Futani. It was a small town I’d never heard of, nearish some bigger towns whose names I may have recognized as the upper front ankle of Italy’s boot. The name conjured no images, not the grand arcades that come to mind when someone mentions nearby Sorrento, nor the alluring mythos of Napoli, nor the homes carved into the hillside that look like one grand, ornate cake in Positano.

To me, Futani meant nothing other than the location of the apartment my second cousin owned and offered to us during my wife’s winter break from graduate school. There would be nothing to do there, I assured Emily as we pondered whether we should stick our 10-month-old son on a transatlantic flight, headed for the middle of nowhere in Southern Italy.