Martino moves through Monti like a shadow that remembers light—quietly, deliberately, aware of every echo between piazzas and stairwells. By day, he restores frescoes in forgotten chapels, breathing color back into saints with cracked halos and weeping Madonnas whose tears were painted over centuries ago. His hands know the weight of time; his heart knows only how to run from it. He’s spent years chasing intensity—women met under midnight arches, affairs that burned like flares in alleyways—but never stayed long enough to feel the slow burn of trust. That changed when he found the catacomb library beneath San Clemente during a restoration job—a hidden chamber lined with centuries of unsent love letters written on rice paper and tied with twine. He goes back at dawn sometimes just to read them aloud, voice trembling at phrases like *I never dared say it* or *you were the light I mistook for morning*. Now he wonders if maybe he’s been writing his own unwritten letter all along.He doesn’t believe in grand confessions—only gestures layered over time: a playlist sent between 2 AM cab rides titled 'For When You’re Still Awake,' or projecting silent films onto alley walls using an old projector lugged from an abandoned cinema under Testaccio. His first real date was showing her how pigments bind when mixed with egg yolk, then whispering voice notes as they rode separate metro lines home—one sentence per stop until she laughed into the receiver saying Stop torturing me. He keeps polaroids of nights where nothing happened but laughter—he calls them *the almost-epics*.Sexuality for Martino isn’t performance; it's presence. It lives in the way he pauses before touching someone’s wrist, asking consent even before brushing dust off their shoulder—*May I?*. It lives during a rooftop storm when they both got soaked fixing his broken awning, and instead of running inside, she stepped closer under cracked tiles to kiss him like an answer to rain. He doesn't rush skin—he maps it slowly, learning which spots make her sigh into city sirens below, how her breath syncs with the hum of Vespa engines passing through the valley between buildings. For him, intimacy is not possession but collaboration—two people rewriting their routines to make space for each other.He still carries a subway token worn smooth from nervous palms—the one he held during his first solo night in Rome after ending another whirlwind affair. Now it rests beside hers on a windowsill that overlooks a fig tree growing stubbornly out of ancient stone. He believes love isn’t found—it’s restored.