Growing up a fan of , getting fucked à la in a medieval city was a natural bucket list item for me. So, when my rolled around and Lorenzo*, a poet I’d met through my alma mater’s graduate networking program, reached out with an invitation to meet in Florentine style, I dusted off my corset and considered my options. I never thought of myself as the kind of woman who catches a flight for sex.
But there I was, at 10 a.m. at the Madrid Barajas airport, boarding the earliest plane to Florence to meet up with a man I’d never actually seen in real life.
We’d been chatting for a while online, bonding over our mutual love of the written word, nature, and our opposing views of the quaint college town in which we’d both lived but somehow never crossed paths. “I can host you at my place,” he wrote. “Take you around the city.
Worst that can happen, you spent a few days in Florence.” While there was obvious chemistry between us, flying two hours east to meet in person could either go well or wrong. But after deliberating in my (close friends) group chat, I decided: If there’s one thing about being a single woman starting her thirties in a world where we’ve reduced romance to dick pics, one-night stands, and non-committal relationships, it’s that when adventure calls, you answer.
Of course, there was another incentive pulling me toward the city of Dante and Beatrice. Lorenzo was hot. Tall with black hair and dark, sad eyes lost in thought and prose.
He was the ste.