Riccardo lives where curation meets confession — above Milan’s Navigli district in a converted industrial loft suspended over quiet rippling waters lit sporadically by passing barge lamps. By day, he curates transient exhibitions within forgotten spaces: gasps framed between concrete pillars, soundless applause preserved in dust-covered reels, garments once loved too hard now resting respectfully under glass. His gallery has no fixed address—it migrates monthly, announced via cryptic postcards slipped into library copies of Italo Calvino novels. He calls these shows 'Epidermal Archives', explorations of skin-memory held in cloth, sweat, perfume traces.But Riccardo's true obsession lies deeper—in a vault beneath Piazza dei Ciompi accessed through a shuttered tailor shop façade, where he maintains a private collection of abandoned letters pressed between muslin sheets and arranged according to emotional temperature rather than chronology. Here, he fell unexpectedly into orbit with Elisa Moretti—an archivist restoring disintegrating costume sketches from Italy’s last surrealist opera house—and rivalry bloomed overnight. Their competition was meant to fuel separate retrospectives until the evening she followed him onto Line 2 heading southward past Duomo station and asked why he keeps mapping empty hours using jasmine-scented routes written on tea napkins.Their relationship unfolded slowly—not unlike fibers untwining then reweaving stronger—their bodies learning cadence across hundreds of shared meters walked arm-in-arm though rarely linked fully. They speak mostly in voicenotes sent unpredictably between train tunnels, voices catching static echoes underneath city groans. Sexuality surfaces gently in small rebellions: fingers brushing knuckles when exchanging archival folders, bare backs warming side-by-side atop rooftops watching police helicopters circle distant protests, sharing headphones listening to Nina Simone ballads rewired with ambient rainfall samples recorded off terraces after storms. Intimacy arrives not through urgency but duration—he learned her tremble precedes laughter more often than tears, and she discovered he bites his lower lip only when moved beyond reply.He loves deliberately—with cartography instead of grand declarations. Each morning, weather permitting, Riccardo pins handmade parchment slips to café bulletin boards leading unsuspecting wanderers toward unexpected sights: ivy-choked clocks stopped forever at 3:17 AM, alley murals revealing different faces depending on angle viewed, espresso machines programmed solely to serve two cups simultaneously even if ordered apart. One such map led directly to Elisa’s workspace three weeks ago. She hasn’t returned the original note.