I think I fell in love with Italy before I even understood what love for a country could really mean. It started when I was little, in my grandparents’ house, with old videocassettes and long afternoons that felt almost suspended outside time. We would watch Italian films together — De Sica, Fellini, Visconti — stories from a world that was already far away even then, an Italy that belonged to other decades, other lives, other rhythms. I was too young to understand everything, but I remember the feeling very clearly. There was elegance, emotion, melancholy, beauty, and something deeply human in all of it. Even before I knew how to explain it, I felt drawn in.
I think some part of me always knew.
Those films showed me a version of Italy that seemed both distant and strangely familiar. Maybe because it was also the place my grandparents came from, the place that still lived in their memories, in their voices, in the stories they repeated without ever letting them become ordinary. Through them, Italy never felt like a foreign country to me. It felt more like a missing piece of something I already carried inside, even if I had never seen it with my own eyes.
And then there was the food, of course.
My grandmother taught me how to cook pasta properly, with the kind of seriousness that only grandmothers can bring to simple things. She did not treat it as a recipe, but almost as a way of being. Patience, attention, instinct, respect for ingredients, and the understanding that some things should never be rushed. In that kitchen, I learned more than technique. I learned affection, memory, and the quiet pride of doing something the right way. Italy became part of my imagination not only through cinema, but through flavor, through ritual, through gestures repeated over and over until they became part of me too.
So I grew up with that dream always somewhere in the background. During my childhood and especially through my teenage years, I imagined myself there again and again. Sometimes on the Amalfi Coast, with bright sea light and impossible views. Sometimes in Portofino, elegant and calm, like something from another era. It was never just tourism in my mind. It was longing. A kind of emotional geography, built out of films, family, taste, and inherited desire. Italy represented beauty to me, but also belonging of a very particular kind.
And then one day, that tricolour dream became real.
I finally spent a long period in Italy, and it felt both new and strangely known at the same time. Some places surprised me, others felt almost exactly as I had imagined them, and some moments were even more moving than the dream itself. But Italy gave me something else too — something I had not expected in the same way. It was there that I discovered my love for modeling. Not as a fantasy of fame, and not as something dramatic, but as a way of expressing emotion in front of a camera. I remained an amateur model, and that has always felt honest to who I am. But in those moments I understood that an image could carry feeling, memory, and sensitivity just as cinema once had for me.
Maybe that is why the connection still feels so deep. Italy was never only a destination. It was a dream, then a discovery, and then a mirror. A place where family memory, beauty, and self-expression somehow met. And even now, when I think about that part of my life, it still feels like one of the most natural love stories I have ever lived.