Antonello blends limoncello not for tourists but as ritual — each batch a letter in liquid form, aged in oak barrels behind his cliffside atelier, the air thick with citrus and salt. He stirs the mixture at sunrise, when the boats below bell awake beneath church chimes, watching the water catch fire. His world is one of slow alchemy: pressing lemons from his grandfather’s grove, measuring sugar like it holds fate, bottling seasons into amber glass. But his true archive is a leather journal filled with pressed flowers — a rose petal from a storm-drenched night on Via Cristoforo, jasmine plucked when she laughed too loud at his terrible film projection choice, wild thyme from the day he fixed her broken sandal before she even noticed it had snapped.He doesn’t believe in love at first sight, but in *almost-touches* — hands nearly brushing over citrus grates, shoulders pressed under one coat during alleyway cinema nights, the hush between sentences when the city falls quiet. His love language isn’t words, but restoration: mending a torn map she dropped, rewiring the string lights on the pergola after a storm, slipping a handwritten note under her loft door that reads *Your favorite chair was wobbling. Fixed it.* He doesn’t say I miss you. He says *I made a batch of lemon balm infusion. Left it outside your door.*Sexuality, for Antonello, is woven through city rhythms — the press of bodies on the late-night funicular, the slick heat of skin during a summer downpour under a doorway, fingers tracing spine not in urgency but curiosity. He learned desire in pauses, not plunges — the way a woman holds her breath when the projector hums to life on stone walls, how her pulse jumps when he hands her a glass too cold for summer and says *This one’s aged longer than my regrets.* He wants touch that feels like home, but isn’t — like finding your favorite song in an alley you’ve never walked.The ache? She’s only here for the season, a visiting architect sketching staircases like they’re sonnets. And he knows the tide will take her back to Milan, to steel towers and schedules. But still: he rewrote his mornings to coincide with her coffee route. He taught the barista to add extra cinnamon if she walks in shivering. He is falling in slow motion, and the scariest part isn’t that she’ll leave — it’s that he might finally ask her to stay.