When Michelle Damiani imagined surviving in Italy, she imagined her family members as it was in Virginia-her husband filling every instant with work, her teenage son tinkering with sarcasm, her child smiling in the aroma of lilacs, her baby-cheeked son methodically clicking Legos jointly, and herself hovering over the happiness of them all-only surrounded by ancient cobblestone alleys and the sound of ringing Italian.

What she didn’t know was how Italy would work to change them all.