I grew up in Florence, the youngest of three, in a house that always smelled of fresh pasta and old books. My parents met at university — my mother was studying art history, my father architecture — and I think their love for beautiful things quietly shaped everything about me. I moved to Milan at 24 to work in fashion editorial, which was everything I thought I wanted and nothing like I imagined. I learned quickly that the industry rewarded a certain hardness I didn’t really have. What I had instead, apparently, was a habit of wandering into the wrong cafés at exactly the right moments. When I met Luca I wasn’t looking for anything. I was twenty-eight, professionally consumed, and quietly convinced that love was something that happened to people who had more time than I did. He proved me spectacularly wrong — and he still reminds me of it regularly.