I’m not Stanley Tucci, but I found exactly what I needed on this particular trip to Italy in 2016.

Do you believe in magic? For as long as I can remember, my answer has been a resounding, “Yes!” From the first time my older sister made a penny magically disappear before my five-year-old eyes, I have been an eager believer in all things woo-woo—although, looking back, I’m not sure how magical that particular instance actually was, considering she made me close my eyes during the incantation. Nevertheless, my need to experience life as mysterious and magical, full of meaningful coincidences, is compulsive. No matter how many times reality falls below those expectations, I never lose hope that the next time will be the real thing. I believe my hope was rewarded tenfold last summer on what I now term my husband’s and my magical mystery tour.

This story isn’t “a tale as old as time,” but it does go back several generations to the small village of Mercenasco in the Piedmont region of northern Italy, a short distance from Turin. My family’s roots on both sides run very deep there, and my four grandparents were the first generation in my family to emigrate from there to “the new country” back in the very early 1900s. My parents were first generation Americans who simultaneously loved the country of their birth and proudly honored their heritage. When I was growing up, that heritage was evident in our house in everything from, ahem, “colorful” Piedmontese expressions in moments of frustration to polenta on Sunday nights.

When I was fourteen, long after my grandparents had passed away, my parents took me with them on their first trip to Italy. It was a homecoming of sorts for my parents who would be meeting the many relatives and friends they’d only known through stories or correspondence. It was a revelatory trip, and I only regret that I was a bit too young to appreciate how meaningful this experience, with its sense of coming “full-circle,” was for my parents. Looking back through adult eyes, I nearly tremble, imagining the powerful emotions my parents must have felt as they walked for the first time the very streets that their parents had walked years before, stood in the houses where their parents had been born, and knelt before gravestones inscribed with names at once familiar and foreign to them. It was as close as they would ever come on this earth to touching their parents again.

With the family reunion segment of the trip concluded, my parents and I set out on the vacation portion. Although we had reservations for some of our destinations, my dad had planned to play it by ear for others, stopping where and when we pleased and finding a hotel when we got there. When we arrived in Turin, our jaws dropped slightly at what seemed a great coincidence to us. The very first hotel we encountered was called the Grande Albergo Fiorina (the Grand Hotel Fiorina), and “Fiorina” was my mother’s maiden name. The hand of destiny was obviously guiding us to stay at “my mom’s hotel,” a particularly lovely one, located on one of Turin’s gracious piazzas even without a “family” discount.

That trip with my parents was the first of several I would make over the years to la bella Italia, the land of my heritage and my heart, the place that feeds my soul like no other. Yet, for one reason or another, I never made it back to Mercenasco to visit on any of my trips. Until last summer. That’s when my husband swept me off my feet with a surprise trip to Europe to celebrate our 10^th wedding anniversary. The trip he’d planned purposely included a week in Turin to give me the chance to visit family in Mercenasco for the first time in nearly 45 years. I couldn’t have imagined a gift my very depressed spirit needed more at the time. In the preceding eighteen months I’d lost not only my mother, but my sister as well. Losing them, in addition to my father some years earlier, had left me feeling rootless, as if the foundation of my life were crumbling. My way of coping with such loss was to immerse myself in nostalgia. I spent hours poring over old photo albums, reliving old times again and again. I was drowning in a sea of profound sadness, but felt powerless to save myself. My perceptive husband threw me just the lifeline I needed.

I felt my spirit beginning to revive the minute our plane touched down in Turin. I hadn’t looked forward to anything with such gleeful anticipation in nearly two years. As our rental car made the last turn into Mercenasco, memories began flooding my senses. The smell of the fruit market where I went shopping with my aunt. The cool air in the church where we lit candles. My heart beat faster with each corner we rounded until, at last, we came to a stop in front of my cousin’s house. I got out of the car, and with shaking hands and my pulse thundering in my ears, I reached out to ring her bell.

Her front door swung open wide and my nervousness instantly evaporated as more than four decades of time collided and collapsed at once. As if by magic, I was suddenly staring into faces that I’d not seen in so long, but which had ever remained a part of my heart, a part of my life story. What a wondrous gift to spend the entire day in the company of my delightful cousins and my beautiful 96-year-old great aunt, my famiglia Italiana, my roots. The afternoon passed in a seeming moment, as two and three conversations at a time, punctuated by laughter and tears, filled the air. How I wished my parents could have been there. I was beginning to understand a little of how they must have felt on their first visit.

My husband and I spent the rest of the week enjoying Turin, completely entranced by its charm and grace. My only disappointment was that we couldn’t revisit “my mom’s hotel,” the Grande Albergo Fiorina. Before we left home, I’d scoured the internet and learned it had apparently closed some time ago. The closest I came to locating it was an old post card on an auction site, but it was just a simple sketch and gave no address. I knew it was silly, but I had been thinking that seeing it again would have been a way to reconnect with my mom, to feel as if she were with me on this trip. Well, I comforted myself, maybe it was time to make new memories.

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And that’s just what my husband and I did. We explored almost every inch of Turin, each day falling more in love with it. From the very first, we were struck by an especially elegant restaurant just around the corner from our hotel. We promised ourselves a splurge night out there before we left town. Yet each evening, our fancy dinner was postponed because by the time we returned to that end of the city, we were exhausted from walking all day. Finally, on our last evening in Turin, we made it to dinner there—a sumptuous feast—and it was a perfect ending to a perfect week together.

When we returned home from our trip, I dragged out the old photo albums again to copy a few pictures from that 1971 trip to send to my cousins. I’d spent so much time with these albums in recent months that I knew exactly the section I needed. When I flipped open to it, a small brown paper bag that I’d never seen before fell out. Where had this come from, I wondered. Looking inside, I found two post cards. My breath caught in my throat when I pulled out the first one and saw my mother’s handwriting. It was a post card she had sent me from Italy on a trip she and my dad had taken without me. The message to me said, “Everyone in Mercenasco wants to know when you are coming back to visit. I told them I knew you would make it back here someday. Love, Mommy.”

 With tears streaming down my face, I looked at the other post card and thought my heart would stop. It was an old, full-color post card of the Grande Albergo Fiorina. I just stared at the card for several moments, too stunned to move. Then, suddenly, a flash of recognition. I grabbed the post card and ran downstairs for the camera. I quickly scrolled through all the photos we’d taken until I found it. I was holding identical images in my hands, the post card of the Grande Albergo Fiorina and the digital photo in the camera of that elegant restaurant that had so captivated my husband and me, where we had dined that last night in Turin. The restaurant occupied the first floor of the building that used to be the hotel.  

In that moment I realized that my mother had been with me the whole time. Clutching the cards to my chest, I could do little more than weep. I wept the tears of a child, the frightened tears of being lost and the joyous tears of being found. I wept tears of gratitude for old post cards that appear out of thin air, for ties that transcend time, space and spiritual dimensions to bind soul to soul. And, finally, I wept with wonder at the magical mystery tour that is life, the one that is available to each one of us if only we open our hearts to it.