Named after a suitcase

There is a photograph I keep from our first trip - outside an apartment building in Florence, luggage clattering on cobblestones, laughing at how far we had walked in heat we hadn't prepared for. What the photograph does not show is Positano that evening: restaurants full of people who had known, in advance, which terrace overlooked which bend in the coastline. We ate well enough. Positano wanted us to eat extraordinarily.

The rest of that trip, I made notes. The courtyard lunch we found only because we were tired enough to stop walking. The bar with no sign, where a Negroni was mixed like an act of ceremony. The beach in the late afternoon, when the light did something to the water I have never been able to describe since. None of it was in a guide. All of it was luck - and luck, as a luxury, is wildly inconsistent.

“We build every itinerary the way I pack that suitcase. Nothing unnecessary. Nothing generic. Everything chosen for a reason - and that reason is you.”

I have a black suitcase - deliberate, worn in exactly the right places, carrying a sticker from everywhere that mattered. It is the most accurate expression of what travel should be: strong enough to take you anywhere, beautiful enough that the journey feels like part of the destination. I named the house after it.

The Founder, Valise Noire