Ross had arrived in Italy six months earlier, on a rainy day with gray, stone skies. He disembarked at Rome’s Da Vinci Airport, exchanged his dollars into lire and found a pensione in a convent at only 100,000 lire a night. He spent his first week in Rome, seeking out the city’s art, dining in the splendor of the Bernini fountains in Piazza Navona and standing in the Sistine Chapel, his head craned back to look at its ceiling, tears flowing freely down his cheeks.

Then he hopped a train south to Naples. After just one day he decided the city was overly populated, crime infested and polluted, so after visiting its central museum, he moved on to Sorrento and the beautiful Amalfi coast, the Isle of Capri, then farther south, ferrying across the Strait of Messina into Sicily. He took a train into the city of Taormina, where he lived in a pensione along the Mediterranean Sea for the rest of the spring, eating blood oranges and writing his thoughts in a leather-bound journal he had bought at a street market.

He traveled throughout Sicily, ingesting the island by train and bus, from the Greek ruins in the Valley of the Temples near Agrigento to snowcapped Mount Etna, where he gathered a pocket of small volcanic rocks as souvenirs.

In late May, when the weather turned warmer and the rain stopped, his travels took him northwest, along the western coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea to La Spezia. He hiked the five cities of the Cinque Terre, taking refuge from a rainstorm in a concrete German World War II bunker. He spent a week in Genoa and two weeks in the bustling metropolis of Milan, where he saw Leonardo’s L’Ultima Cena (The Last Supper). Then he turned eastward, first to Verona, then on to Venice, wandering the labyrinth of islands for nearly three weeks. He spent two days on the island of Murano, where he watched artisans blow glass into art.

He was in no hurry, which is a virtue in all things Italian, but as summer waned he felt the desire to settle. And so in late August, his tourist visa expired, he came to Florence, where he hoped to find work at the Uffizi, Florence’s world-famous art gallery.

Though he had been alone since his arrival, now, in a town famed for its bachelors, from Donatello and Michelangelo to its present-day mammoni, he felt the extent of his loneliness amplified by his new surroundings. Florence is a city of lovers. It seemed to him that everywhere he looked there were reminders of his solitude.

Earlier that day he had sat alone in a café, watching a young Italian couple across from him as they drank their cappuccinos and looked into each other’s eyes, the two of them laughing and flirting and touching. Ross felt envy rise in his chest like an illness. It had been a long time since he had been with a woman. Still, something, a voice from some shadowed corridor of his mind, told him that it hadn’t been long enough.