The Watchmaker

A childhood year living in a medieval Italian city has haunted – in a friendly way – all of the other places I've ever lived.

When I first arrive it will look remarkably like the upper city – Città Alta – in Bergamo, Italy.

Bergamo was the walled medieval town where I lived for a single year as a child. It had cobblestone streets, a piazza with a fountain littered with coins that were free for the taking if you’d only stick your skinny bare arm into the cold fountain water. It had a bakery that pumped out the fresh crunch of early-morning bread – which was then buttered carefully, European style, the knife held awkwardly in the right hand like our mother showed us.

It had an actual blacksmith with a forge that would burn your retinas when you stared at it from the shop doorway, and it had its grave, Latin-speaking churches with tearful old, bundled-up women. In an open-air laundry beneath magnificent chestnut trees those same women, laughing now, did their weekly washing.

Bergamo had its fantastic funiculari that traversed the city hills at Seussian trajectories. You could buy carrots from a cart hauled by do…