Present Day, late September 2026
I was born in Umbria in April 1458 in a small town that no longer exists under the name I would remember it by. My mother died in the hours after I was born. My father was dead before the year was out, killed in a war in Naples that was about the succession of a kingdom that itself no longer exists. I was an infant double-orphaned in a place I do not remember, sent north to Florence before I was old enough to form memories.
I have never returned. This is partly practical: the documentation that would allow me to visit a region of Italy with a coherent biography has always required careful construction, and there is nothing in Umbria that requires my presence badly enough to justify the construction. But it is also something else, something harder to name: the place where you begin is not a place you can revisit except in imagination, because the person who would revisit it is so different from the person who left it that the revisiting would be a kind of fiction.
I left before I could remember leaving. My entire conscious existence has been exile from a starting point I do not remember. I find, sitting with this tonight, that I am not sure whether this is a loss or a liberation. Probably both. Most things are both when you hold them long enough.
Umbria is full of medieval hill towns and rolling green and the particular light of central Italy in autumn. I know this from reading. I know this from paintings. I have never seen it myself. This is my original fact.