It’s a Friday afternoon in fall, and the A27 highway is deserted as small Italian villages and dormant farmland pass by the windows of our rental car. I’m focused on the true crime podcast coming through the speakers when the low layer of clouds suddenly parts.

The gasp I make rattles my husband Topher, who jerks the wheel in concern that we’re about to hit something. It’s a tense thirty seconds of me unhelpfully squealing, “look, look, look!” before he sees the mountains, too. Like out of a dream, the peaks I’ve been fantasizing about for years get closer and closer as we eat up the kilometers: the Dolomites.