This morning I sat in the greenhouse with my hot mug of freshly pressed Italian coffee and closed my eyes. It’s been a rough few weeks, ones where I was often afraid to read the news on my small screen, which I have done for years, before getting out of bed. Stories from the BBC, The New York Times, The Guardian … and now Substack after Substack essays that are doing little to reassure me. The constant question: What atrocity happened overnight and do I really want to know?

During Covid, I would often hear about some crazy impulse purchase my friends had made. Chalk it up to damn-it-if‑I’m‑going-to-die-I-might-as-well-get-what‑I’ve-always-wanted spending. Roombas came up a lot. So did luxury food delivery services. Wildly expanded cable tv packages. And so on. My husband and I bought an apartment in Italy.

We are in a small coffee and sandwich place housed in a former two-bay service station in Richmond, Virginia. Boxes of paper goods and food service supplies are piled almost to the ceiling. Everyone who has ever been here has taped a business card to the wall. They are the usual suspects: real estate agents and Reiki practitioners, computer geeks and Kundalini yoga instructors, pet sitters and psychoanalysts. They all come here.

A few years ago, my friend Vicky and I invited some Italian friends to come to the States to do a few authentic Italian cooking demonstrations. They were wildly successful, and people still talk about them.

Do Rome in small chunks. Get to Rome, stay in your (imaginary) lane and promise to come back and see something different next time. Rome will always be Rome.