On the train from Milan to Corniglia; looking out and looking down. At my feet and out the window. Scenes pass by like moments from a drunken evening. Blurry and uninterrupted.

I spend the next six days eating only flour, butter and water. Hiking hills as the sun rises over the horizon. Peeling cotton off my skin to jump into my favorite sea— where swimming is unnecessary because you bob like a cork— swaddled in salt, rocking back and forth through tired waves.

I’m forever a student of homelands, curious about where people come from and what that even means. “It’s my soil, the place I feel most like myself,” my great-grandmother told me once in her garden, clutching a hand full of Idaho dirt. She was describing her childhood, spent on the hilly border of Italy and Switzerland.

I think about my great-grandmother often here, her roma tomatoes and sliced bread. I take these photos to understand her, what she might have seen, and how her life would be different if she never left. I sit into the afternoon and watch the light bounce off apricot buildings onto healthy bodies, painterly and raw.