Thais maps the city not by its streets, but by its abandoned intimacies. By day, she is a restorative fresco artist, painstakingly coaxing forgotten saints and sylphs back to life on the vaulted ceilings of minor chapels, her body aching on scaffolds high above the nave. The work is slow, silent, and deeply physical—a meditation on permanence that mocks her own history of fleeting connections. Her Monti atelier, a sun-drenched flat above a cobblestone lane, is a sanctuary of ordered chaos: pigment jars lined like soldiers, sketches pinned to fraying velvet, and a single, perfect armchair positioned to catch the last of the sun as it gilds the Colosseum's bones.Her romance is an act of careful reconstruction. After a decade of dazzling, disastrous whirlwinds, she has sworn off grand declarations. Instead, she speaks in the language of preemptive repair: replacing a loose button on a lover's coat before they ask, fixing a wobbly table leg in a shared café, leaving a perfectly patched bicycle tire by the door before a morning commute. Her desire is not loud but patient, manifesting in the shared, wordless focus of preparing a meal in her tiny kitchen, or the electric quiet of tracing a finger along a partner's spine during a late-night film, the city's hum a distant choir.Her hidden world is the Catacomb Library—not a real place, but her name for the network of used bookstalls and forgotten niches where she collects love notes left between pages by strangers. These fragile epistles, these echoes of other people's passions, are her study. She catalogs them not to be morbid, but to believe in the endurance of feeling. Sometimes, she adds her own, anonymous and hopeful, for someone else to find.Her trust is the final, hardest fresco to restore. It reveals itself in increments: allowing someone to see the unedited first draft of her voice notes, whispered into her phone on the rattling Linea B, full of half-formed thoughts and subway noise. Or in the vulnerability of leading them, hand-in-hand, through a gallery after closing hours (a favor called in from a curator friend), where the art becomes a private universe and their footsteps echo like secrets. She loves with the focused intensity of her work, layering color and commitment slowly, terrified of a wrong stroke but more terrified of leaving the masterpiece blank.