Italy arrived differently from Paris.
Paris had announced itself from above, the geometry of it, the deliberate arrangement of boulevards and bridges and the tower visible before anything else, the city presenting itself with the specific confidence of something that knew it was being looked for and was content to be found. Italy did not announce itself. Italy simply appeared, rising out of the earth with the particular, ancient certainty of land that has been inhabited for so long that it has stopped distinguishing between itself and the people on it, that has absorbed centuries of them and become something that was not quite geography and not quite history but was both things simultaneously, inseparable and permanent.
I pressed my face toward the oval window as the jet descended.
The
