Page 104 of Valentino

"Fourteen, probably. Milan for Fashion Week. Florence for a shoot. Lake Como twice for a campaign and once for a wedding I wasn't technically invited to. Capri. Positano. Portofino."

"And never Rome."

"Never Rome."

Valentino stares at me for a second.

Then he shakes his head.

"That's insane.”

"There was never a campaign here. The luxury market skews north. Milan's the money, Rome's the—" I wave my espresso vaguely at the window. "Rome's the ruins."

The sound he makes is somewhere in his chest, low and genuinely pained, like I've insulted his mother and his mother's cooking in the same breath.

"The ruins," he repeats.

"I'm sure they're lovely ruins."

"You're sitting in the middle of the greatest city human beings have ever built, and you've spent fourteen trips drinking spritzes on a lake and fashion shows."

"The lake had wifi and George Clooney's house. What does Rome have?"

"Everything," he says, with such flat finality that I actually shut up for a second.

He turns back to the stove and slides the eggs onto two plates, but his shoulders carry the conversation with him.

"When this is settled," he says, with his back to me, and I hear the small hitch he puts before the word settled, the half-second pause that means he's chosen it carefully from a lineup of much worse words, "you will see Rome. Properly. Ten days, minimum."

"Ten days?"

"Ten days, on foot. You walk the entire city. No driver, no itinerary, no phone in your hand." He brings the plates over and sets mine in front of me. "You get lost. You eat where the menu is handwritten. You sit on the steps of a church for an hour and watch people do nothing. That's Rome."

"Ten days of walking. In what shoes, exactly?"

"Flat ones."

"I don't own flat ones."

"Then we'll buy you flat ones. Christ." He sits down across from me, and the chair complains under him the way furniture always does, like it knows what it's been asked to hold.

I cut into the eggs and watch him over my fork. There's color in his voice that wasn't there yesterday, a current running under the words. He talks about this city the way other men talk about teams they've loved since childhood.

"You know who you sound like right now?" I say.

"Don't start."

"There are these Italian guys I follow on Instagram whose entire content is judging non-Italians for committing crimes against Italy. Cappuccino after eleven a.m.? Crime. Cream in carbonara? War crime. Chicken on pasta? They do a whole funeral. Black clothes, fake casket, the works."

"They're correct."

"They rated American garlic bread a two out of ten and one of them crossed himself."

"A two is generous."

"You're proving my point, you understand that. You're doing the bit right now."

"It's not a bit." He points his fork at me. "It's the truth. Your country puts pineapple on pizza and calls espresso a 'shot.' Someone has to hold the line."