live life fully

By: Kamin Mohammadi

In my first year in Italy, 2008, I was introduced to the peculiar charms of the Italian summer. As a writer whose initial four weeks in Florence had quietly extended till I’d become an accidental resident (a much longer story), watching the city empty in August came as a shock. 

The idea of a month devoted to vacationing was alien to me – I am a Londoner, and we live to work. But in Italy things were different. 

The dreamy long summer was planned for from late winter: beach houses lined up for weekend visits as early as June, land-bound friends suddenly spending all their spare time messing about on boats. As more tourists filled the streets, more locals disappeared – first for weekends, then, come August, altogether. 

The city I’d fallen in love with simply… left. 

Shutters came down over favourite cafés and trattorie one by one, like eyes closing for a long nap. The streets that had roared with vespas and market chatter went eerily quiet. I was young, broke, and writing my first book with nowhere else to be. I remember standing in a piazza at midday, sweating, disoriented, watching the high summer glare bounce off empty palazzo walls, and thinking: where did everyone go?

I found out soon enough that “everyone” meant anyone with the means to leave. What was left was a small, scrappy band of us – artists too poor for the coast, writers with deadlines instead of beach houses, a handful of stubborn locals who refused to abandon their own city. 

We had Florence to ourselves that August, in a way that felt almost illicit. Sitting at my open window writing day after day, a sort of silence filtered through – an absence of the regular noises that kept me company: my neighbours cooking lunch, the whizz of mopeds crisscrossing the river, the roar of traffic underneath it all. And with the silence came community. 

In my quartiere, we gathered on the street after sundown, drinking ice-cold wine as our laughter echoed through the deserted neighbourhood. There was a strange, conspiratorial joy in being the ones who stayed – like we’d been let in on a secret: a Florence at rest, breathing, for once belonging entirely to itself.

Then September came, and with it, everyone else – returning sun-loosened and nut-brown, trailing stories of Puglian coastlines and Ligurian coves. I learned the ritual fast: the kiss on both cheeks, the allora, dove sei stata?, the languorous recounting of where they’d been, what they’d eaten, which unknown seaside town you now had to add to your list. I didn’t have my own summer story to offer that year, only August’s strange, hot solitude. But I watched the city fill back up with its people, loud and relaxed and glad to be home. 

Rientro, I came to understand, wasn’t just a return from holiday. It was a communal exhale – the moment Florence became, once again, a city of people who lived there, rather than a backdrop for people passing through.

For years, that was the shape of my summer: watch the city empty, hold on through the heat, wait for the joyful, noisy flood of rientro. It was a rhythm I came to love, repeated in cities, towns and villages all over Italy.

But the shape of things changed as the years wore on – for the city, and for me. 

Florence stopped emptying out in summer; it began, instead, to visibly fill up with visitors. Viral travel turned side streets into film sets, sleepy piazzas into queues, not just in Florence but across Italy. Somewhere in there I stopped being the newcomer and became, instead, a person other people wanted to visit. The apex arrived in the summer of 2020: four unbroken months of houseguests in Tuscany, friends craving the freedom and beauty of an Italian summer after months locked in their apartments. I loved seeing so many people I cared about. I also began to understand the toll that hosting as a way of life actually takes.

I now live in a tiny town in Umbria, which, for all its medieval hilltop charms, can’t compete with a rock star like Florence for popularity. Yet we’re close enough to Rome and Florence for friends to detour here for a few nights during their Italian sojourn. 

Again I found myself an intermittent host from late May through August, juggling time with friends and day trips with the hustle of freelance work – all in the fiercest heatwaves I’ve seen in my 18 years in Italy. The heat has always been a challenge (hence the obligatory decamping to the beach). But it has changed too. This summer, all of Italy burned up; even my usually breezy town baked in temperatures that meant my dog couldn’t lay paws on the tarmac for hours of the day. Florence itself ranked among the hottest cities in the country, a Renaissance oven. Hosting feels different at 45 degrees, and when you have to check your day-trip destinations for wildfires. You find yourself pouring the wine in the evening sweat-damp, delighted and depleted in equal measure, silently counting the days until September.

Which is, I think, why rientro means something different to me now, nearly two decades in. 

It’s no longer only about missing my community and welcoming them home. It’s about my own return – to routine, to my desk, to days not built around other people’s holidays, to heat that’s manageable, to a sun that doesn’t feel like it wants to kill you. 

To kids going back to school after a three-month holiday that has made them feral and their parents despair. I met a friend in the piazza yesterday, glowing from a summer at the beach with her family, her hair streaked blond. When I asked how her summer had been, she said simply: “This summer, I was surviving, not thriving.”

Here in Umbria, the rientro is gentler, smaller in scale, but the shape is the same: the piazza slowly repopulating with familiar faces instead of passing ones, the market finding its rhythm again, neighbours reappearing on doorsteps. Somewhere, a fire is being lit in a kitchen for the first time in months. The air, finally, has the grace to cool at night.

I don’t think I love Italy any less than I did that first sweltering August. I love it more honestly. Because loving a place fully means loving the unglamorous parts too: the exhaustion, the heat, the endless hosting duties, and then, at last, the quiet joy of everyone – myself included – coming home.

You can follow Kamin on Substack or visit her website.