Above all, she remembers the beach. She would wake every morning to a view of the sea, spend her days splashing in the surf, playing football on the sand with her brothers. They would talk into the night, eating and drinking, the waves crashing below them. These are her earliest and most treasured memories: Nettuno, the coastal town an hour south of Rome, where her nonna still lives and which Alessia Russo still describes as her favourite place in the world.
The story goes – and so fondly is it recounted in the Russo family that it has long since passed into lore – that one day Alfonso was up from Sicily, visiting Rome with a friend, when he saw a girl stepping on to a train at the railway station. No, not just a girl. The girl. Two fairly major issues: he didn’t know her, and it wasn’t his train. But Alfonso was a true romantic, the train was about to leave the station, and above all he knew that some moments in life just need to be seized.
