old row house on the edge of the village, restored it for two years, spent another year furnishing it, and in all the years that followed, I have lived many of the happiest days of my life there.