My wife and I did not set out to see Europe. We set out to get lost in it. For six weeks this summer, we gave ourselves permission to move slowly to let a city detain us, to miss a train, to follow a conversation down a side street. What started in Scotland ended in a small Piedmontese town I had known all my life without ever having seen.
I stood high on the ground as I strutted these places:
I. Edinburgh
There is something about landing in Scotland in the summer that feels like stepping into a novel you never want to end. The light hangs differently there gold and low, as if the sun itself is reluctant to leave.
Edinburgh doesn’t try to impress you. It simply is. Layered, ancient, humming with stories in every close and wynd. We wandered the Royal Mile, climbed toward the castle perched on its volcanic rock, and let the wind off the Firth of Forth redden our cheeks and tangle our hair. We drank tea when the rain came, and it came, as promised. And we drank whisky when the evening cooled.
One evening, we climbed Calton Hill as the city below turned amber. The castle, the spires, Princes Street glowing. My wife squeezed my hand and we said nothing. We both knew this was only the beginning.
2. Amsterdam
A short flight south, and the world changed colour. Amsterdam is a city built on water and stubbornness, a place where narrow houses lean toward each other like old friends sharing secrets. We learned to navigate by canals and by bells, the gentle chiming of bicycles everywhere.
The Rijksmuseum humbled us, the Van Gogh Museum moved me more than I expected. There’s a particular stillness that hits you when you stand in front of a painting you’ve seen a thousand times in books and then suddenly, there it is, real, inches away, alive. The impasto thick as cake frosting.
In the evenings we walked the Jordaan district, lingering over rijsttafel and bitterballen, watching houseboats bob gently on the Herengracht. Amsterdam taught me a word I had no use for before and now use all the time: gezelligheid. That untranslatable Dutch word for coziness, warmth, and belonging. We felt it.
3. Athens
And then Greece. Athens hit me like a revelation.
Standing at the foot of the Acropolis Museum, looking up at the banner of Athena Battling the Giants, I felt time collapse. This wasn’t history in a textbook. This was the very ground where philosophy was born, where democracy took its first breath.
We walked among the ruins of the Roman Baths near the Zappeion, where terracotta lamps from the 4th century AD still rest in their places, discovered not by archaeologists on a dig, but by workers building the Metro. Athens, it turns out, is a city that finds antiquities the way other cities find lost keys. A marble head of Asklepios, reused as building material centuries later even the stones here have layered lives.
I stood at the Arch of Hadrian that magnificent gateway where ancient Athens meets the Roman emperor’s vision with the Acropolis floating above me in the haze, and a red CitySightseeing bus rolling past like a splash of modern paint on an ancient canvas. I couldn’t help smiling. Athens doesn’t separate old and new. It simply stacks them, patiently, one upon another.
At the National Archaeological Museum, with its neoclassical facade and statues guarding the entrance like silent sentinels, I walked through rooms of gold, bronze, and marble until my mind was full to bursting. And then the moment I’ll carry forever standing before the great equestrian statue, reading the inscription on the pedestal: ΜΕΓΑΣ ΑΛΕΞΑΝΔΡΟΣ, Alexander the Great. I stood there a long time, my wife snapping the photo, but in truth I was somewhere else entirely, riding with him across the known world.
Greece doesn’t just show you its past. It speaks to you, if you’re quiet enough to listen.
4. Rome
If Athens is where the gods speak, Rome is where they moved in, built palaces, and threw legendary dinner parties.The Colosseum needs no introduction, but standing before it, its travertine arches glowing honey-gold in the afternoon sun, its broken silhouette somehow more powerful than any intact building I’ve ever seen. I understood why they call Rome eternal. Two thousand years of empires, earthquakes, and time itself, and it still dominates the skyline like a patient giant.
Then, the Vatican. Piazza San Pietro stretched before us, Bernini’s colonnades curving like open arms, the statues of saints standing sentinel along the rooftop against the bluest sky I have ever seen. We walked the great piazza hand in hand, dwarfed by the columns, and I watched my wife crane her neck upward at the basilica’s facade. In that moment, surrounded by centuries of faith and art, the world felt both enormous and intimate.
We ate too much gelato. We got gloriously lost in Trastevere’s twisting streets. We threw coins over our shoulders into fountains and made wishes we mostly kept secret. Rome with my wife, that’s the part I’ll write about when I’m old.
5. Milan
Milan greeted us with sun-drenched splendour. The Duomo rose before us like a confection of marble and spires, 135 spires, each one a stone prayer reaching toward heaven. Standing in Piazza del Duomo as the sun flared behind the cathedral’s silhouette, I felt like I’d walked onto a film set. But no, this was real, and it had been real for six centuries.
Inside the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, we tilted our heads back at the great glass dome, that lattice of iron and light, shops glittering below, the polished mosaic floor beneath our feet. Prada, Louis Vuitton, history, coffee, all under one magnificent glass roof. We spun on the bull’s mosaic testicles on the floor for luck, as tradition demands, and laughed like children.
And then San Siro. Me, standing outside the great striped concrete cylinders of Stadio San Siro, in my AC Milan shirt, grinning like the kid I once was, kicking a ball against walls back home dreaming of this exact place. My wife took the photo; I didn’t even need to ask. Some pilgrimages are written in the heart long before they’re made. Ingresso Gate 10. I know, I know. I’ll remember it always.
We paid our respects at the Leonardo da Vinci monument in Piazza della Scala, the great master towering over us, surrounded by his disciples in stone. Milan, it turns out, is where Renaissance genius wears a football shirt.
6. Torino & Pianezz
But the true destination of this entire summer, the place the whole journey had been quietly bending toward, was Pianezza, a small town in the Piedmontese countryside near Torino.
My father had once journeyed abroad, as young men do, and he had left a piece of his heart here, among friends who became brothers, in a place that became a second home. Now I was walking in his footsteps, decades later, carrying his story in my bones.
I stood before the war memorial in the town square, “PIANEZZA AI SUOI FIGLI CADVTI — IV·XI·MCMXXV” — Pianezza to her fallen sons. A soldier stands atop the pedestal, arm raised, forever mid-gesture between grief and glory. The mountains behind, the terracotta roofs, the flowers on the railings. I thought of my father as a young man here, and of all the young men this statue remembers.
And then, the joy of it. The American Bar, with its striped awning and beaded curtain doorway, where I sat on a stool and soaked in a place my father must have known. Inside, warm faces and warmer welcomes. We posed together, laughing, three friends spanning generations, the barkeeper and his family treating us not as tourists but as family returned. A little dog slept by the door. Espresso was poured. Stories were told in a blend of Italian, English, and the universal language of laughter.
There are monuments you visit, and then there are places that visit you, that rearrange something inside you.
Pianezza did the second thing.
After six weeks and six cities, after castles and canals and colosseums, I learned this: You travel to see the world, but sometimes the world is just trying to lead you back to your father’s barstool.
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