The South Always Pulls

There’s a specific gravity to Italy that I’ve stopped trying to explain. You go with friends, with a plan, meaning to see things—and then you end up sitting somewhere with a glass of something cold, watching the light move across old stone, and the plan quietly dissolves. The country operates at a frequency that overrides whatever you arrived with. Every trip there feels slightly stolen: from routine, from obligation, from the persistent feeling that you should be doing something more productive. You come back and nothing is resolved and it was absolutely worth it.