When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie
That's amore
When the world seems to shine like you've had too much wine
You're in love...
When you walk in a dream but you know you're not dreaming signore
Scusami, but you see, back in old Napoli
That's amore!
1953 song by composer Harry Warren and lyricist Jack Brooks famously sung by Dean Martin
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Twelve well-heeled American tourists made arrangements for a nineteen day luxury (though with some challenging physical experiences) guided tour of Italy one summer. They included five married couples and a mother-daughter team. The pairs didn't know each other before the tour but since they were from the same types of backgrounds and education level they expected to get along well. Their Italian guide, Gina, was experienced and well-educated with Masters Degrees in both Humanities and Italian history from Sapienza University, and has a pleasant demeanor while still possessing the ability to control any situation.
Four of the travelers were star-crossed, twenty four year married couple Ryan and Sylvia Bodine and the mother and daughter team Mary and Stacy Warren. All four were, of course, looking forward to travelling to legendary Capri, Naples (Napoli), and the Amalfi Coast, but each had his or her own other reasons for the adventure.
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Ryan Bodine was forty four at the start of the adventure and a very successful intellectual property attorney from the Washington, D. C. area of the United States. He is six feet two inches (188 cm) tall, 185 pounds (84 kg) of wiry muscle, blond hair and blue-eyed, accomplished as a tennis player and bicyclist, and also an enthusiastic cross-trainer.
Ryan had already graduated engineering school at twenty years old and married his college sweetheart twenty one year old Sylvia a week after he graduated from Stanford University and she from Menlo College. They have two children, twenty two year old Austin who himself graduated from Stanford the year before and now is working in a high-powered engineering job in Northern Virginia, and nineteen year old Brittany who is attending summer school in organic chemistry between her Freshman and Sophomore years at the University of Virginia.
Despite having trouble making ends meet, Ryan and Sylvia enjoyed their life while he went to law school at Northwestern University while working part time as a paralegal at an intellectual property firm in Chicago while Sylvia -- when not carrying Austin -- worked for a marketing firm in a Chicago suburb. After Ryan graduated he, Sylvia, and baby Austin, moved to Northern Virginia and Ryan started work at the largest intellectual property firm in Washington.
Ryan and Sylvia had a serious challenge in their marriage when Austin was twelve and Brittany nine; Sylvia had an affair with Jorge, another partner at the law firm Ryan worked at. When Ryan found out about the affair he shut it down cold, and demanded that the firm fire Jorge. "It's either him or me," was how he put it to the management group.
In a display of poor judgment -- because Ryan was the top producer at the firm, its best trial attorney, and because he always meant what he said -- the management didn't take Ryan seriously and offered him more money to suck it up. Two months later Ryan gave his two week notice and had already set up his own law firm taking two associates from his present firm and two partners from competing firms to join him in Bodine, Carleton, and Winston, now one of the most successful law firms of any type in the entire Washington area.
Ryan's firm panicked when he gave his notice and offered to fire Jorge, but it was too late. Also, Ryan had a plan for Jorge that would not involve the physical beating that he earnestly desired to inflict upon him, but would be more meaningful in the long run. Ryan hired a black hat hacker who, a month after Ryan left the firm, was able to alter an important brief that Jorge was filing for a key client to include the sentence: "Of course counsel for the plaintiff does not expect Judge Bryant to understand this complex legal issue because he's a fucking moron, but these arguments are made anyway to preserve the issue for appeal."
Not surprisingly Jorge was held in contempt by Judge Bryant, the plaintiff lost the case, the client was incensed and threatened a malpractice suit, and Jorge was not only fired but was unlikely to get a comparable job again once the entire situation was reported nationally by the American Bar Association Journal.
Ryan was able to forgive Sylvia and move past her affair because she appeared to be genuinely contrite but most importantly because Ryan could not imagine giving up daily contact with his young children who had a better relationship with him than they did with Sylvia.
Over the last year Sylvia seemed to have lost interest in significant intimacy, and seemed like her mind was elsewhere. Ryan hired a private detective who found unequivocally that it was not because of an affair. While Sylvia had made all of the arrangements for the trip Ryan was definitely on board. Ryan's additional purpose for the Italian excursion was to attempt to rekindle romantic feelings in Sylvia, or at least get to the bottom of her lost interest.
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