A night in Vasto, Italy

The church in Vasto, Italy. Photo by Katie Botkin.

A Letter from Katie Botkin in Italy:

On the way back to Pescara, we stop in Vasto, which has been a nice town since the days of the Roman Empire, for some pizza, meeting up with one of Alex’s friends in the process. Our table has no adornment, so Alex runs outside to pick a small bouquet of flowers and sets it in a cup.

“You know that not all Italian men are like this,” Fatma tells me. I nod sagely.

After the pizza, we take a night tour of the town. The sidewalks are made of marble, softly glistening under the street lamps, and we can see the curve of the bay below, glowing with lights. We walk through one wall of a cathedral, the rest of which fell into the sea a couple of decades ago. And where there was supposed to be a parking lot, there’s a collection of Roman ruins.

“That’s the problem with doing any construction around here,” says Alex’s friend, our impromptu guide. “You run the risk of finding ruins and not being able to complete anything.”