Head & Heart

Before You Go

Things you may be wondering

Why should I care about yet another American writing about travel?

Travel articles typically come in two modes: surface-level, budget-centric roundups of top tourism sites or aspirational, luxury (read: expensive) guides to far-flung destinations. Both categories certainly have their place, and I’ve contributed my own writing to according publications. Yet I’m interested in the subjective components of place. As a reporter, I write about travel, food, and wine, as well as commercial real estate, ESG, and climate change. These topics may seem all-encompassing, but they collectively feed into our understanding of the places we inhabit; I've sat down with Miami's mayor in Buenos Aires, Argentina to discuss South Florida's flood resilience, and I've shadowed puppeteers in Palermo, Sicily to see their dwindling art form in action. This website documents those stories, as well as the ones in my head.

What places do you write about?

Nothing I seek from travel is mutually exclusive with jet-setting to a new continent. So, I’m writing about all the places that make me feel some kind of way, from Sicily, where I’ve formed lifelong connections, to Buenos Aires, where I recently paused, to Toronto, Canada, which is quickly becoming a favorite North American city. I’m writing about Rochester, New York, where all the people I love have serendipitously, somehow congregated, and the woods of New Hampshire, which will always make me feel 18 again, for better or for worse. I’m also a firm advocate for micro-adventures, which can be as mentally monumental as the macro-, once-in-a-lifetime trips you see on your favorite travel sites.

So this isn’t just Italy content?

This website began with Sicily, but I’m beginning to explore the rest of the world and want to do so in a way that’s sustainable, both to the place I’m visiting and its inhabitants. I recognize that many, if not most, countries, cities, and communities do not belong to me, nor me to them. Being an outsider in a place that owes me absolutely nothing is daunting, disconcerting, and entirely fascinating. Let’s linger in that discomfort.

You may also be wondering why my thoughts about places to which I’m untethered, places I’m borrowing, matter. Truthfully, I’m wondering that, too. That’s what this site is for. A way to discover the heart of a place through reflection; a thought project on the ethics of travel writing; an exploration of who we are and who we become relative to a geographic fling that’s other people’s monogamy.

What were you doing in Italy?

The first time I “lived” in Italy, I studied abroad in Rome on a college program. (Yes, I was that person who studied abroad and wouldn’t shut up about it…and I still won’t shut up about it). The second time, I interned at a publishing company in Florence.

The next year, I found my way back on a postgrad fellowship, where Dartmouth College funded me to research and write about my Italian origins in Palermo. While in Sicily, I met cousins I never knew existed and connected with a part of my past that was literally lost in translation. I originally planned to spend the second half of my fellowship exploring the area around Treviso (where my maternal grandfather is from) and the island of Salina (where my maternal grandmother is from) but COVID hit. I was slated to return to Italy in September of 2020 on a teaching assistantship, but COVID canceled that as well. I went back in 2021 to tie up loose ends.

Aren’t you sick of Italy?

No! I’ve been to Italy five times and lived here four times but each experience has been drastically different. I studied art history in Rome in 2017 and would have sworn that Rome was the world’s most spectacular city. But when I worked in Florence during the summer of 2018, I gravitated toward the Arno and the enchanting Tuscan towns. I expected to find Palermo equally magical but my love affair with Sicily was slower and more complex. Sicily could very well be its own country; there’s something incredibly jarring but captivating about its grit, history, and passion. It’s not the Italy tourists expect to find, and that’s why I want to write about it.