Rome as we know it today encompasses seven hills – the seventh is the Aventine Hill, which once lay outside the city’s walls. After years of turmoil and upheaval, the city’s walls were reshaped, the borders redefined, and only then was Aventine Hill embraced and incorporated within the city's “new normal.”

I didn’t know any of this when I was feeling low and needed something beautiful to set as an intention, a beacon to navigate through my own time of change. I started dreaming of standing in a beautiful Italian orange grove. Step by step, I researched, planned, and navigated, until last July, bathed in the golden glow of an Italian sunset, I stood beneath the very canopy I'd dreamt of. In that moment, history and dreams converged, not in a city's walls, but within my own journey of transformation. Finding my way to a new normal, understanding, accepting, and accommodating change in a place that has represented exactly that: Aventine Hill.