Last summer, my daughter, my dad, my grandmother and I all saw olive trees for the first time. We walked through the grove next to our villa in the evening light, falling in love with the views of Tuscany, Italy, like so many had before us. “It’s the most romantic country,” I was told over and over by friends before I visited. “You are going to love the evening light against the rolling hills.”
Our villa was tucked up into the hills of Sansepolcro, Italy, at the end of a 20-minute drive on a dirt road filled with crevices that resembled craters more than potholes, past fields of sheep grazing, of sunflowers with their faces stretched to the sun. My mom had found a villa that could hold 28 of us, the number to which my extended family had grown. We stretched across four generations, ranging from my 1-year-old niece to my grandmother, now a great-grandmother of seven. Everyone came: my aunts, uncles, cousins, and their children, from all across the globe, for a week of being together and enjoying one another.
