The Italy of my imagination exists in perpetual summer. The days are pleasant and uniform; the sun casts long shadows, hour after hour, horizon to horizon, until it dips into the sea and gives way to a gradient twilight; the nights are warm and sort of electric. 

I became conscious of this mental summer when I landed in Italy for the first time in mid-January. I met up with my mother, who had arrived a week earlier, and we stayed in functioning monasteries in Venice, Florence, and Assisi. 

Italy in Wintertime has its own star quality. The light is different than in my imagined summer, perhaps starker, but no less lovely. There’s a welcome sense of solitude and self-reflection. The residue of warm-weather hedonism lingers, but everyday life is the main event. In Venice, first thing in the morning, men hauling stuff on utilitarian gondolas shout gruff greetings over their engines. Then, in Florence, refined older women in wool overcoats and low heels whisper together in front of beatific paintings of heaven and hell. A barista with tattoos on his hands makes macchiatos without looking away from a soccer match on his cafe’s tiny TV. In Assisi, a nun pauses at the window of her monastery’s chapel, lost in thought, and a couple, ascending a staircase, lifts their child between them. People bend against the wind, holding their hats down. Italy’s beauty in the off-season is comparatively frank. Reputed for its glamour, it shows up bare-faced and still wows.