SOMEWHERE IN NORTHERN ITALY

we had met in a little seaside town just north of Marseille in the cool summer of 1975. It had been 2 years now and I could barely remember what life felt like before it all. she was a young writer from Sicily, 20 something with eyes that burned with desire and dreams for a life that simmered somewhere in the dark. for some time it was beautiful, long days spent by the water with the cliffs on each side of the beach, hot walks back to the car, her cheeks warm and red in the s

a few hundred miles south of the Austrian border sat a small ski town nestled in the heart of the Italian Alps. the mornings were quiet and cool and you felt clean walking the streets before the sun rose and brought light to the valley. in the spring you could hike from Lago Di Braies to a small Rifugio further up the mountain where you felt warm by the fire and the wind would rise in the evenings with a deep howl from the valley below. on spring days the gravel felt fine und

in the deep south of Italy a small fishing village sat perched on the very edge of the Adriatic Sea. it was the summer of 1994 and a sense of yearning swept across the beach below, in the evenings the horizon would slip into the sea and you felt that in moments like these maybe this really was the edge of the earth. the cliffs seemed to fall away into the blue water below, bodies scattered across the rocks, the water broken every few seconds with people diving from the cliffs