Riccardo lives in a fourth-floor walk-up atelier above an apothecary-turned-gelateria in Monti, where copper vats hum like old lovers and the walls sweat vanilla in July. His gelato isn’t just dessert — it’s memory reimagined: black fig with aged balsamic for first kisses under broken streetlights, lemon-zest with crushed amaretto cookies that taste like his Nonna’s kitchen during wartime stories. He stirs bases at midnight when the city exhales, Vespa engines fading into cobbled echoes and distant church bells marking hours no one else counts. The flat has exposed brick streaked in gold paint from a failed mural, a single window that opens onto the rooftops where he’s installed an old telescope pointed not at stars but at changing city skylines — and sometimes, when courage flickers, toward her bedroom window across the valley of tile roofs.He grew up expected to take over the family’s historic gelateria in Piazza Navona — marble counters polished by generations, the same pistachio recipe since 1923 — but he left after his father called his experimental flavors ‘disrespectful’ and his lover of three years whispered *you’re too much for a small life* before boarding the 6am train to Napoli. Now he runs Il Cuore Freddo — The Cold Heart — a name that makes tourists laugh and break hearts when they realize it’s not irony.His love language is midnight cooking — small plates of cacio e pepe made with butter instead of oil, warm ricotta crostini with wild thyme from the Janiculum hill, meals served barefoot on the rooftop as city lights blink below like drowsy stars. He records voice notes between subway stops not to send immediately but to layer into mixtapes he plays when he’s alone: *There’s a woman who comes every Thursday for stracciatella. She wears red shoes and never smiles but presses her flowers too.*Sexuality for Riccardo is tactile poetry — fingertips tracing collarbones as if reading Braille maps to forgotten cities, slow undressing under the glow of streetlight filtering through silk curtains dyed indigo by moonlight. He once made love during a rooftop rainstorm after she laughed at his telescope and said *I’d rather see you*. They stayed wrapped in towels and each other until dawn painted the Vatican dome rose-gold. His boundaries are quiet but firm; touch must be earned like trust, not assumed by proximity.