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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At forty five years old, Sylvia had been experiencing problems over the last fourteen months or so that she had not come to grips with. Sylvia knew that she was adopted but had no details whatsoever about her birth family. Through a DNA test on 23 & Me about sixteen months ago she had connected with a sixty five year old woman who was her biological aunt -- a sister of her birth mother.
Through the aunt, and work by a genealogical society, she ultimately came to learn that her birth parents were both of Italian extraction from the Amalfi Coast and that her birth name was Gabrielle Amendola (Amendola being the surname of roughly 12% of Almalfi Coast natives). Her birth parents were killed in an auto accident when she was six months old, her aunt was her only living relative that could be found and at twenty years old was not in a financial or emotional situation to care for her, so she was put up for adoption and her name changed to Sylvia Evans. Since her adopted parents were of English and German heritage she had no Italian influence in her life.
Sylvia had a longing that she couldn't really put her finger on after she found out this information. She is a beautiful woman who normally kept herself in good physical condition but had started to lose muscle tone because she had become preoccupied with the subject and found her mind constantly wandering. Although probably unrelated to her recent findings about her heritage she also was sometimes having flash-backs to her affair, now ten years ago, and felt significant remorse. Even though Ryan had given every indication that he had forgiven her she wondered how that could be and didn't consider herself worthy of his forgiveness. She shared none of the feelings about her heritage or remorse with Ryan, or anyone else.
When Sylvia became aware of the luxury trip to the Amalfi Coast she jumped on the opportunity to visit her birth parents' homeland and try to see if she had a connection with her roots. For the four months before the trip she had secretly been taking intense Italian language lessons and studying the history and culture of the Amalfi Coast. Therefore Sylvia's main reason for the Italian excursion was not just a vacation, but to try and connect with her roots -- and as a secondary matter to try to overcome her tardy feelings of guilt.
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Eighteen year old Stacy was a rising senior in High School and a truly beautiful young woman. She had an illness when young that held her back a year, but now was completely healthy and a good athlete and student. Her biological father died when she was six years old but even though she was very young at the time she still remembered him vividly because he always treated her like a princess, and referred to her as "my special girl."
Stacy's mother Mary re-married Tim Burton (six years her junior) when Stacy was nine. Tim's only good quality, as far as Stacy was concerned, was that he was good-looking. Stacy hated her stepfather with a passion even before he married Mary, and threw a fit when Mary was considering taking Tim's last name. To placate Stacy Mary agreed to keep her late husband's surname of Warren and Stacy always made a point of making sure that everyone knew that her last name was that of her real father, not her stepfather's.
Besides a vacation, Stacy's other reason for this trip was to convince her mother that she should jettison Tim because he was a leech who couldn't hold a job, had acted inappropriately with Stacy's friends, and seemed to go out of his way to make her life miserable, although he didn't succeed.
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Forty year old Mary Warren has exotic looks, not normal beauty like her daughter, enhanced by her lustrous blond curly hair that she wears shoulder length, and piercing steel blue eyes. Probably 10% of the hetero male population would consider Mary's looks spectacular, another 50% would consider her beautiful, and the final 40% would consider her attractive but nothing special. One thing that most likely all hetero males could agree upon, however, is that she has a perfect ass -- round, firm, and slightly over-sized -- with thighs that complement her ass perfectly.
Mary is a petite woman at five feet three inches (160 cm) tall and 114 pounds (52 kg), but with a full chest and as many curves as a 114 pound woman could possibly have. She is intelligent, personable, and friendly. Those who know her also are keenly aware that he has a mischievous element to her personality, which some might call "playful" and others "wild."
While no one would ever be able to tell from the way that she deals with other people, Mary is also extraordinarily wealthy from trust funds set up by her wealthy parents and grandparents but also because her first husband was a man of significant means and left his entire fortune to her when he died. While Mary does not live ostentatiously every year she gives hundreds of thousands of dollars (always anonymously) to charities and also significant amounts of her time.
