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All my life has been focused on Italy, from birth to this day.

Italy has always been my true north, and whenever I am not there, I am waiting to return, impatiently.  Such waiting periods were in my youth, from ages 5 – 12, when my father’s anti Vietnam political views cost him his job at the US Embassy in Rome, and displaced us suddenly from Rome to the suburbs of America, and again during my college years in Pennsylvania.  To grow Insider’s Italy I lived in New Haven, and then New York, from the ages of 29 – 35. To study for a Masters of Wine, while running the business, I resided for four years in London.  But during those times in my adult life when I was away,  Italy always called me back, both professionally and especially emotionally. When not there I would often wake at night dreaming of a landscape, a smell, the light, a food.  The pang that I felt made me more impatient than ever to return, and so I would : never in my adult life did more than three months go by without me being in Italy, and always for substantial periods.

It has, then, been astonishing that COVID kept me for five months out of the country that I love most, a slip of fate since we have a home in Maastricht too, a city that feels comfortingly Italian.  I was in Rome in early March, when northern Italy was already in head-on confrontation with COVID, and signalling to the world that a global response to prepare health systems worldwide was imperative. I returned to Maastricht where I was planning an April return with specific destinations relevant to summer and autumn client trips.  Then Italy’s border closed, as did those of all EU countries and only on June 15 was interEuropean travel possible once again. But my children’s schools ended in July, and birthdays and one-after-the-other minor events jockeyed for priority, and only today am I back to Rome, where I was born, feeling like a swallow that has returned to its original nest.

Nevertheless, since March my professional and personal self has been fully moored in Italy, my life tightly intertwined with that of lifetime Italian friends and partners of longest standing. In those long months when Italians stayed at home, I documented in my blog what, for 13 Italians, their new reality was like. In their varied regional accents, my friends in Veneto, Sicily, Amalfi, Florence, Tuscany, Umbria, Marche, Puglia and Lombardy narrated to me quite frankly how they were adapting to a changed Italy. From these stories came a tableau from across the country. The first and last news of my day was Italian. I followed with constant attention Italian COVID statistics and the daily televised briefings from the Prime Minister.  My home has flown the Italian flag…

and my larder has been well stocked with the Italian essential foods (olive oil, pasta, balsamic vinegar, tomatoes, honeys, cheeses) shipped by the same artisans I buy from when I am in Italy.

My dressmaker and friend Paola in Spello has sent her lovely handmade linen clothing, so Italy feels soft and close to my skin.

Today, wearing Paola’s blouse and trousers, with lemon earrings made by my friend Anna in Florence, I am holding my Rome house keys in my hand and am going home.

Flying into Italy always has the same effect on me : looking down from a plane’s window, I decipher familiar landscape and places, and imagine squares, and friends, and stores, and museums, and restaurants.  There is special reassurance in first spotting the long Apennine ridge that runs from the arch of the Italian boot all the way up to Emilia Romagna, and then the meandering Tiber river which ends its 252 mile journey at Ostia, just west of Rome.

When the plane door opened at the quiet Ciampino airport, and a hot sun hit my face, I was back; never more welcome was the sound of the cicadas.  Outside the airport, taxi drivers took umbrage from the sun beneath a pine tree; not one accepted a credit card since, as they explained to me, that way they would not see payment till the end of the month, and as there was so little work to begin with (just two days a week), why would they want to do that ?  Mid August sleepiness coinciding with holiday time meant that Rome had no traffic, and that the sturdy Porta San Sebastiano…

.. and the Aurelian walls, caper-studded in the baking heat, were just a blur of joy, as was the pyramid of Caius Cestius and roads I’ve known forever.

And I was home, to a louder still chorus of cicadas  and the deep comfort of an Italian place that was mine.

This evening, as the heat attenuated by a degree or two, I ventured out for dinner, my restaurant options reduced as the coinciding of August and Monday meant that very little was open.  More so than ever in August, all Italians know that digestibility is the central attribute we look for in a pizza, so I ventured to Eataly, where generously spaced tables and warm, professional, masked waiters were the backdrop to a perfect pizza with capers and anchovies.

And several glasses of Bollicine Rose’, from Serafini and Vidotto in the Veneto, encouraged by the wine list’s citing of Baudelaire’s statement “he who does not drink wine has something to hide”.

Tomorrow begins two weeks of research.  I wish that everyone were with me in Italy, where masks,  social distancing and an ongoing determination to see this through coexist naturally for Italians who do not forget what it is to be Italians.