Everywhere I went, I walked in her footsteps. She stepped on these same stones, past the Roman-era thermal baths, beyond the church, to the 15th-Century castle in the heart of the town. When I pictured her, she was no longer the white-haired octogenarian I knew from my childhood, but a 25-year-old newlywed with her whole life ahead of her.

In the first days of my honeymoon, I travelled to the region of Abruzzo in central Italy to retrace the same steps my great-grandmother Filomena walked after her own nuptials, almost 100 years earlier. For the past two years, I’d been so busy planning my own wedding that I didn’t have much time to think about what it meant to be married. But travelling to the town where Filomena began her 50-year union seemed like a good place to start.