The customs officer at Milano Linate looked at my passport for one long second, looked at me for one long second, and stamped the page without saying a single word.

I had been in the country for eight minutes. I had been awake for nineteen hours. I had not, in the previous month, slept more than five hours on any single night, on account of the project that was now waiting for me on the other side of the customs hall, and on account of the long careful list of things I had been trying to wrap up at Wickline before I left, and on account of the fact that every night of the last week, in my apartment in Wicker Park, I had lain in my bed in the dark and thought, in the small honest part of me that always spoke last: Brooklyn. You are about to fly across an ocean. You are about to live in a city you have never been in for two months. You are about to do the largest piece of work of your career, alone, in a language you do not speak. Are you sure you are ready.

The honest part of me had not, in the dark, given me an answer.

I had taken that as the answer.

I had packed.

The customs officer handed back the passport. He gave me, with the corner of his mouth, the small careful Milanese half-smile that I would, in the next eight weeks, see on the faces of waiters and concierges and barmen and women on the train and a man in the bookshop on Corso Garibaldi and the chef at the small place near the Brera who would, in the third week, become the chef who knew my order. The half-smile said, in a single small expression: I see you. I have seen you before. I will not pretend that I have not. I will also not, on a Tuesday at six in the morning, give you any more of myself than that.

I gathered my bag. I rolled the suitcase out into the arrivals hall.

The driver from the production company was standing behind the rope at the end of the hall with a small white sign that said, in careful capital letters, PACE. He was sixty. He had a heavy wool jacket and a beautiful watch and a face that had been a face for a long time. He saw me before I saw him. He raised the sign about a centimeter.

I went over.

I said, Brooklyn Pace.

He said, Signora Pace. Sono Riccardo. Welcome.

I said, thank you.

He said, the car is outside. We have, today, the bad luck of a small rain. The drive will be forty-five minutes. You will have, perhaps, time to sleep.

He took my suitcase. He walked ahead of me to the doors. He did not ask if I wanted help with the carry-on. He simply, without performance, took it from my shoulder as we walked. The Italian gesture, I would learn, was not a gesture. It was the way of doing a thing.

We went out into the small rain.

The car was a black sedan. The car had been waiting at the curb. The driver of the car was a younger man who, I would learn over the next two months, was Riccardo's nephew, and who was, on this morning, going to drive the car while Riccardo sat in the passenger seat and answered, on his phone, the four texts that had come in from the production office during the time he had been in the arrivals hall meeting me. The younger man was twenty-six. He nodded to me from the driver's seat. He said, in careful English, good morning, Signora Pace. He pulled out into the small rain.

I sat in the back of the sedan and I looked, for the first time, at Italy.

Italy, on a Tuesday morning in the second week of October, between Linate and the city, was not — and I want to give you the truthful version, because the truthful version is what I want you to have — was not, in the first ten minutes, beautiful. It was suburbs and ring roads and warehouses and a small grey rain on a long stretch of cement highway that could have been the highway between any airport and any city in any developed country in the world. There were billboards. There was a McDonald's. There was a sign for a hotel chain I had stayed in once in Cleveland. The trees were the small careful trees that had been planted along the highway by a public-works office. The sky was the color of the inside of an envelope.

I had, in the past month, been sent four photo essays about Milan by Italian-speaking friends of Simone's, which she had forwarded to me with the affectionate sentence, Pace, get romantic with the city before you get there, you will not regret it. I had read them. The essays had shown me piazzas and arched arcades and the Duomo at sunset and the Navigli at midnight. The essays had not shown me the section of the highway between the airport and the city.

It was, I want to tell you, the most useful image of the morning.

It told me — and I am being honest with you about what I felt — Milan is a real city. Milan is not a postcard. Milan is full of people who get up on Tuesday mornings in October to drive to work in the rain. You are coming here to do work. You are not coming here to fall in love with a postcard.

I was twenty-eight years old. I had been a brand strategist for four months. I had, in my carry-on, the laptop on which I had been preparing the production deck for eight weeks. I had, in my pocket, my passport and a small printed itinerary that I had folded into thirds. I had, in the suitcase in the trunk, three pairs of black trousers, four dark sweaters, two button-downs in different shades of cream, the navy down coat I had brought because the agency travel guide had warned me about Milan in November, and one black knit dress I had borrowed from Simone, who had shoved it into my hand on the morning I left Chicago, and said, Pace, in case. Just in case.

I had said, Simone. I am going to work.

She had said, Pace. I know. The dress is in case.

I had taken the dress.

We came up over a small rise on the highway, around the eighteen-minute mark, and the city, suddenly, in the grey, came into view in a way I had not been ready for. There were the small careful clusters of buildings. There was a piece of a tower in the distance — Pirelli, I would later learn. There was, beyond and behind it, the smoke of the morning trains, and the long careful line of low buildings, and the dome of something, and the short sharp shadow of a crane against the sky. The city, in the grey, on a Tuesday at six-forty, had the small important feeling that I had been looking for since I had left Chicago — the feeling of a place that has been there for a long time without me.

I sat with the feeling.

I did not, in the back of the car, cry.

I did, however, do the thing I had done on a porch in Wicker Park, and on the floor of an empty apartment in Logan Square. I noticed the city. I picked, in the skyline, one specific small thing — a piece of a tower that I had not yet learned the name of, against a piece of grey sky — and I said, in my head, very quietly: that is the thing. That is the thing I am going to remember on the days I cannot remember anything.

The driver took us off the highway. We crossed the ring. We came into the city through the eastern side, on small streets that were starting to wake up. There were men in long coats walking small dogs. There were women in scarves at café windows. There were trams. There were, on every other corner, the small bright lights of a bar that had opened at six and had already started to make espresso for the morning's first dozen customers.

We turned onto a street I would, in two weeks, learn was called Via San Marco. We pulled up, on the right, in front of a small hotel that did not announce itself. The hotel had no awning. The hotel had a single small brass plate by the door. The hotel had the particular calm exterior of a building that had been a building for two hundred years, and that had only, in the last thirty, been a hotel.

Riccardo got out. He took the suitcase. He walked me to the door. The doorman, who knew him, opened the door without speaking. The lobby was small. The lobby had a single low desk in dark wood and a single woman behind it in a navy suit and a small careful chignon and a face that was, in the way of women who worked the morning desk at small Milanese hotels, completely unreadable.

She greeted me by name.

She said, Signora Pace. Welcome to the Hotel San Marco. Your room is ready. You have a meeting at the production office at eleven. The car will be at the door at ten-thirty. May I offer you, in the meantime, a small coffee.

I said, yes please.

She said, cappuccino? Espresso?

I said, cappuccino.

She said, very good.

She handed me a key. The key was an actual key. The key was on a small heavy brass fob with the room number engraved on it. The key was the kind of key I had not held, in a hotel, in my life. American hotels, in the years I had been alive, had been giving out keycards.

I took the key.

Riccardo nodded to me. He said, I will see you, Signora Pace, at ten-thirty. Sleep, if you can. The city will still be here.

He went out.

I went up.

The room was on the third floor, at the back, looking down into a small interior courtyard with two trees and a single iron bench and the kind of soft light that filtered down between the buildings only on the kind of grey morning Milan was having. The bed had been turned down. The cappuccino arrived, on a small tray, three minutes after I had come into the room. There was a small biscotto on the saucer. The biscotto was, in fact, two small biscotti, wrapped in a piece of waxed paper that had a single careful gold stamp on it.

I sat on the edge of the bed. I drank the cappuccino. I ate the biscotti.

I called my mother on FaceTime.

She picked up immediately. She had been waiting. It was, in Dayton, the middle of the night.

She said, Brooklyn.

I said, Mom. I am here.

She said, let me see.

I held up the phone. I turned it slowly. I showed her the small careful room, the bed, the window, the courtyard, the cappuccino on the small tray.

She said, Brooklyn.

I said, yes.

She said, that is — that is a very pretty room.

I said, I know.

She said, did you eat on the plane.

I said, I ate on the plane.

She said, good.

I said, Mom. I have to sleep for an hour. I have a meeting at eleven.

She said, Brooklyn.

I said, yes.

She said, call me tonight. After the meeting. Tell me how it went.

I said, I will.

She said, I love you.

I said, I love you.

I hung up. I closed the curtains. I set the alarm on my phone for nine-thirty. I lay down on the bed in my clothes. I did not, for a minute, sleep. I lay there and I listened to the small careful sounds of the courtyard — a tram, distantly; a man speaking Italian on a phone, in a window across the way; a piece of an espresso machine, two floors below, hissing into the morning.

I thought, in the dark of the closed-curtain room: I am in Italy.

I thought, also: the meeting is in three and a half hours. Sleep.

I slept.

The alarm woke me at nine-thirty.

I got up. I took a shower in the small careful marble bathroom. I put on the dark trousers and the cream button-down and the dark cardigan I had folded carefully in my carry-on, on the off chance that the suitcase had not, in fact, made it to Milan. I put on the small earrings. I put on the navy blazer. I looked at myself in the mirror.

I said, out loud, in the small careful Milanese hotel room: Brooklyn. Go to work.

I went down. The car was at the door. Riccardo was in the passenger seat. The younger nephew was at the wheel.

We pulled out into the rain.

In an hour I would, for the first time, walk into the offices of Casata di Vega, and meet Signora Vega, and meet the Italian production team, and begin the eight weeks that, more than any other eight weeks of my life, would teach me — and I am not being dramatic, I am only telling you the truth — what wanting actually felt like.

But that was in an hour.

For the moment I sat in the back of the car in the small grey rain in Milan and I held my laptop bag on my lap and I watched the city, in the morning, do its work.

I was, for the first time in my life, in a country in which I did not speak the language of the people on the sidewalk.

I was, for the first time in my life, on a job I was going to do alone.

I was, for the first time in my life, exactly the right age for what was about to happen.

I would, however, have to wait — about eleven days — to find out what what was about to happen actually was.

For the moment, the rain.

For the moment, the car.

For the moment, Milan.