I think I understood very early that I was not meant to stay in one place for too long. Even when I was younger, there was always something inside me pulling my attention elsewhere — not because home was not enough, but because the world felt too wide, too beautiful, and too full of possibility to be experienced only through a screen. I wanted to see it with my own eyes, to hear unfamiliar languages in the street, to get lost somewhere new and discover that being far from what is familiar does not always mean being far from yourself.
Leaving Italy was not easy, of course. I knew that life away from home would bring difficulties, loneliness, confusion, and all those quiet moments when you wonder whether you made the right decision. But the desire to know more, to move, to travel, and to understand life beyond the borders of what I already knew was stronger than fear. I never wanted to sit still and imagine other places while watching them from a laptop. I wanted to go. I wanted to feel them for real.
Maybe that is why the word “home” has never meant only one place to me. I was born in Italy, and that part of me will never disappear — the warmth, the instinct, the attachment to beauty, the emotional way of seeing things. But I also learned that home can be something wider. It can be a feeling you carry with you. A room in a city you have just arrived in. A quiet café where no one knows your name. A train station at sunset. A window view you will remember years later. Sometimes home is simply the place where, for a moment, your heart feels calm.
People often think that someone quiet must also be closed, or distant, or difficult to know. I have always been shy, and that part of me has never changed. I do not enter the world loudly. I take my time. I observe first. I listen. I speak when I feel safe enough to do it. But the people who really know me know that silence does not mean emptiness. If anything, it means I feel things deeply. I care deeply. I carry people with me for a long time. My heart has always been larger than my words.
I think that is why travel became so important to me. It gave me a way to grow without having to become someone false or louder than I really am. It let me stay myself while still changing. Every place left something in me. Every departure taught me something new about courage. Every return showed me I was no longer exactly the same girl who had left. Maybe that is what life is, in the end — not becoming a different person, but becoming more fully yourself in more places than you ever expected.
When I look back now, I realize that some faces and some landscapes stay with you forever for the same reason: they made you feel something true. People tell me my eyes are difficult to forget, but I think I understand that better when I think about the places I have seen. Some cities, some roads, some moments remain with you long after you leave them. They stay clear in your mind because they changed your way of looking at the world. My journey has never really been about escaping anything. It has been about answering something.
And I think that is still true now. The journey is not over. It is still unfolding, quietly, one place at a time.