When I crawled into bed, it was so hot and humid that I struggled to sleep, making do with an electric fan and open windows. But Verona came alive early and just as I was about to drop off, the traffic, and sirens from the ‘ambulanzas’ on route to Borgo Trento, denied me the pleasure.

I blinked through the morning until there was a polite knock. Fragmented dreams stumbled into consciousness. I tried to ignore the short taps, but whoever it was wasn’t going to go away. I climbed out of bed, with eyes that felt like sandpaper, and opened the door.

It was Cola. “Buongiorno,” he quipped. “My mother told me that you had returned.” I let him inside and noticed how tall he had become. He frowned at my unruly appearance and held up a bag of fresh cornetti. “I shall make coffee, and you must tell me where you have been for so long.” 

I had known Signora Bruschi’s son since he was fifteen, from days when the skinny boy sat on the front doorstep and made cheeky remarks to ladies who passed by. His mother warned him that it was not how good catholic boys behaved but she already knew that Nicola was a lost cause. “He takes after his father,” she had confided, “and has such a violent temper.”

Cola had taken a shine to me after I’d stayed here the first time. He waltzed in and out and helped himself to the contents of the fridge. Then he would beg me to play football with him on the campo giochi until the light started to fade. “He treats you like a big brother,” Signora Bruschi told me. “You are a hero to him, and I pray to St. Gianna Beretta Molla that he will follow your good ways.” The fact that I hadn’t kept in touch bothered me.

Cola was eighteen now, still skinny, but he towered above me. I pulled on a tee shirt and sat at the table while he made coffee. 

“What have you got planned for today?” I had hoped to wander through the day without an agenda but sensed that this might be about to change. 

“Nothing,” I volunteered. 

“Then let me take you out in my new car.”

Cola’s strong coffee wasn’t to my taste. I would have preferred a latte but Italians regard this as sacrilege and so I accepted it without comment. 

“My mother says that you have a French boyfriend.” He waited for an answer, but I didn’t respond.

The truth is, I’d argued with Charlie before coming here and was annoyed with him. When he snapped at me, I’d matched his gallic temperament with a dose of Anglo-Saxon home truths. Afterwards, he had sullenly caught the Eurostar to Paris, and I had come to Verona, to the apartment that was rarely used. 

Buckle up, hot shot. Time to take flight… and land with impact.

Cola’s new car turned out to be a bright yellow Abarth 500 that he drove too fast. I tried to ignore his erratic driving as I did the alarm bells that were hammering inside my head. How many teenagers could afford a car like this? As far as I was aware, Cola didn’t have a regular job, and I feared that he was mixing with the wrong people, something that was easy to do in Italy.

The apartment has stood empty for fourteen months. Now I return to it, in a city smothered with sunlight and heat, a place where distractions fall away. Here, I will write of the world I have just left, the world to which I must soon return—dragging up stories from a cemetery of memories. I have always written best from the outside, peering in.

At night the air thickens, heavy and damp. Through the high windows of this old townhouse I look out, remembering what happened here long ago. A man stabbed in the heart with a kitchen knife, left to rot for weeks before anyone noticed, the flies devouring him first. Signora Bruschi, who has scoured the floors and scrubbed the walls, insists it was not in these rooms.

I do not believe her. Yet under the pale wash of moonlight, in a room fragrant with flowers tumbling from the iron balcony, the truth hardly matters. I hum softly to myself, listening to the percolating hiss of coffee on the stove, until the first birdsong threads through the great London Plane outside—the one whose trunk carries the carved names of lovers and bored teenagers.

I take my place on the terrace beneath its green-striped awning, my Chromebook open beside a steaming bowl of carrot cream soup from the little shop on Via Giuseppe Cesare Abba. Overhead, a man and woman murmur in their rooms. Strangers still, but as the night deepens their voices taper into silence.

Sometime after midnight, Charlie’s message arrives from Paris. He is staying there with his family for a few days. Tonight he tells me he walked to the site of the old Hôpital Broussais – not in search of medicine, but to stand on the ground where Jean-Paul Sartre once drew his final breath.