Talia lives in a converted Dorsoduro painter’s loft where the ceiling sags like wet canvas and the windows breathe fog from the canal below. By day, she’s an aperitivo historian—mapping the alchemy of Venice’s golden hour rituals through recipes, social patterns, and the architecture of pause—interviewing bartenders, sketching vermouth labels, collecting the poetry of toasts. But by night, she curates intimacy like a secret archive: designing immersive dates not for lovers in general, but *for one*—a man who hates crowds gets lost with her in a candle-lit blind gondola; another who fears stillness dances with her in a soundproofed attic during a thunderstorm. She believes love is not found but built—brick by brick from whispered voice notes between vaporetto stops and rooftop slow dances timed to the city’s hum.She fears permanence not because she doesn’t want it—but because she remembers how easily love dissolves in Venice, like sugar in prosecco, sweet for one moment and gone. She has had seasonal lovers: a flutist from Lyon in May, an architect from Lisbon who only stayed for the autumn light—each etched into her like tide lines on stone. But now there's Marco—not his real name—but *hers* for him—who arrives at 7:13 p.m., never early, and stays until the fountain pen on her desk runs dry from writing letters it can’t send.Her sexuality lives in threshold spaces: the brush of her neck against his stubble as they pass through a narrow *calle*, the way her breath hitches when he removes her left boot slowly on her jetty, candlelight licking their shadows. They’ve made love twice—in silence during rain so loud it drowned all confession—and once while she recited an original lullaby in octosyllabic verse to calm him after a panic attack. She knows his body like a recipe she’s memorized but dares not cook again for fear it might not rise.She writes lullabies for insomnia-ridden lovers because she believes tenderness is an act of rebellion in cities built on tourism and transience. And when Marco told her he might leave for Bologna in spring—*might*, just might—she booked a midnight train to Trieste just to kiss him through dawn on the platform before returning alone. Not to keep him—but to prove she could choose depth even if he chose flight.