At this magazine we have our flights of fancy. Our passing infatuations. Our mad crushes. Places that we fall for and fawn over but eventually we forget about and move on. But we also have our life-long love affairs, the destinations to which we return again and again, the cities and countries that we can never quite get to the bottom of, the places that intrigue us, challenge us, delight us, entrance us.

And then there’s our relationship with Italy, which is something else entirely. Of course it is: Italy is the country that travel was invented for, the destination of the original Grand Tour, first among equals. This, after all, is a country which pretty much tops the charts at everything it does: food, history, architecture, romance, opera, people, wine, landscape, art.