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Mini-Series: The First 60 Days in Italy—EPISODE II
Last episode (Beginning Anew): We arrived in Italy and went straight into quarantine—life was paused here in much of the same way it was back in America. However, there was a in elevated sense of togetherness that would frame our travels to come. A new country in an unprecedented time held its armored arms out to us. [READ: Beginning Anew — bridge episode]
Quarantine ended with wide open curiosity—and excitement.
We had counted down the days. Outside had a new meaning.
Not because the world was suddenly safe, but because the clock had done what clocks do: it kept moving forward, indifferent and exact. Our quarantine time was up and we were cleared to move.
And the first place Italy gave us wasn’t a villa, or a sunlit apartment with shutters and a balcony full of basil.
It was a hotel. Not very far from the Quarantine house. On the same post.
A room that smelled like fresh sheets and disinfectant, a scent that says no one belongs here for long. We soon made it our own, the way we do temporary spaces. It would be filled with tents that served as forts for the children, the playstation and controllers found their resting space near the tv waiting to host the next sibling battle, or solo adventure. The desk would transform to fit the two girls who were still doing school online. How they moved across the world while keeping their school grades up and studies on point is unreal and remains a testament of their resilience.
We walked in carrying everything we could carry—suitcases, backpacks, that tense patience you develop when your whole life is in transit. There’s a particular kind of humility that comes when your “home” is a rolling bag that can tip over if you pull it too hard. Our furniture was still somewhere at sea. Our car was still on a boat. Our address existed only on forms.
We had arrived.
The hotel became our first Italy—our first perimeter. Beds curiously neat and tight. A little table that tried its best to feel like a dining room. Yet, still from the windows—snowcapped mountains, the treat that kept promising that there was so much more that we were waiting for or that was waiting for us.
And still—still—something in us refused to sit in the waiting room of our own life.
Because becoming doesn’t begin when everything is ready.
Becoming begins when you move anyway.
Little Big Adventures always begin this way…curiosity then movement almost on the heels of wanting to do it. Like we could paint the picture and step right into. We rented the largest car they had from the on-post rental—something big enough to hold all of us, plus the invisible cargo: nerves, anticipation, a brand-new map of who we were about to become.
We didn’t wait for our car to arrive.
We didn’t wait to feel settled.
We didn’t wait for certainty
We chose motion.
We chose the road.
The drive out of Vicenza felt like an opening sentence. Fields and fences. Signs in Italian that were speaking to us even when we didn’t fully understand. The girls in the backseat reading the landscape like it was a movie—eyes wide, taking in the newness.
And then—Venice.
Not quite the Venice from postcards. Not the Venice you see in summer reels with laughter spilling over bridges like champagne. This Venice was paused.
Masks on the few faces we saw. Streets with space in them. Shops half-awake. Water moving the way water moves—steady, ancient, unconcerned with human schedules. The city didn’t feel empty like abandonment.
It felt empty like reverence, a preamble to an epic journey.
As if the whole place had turned the volume down and left only the essentials: footsteps, breath, the hush of canals, the echo of your own presence returning to you.
We crossed into it like you cross into a cathedral.
And I remember thinking—perhaps this is the first time Venice was able to speak uninterrupted.
Not the tourist version.
The real one.
The one that exists when no one is performing for anybody.
We moved through the streets with the kind of alertness you can’t fake—new country, new rules, new rhythms. But beneath the awareness, there was another feeling too, subtle and powerful:
Presence.
COVID wasn’t over. It was here too. But here was a different here. An arrival not just to a place but one that had new stories to tell and a beauty that kind of feels like a looking glass.
It was showing not only a place to revere for its majesty, but one that we could see ourselves in. We were exploring the grandeur of this place during a time when the world was supposedly shut down, had stopped moving—yet, our world was awakening, evolving.
There was a discounted gondola ride that day—one of those small, practical miracles that doesn’t look like a miracle until you realize how much it means to your spirit. We stepped in carefully, as if the boat could read our uncertainty.
The gondolier didn’t perform like the movies.
He was kind. Direct. Human.
His voice carried the weight of survival. He told us about how things had been. About family. About work. About what it felt like when a city built for visitors suddenly had no visitors. It wasn’t tragedy as entertainment. It was truth as atmosphere.
And I watched my husband listening. I watched my children absorbing. I watched myself—quiet, attentive, newly aware that this overseas life wasn’t going to be a montage. It was going to be real.
The gondola slid forward. Water tapped softly against wood. The city watched us without judgment.
And in that moving hush, I felt something shift. Not a big, dramatic shift.
A deep one.
Like a root catching in soil.
Like the nervous system exhaling one layer of its armor.
Venice didn’t welcome us with fireworks.
Venice welcomed us with space.
With stillness that wasn’t empty, just uncluttered.
With proof that beauty doesn’t need crowds to be undeniable.
And here we were, the Littles, invited to witness and to take up space.
This was a threshold.
Venice wasn’t impressing us.
It was meeting us.
And somewhere between the canal’s quiet bend and the gondolier’s measured truth, something loosened inside my chest. A tension I hadn’t known I was carrying finally exhaled.
That our presence didn’t disrupt the world.
That our family could exist, visible and unremarkable, in this place.
And then—our first gelato in Italy.
A small thing that would become our thing. A newfound ritual.
Cold sweetness, bright flavor, the kind of taste that doesn’t just hit your tongue—it tells your brain: this is real. you’re here. you made it.
My girls were smiling with their eyes. My husband’s face had that look—half wonder, half calculation—like he was trying to memorize the moment and protect it at the same time.
And me?
I was watching us become a family abroad in real time.
Not in theory.
Not in planning.
Not in a Pinterest board version of “expat life.”
In a mask. On a quiet Venetian street. Holding gelato like a promise.
We took pictures, easily. no waiting for passersby or competing for space or a background without others in the frame. We able to get closeups with the star herself, Venice. No lines, no waiting.
We returned to the hotel later, carrying Venice back with us like a lantern. The room was the same—beds, walls, luggage—but we weren’t. Something had been named inside us:
We don’t wait for life to feel perfect before we live it.
We live it on purpose—inside the imperfect conditions.
That night, the hotel didn’t feel like a temporary holding space. It felt like the first chapter. Like the beginning of a rhythm.
In the coming weeks:
- A birthday on the water at Scaligero Castle
- An old beater van that would unlock more of Italy
- An Epic winter storm
- Mildred’s granddaughter makes a Thanksgiving spread out of inheritance and instinct in a tiny two burner hotel kitchen
- House hunting before Christmas like we were chasing a deadline that had claws
But on this first voyage—this first Venice—our family learned the core truth of the series:
The move is not what makes you global.
The move is what reveals what you’re made of.
And Venice? Venice was the first mirror
If you’ve ever paused at the edge of what you know,
not to escape it,
but to see what else might be possible—
like this story and tell me what it shifts in you in the comments below.
Thank you for being here!
Read next:
If you want the practical guide companion to this story—what to see/what to do—we’re publishing the guide next.
Venice Guide — ready to go!
Series navigation:
Mini series: The First 60 Days in Italy
→All episodes in this mini-series
→Italy World Page
Coming up next in the series…
Episode III — A Birthday Surrounded by Water and a Castle (Lake Garda / Sirmione): Zhaniya turns ten in Sirmione—castle walls, water circling stone, and our first time on a boat on a lake in a new country where we were still learning the rules.
Because Italy wasn’t just giving us scenery.
It was giving us tests disguised as celebrations.
And we were learning—moment by moment—how to meet them as a family.
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