It was December 2016, my husband and I had just the day before taken our exam for the first semester – Level A1.1 of Italian and we were flying to Italy for Christmas. Even more than 4 years later, I can still feel the euphoria.

I remember the last meal we had at home before the flight, a delicious salad of the leftover vegetables in the fridge, all the eggs and of course a can of tuna, which was added only to ease our extreme reluctance to eat something purely vegetarian.

The flight was a movie marathon accompanied by in-flight dining. We landed in Rome at about 2pm and immediately went to pick up our rental car, the service provider was Noleggiare, incidentally noleggiare is an italian transitive verb which means – to hire, what a wonderful way it was to learn a new verb.

We were headed north of Rome to Tuscany, and had chosen the town of Orbetello to break journey for the night, after many nervous wrong turns on the freeway we managed to drive through the centre of Civitavecchia to our night stop reaching Orbetello just before dusk.

Orbetello is a small town located at the tip of an isthmus running through a lagoon south of the Parco Regionale della Maremma. We located our hotel and our first chit chat in Italian bore us ripe fruit when the cheerful friendly Receptionist of our hotel – Hotel Relais Presidi guided us to a wonderful ‘tipico’, a local restaurant – Trattoria Rugantino for dinner. It is one of our most memorable evenings till date. The staff was indulgent, the ambience incandescent, the flavours decadent, and the mood ascendant. I could return to Italy, just to eat there….magari!

The libations and partaking continued till late at night after which we strolled through the town, not a soul in sight not a sound in the night and admired the piazzas and buildings through the canopy of Christmas lights.

The next morning we took a brisk walk along the shore admired the birds and the palm trees, had a wonderful breakfast at the hotel, the orange juice, which we could squeeze ourselves, being the highlight and set off further north.

Compassion, nostalgia, apprehension, anger, boredom, time, selfishness, selflessness, history, posterity, fallibility and a gamut of other factors and emotions have lead me to penning down these our happy memories of Italy. Read next – Sienna.