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The road to the medieval village of Ravello rises from the sea and zigzags up a long steep incline terraced with vineyards and lemon groves that, from a distance, look like yellow confetti scattered across the hills.

Because of its isolated location, Ravello is not as much on the tourist circuit as other towns in the area. The day we arrived, the streets were pleasantly uncrowded; an air of normalcy prevailed as the local villagers went about their daily errands.

To reach the center of town required a long walk up many steps. I lagged behind with Marta, ducking in and out of tiny shops and peering through gated doorways. In the courtyard of one house we spied a family of cats. A few were full-grown, but most—at least a dozen—were kittens of various sizes. Marta, also a cat fancier, stopped with me to watch the feline circus going on inside the gates. While the adult cats engaged in a hilarious round of territorial strutting, the kittens proceeded to stalk blades of grass, pounce on sticks, bite each other on the neck, tip over pots, and fall into small ditches before dozing off, one on top of another.

“Makes you homesick for your cat, doesn’t it?” Marta said, laughing at their antics.

“More than you know,” I said.

Actually, a small breeze of homesickness had been blowing over me for the last few days. I suspected, however, that I wasn’t homesick for anything I would find at home when I returned. The longing was for what I wouldn’t find: the past and all the people and places and cats that were lost to me. I’d been thinking a lot about that lately—the inevitability of separation, in one form or another, from all those we love and, in a different way, from ourselves as we were in the past.

But there would be time enough to face down those feelings in the weeks ahead; this was my last day with the group and I intended to enjoy it.

Although I do not believe in love at first sight—not with a man, anyway—I do believe it’s possible to fall instantly in love with a place. As soon as Marta and I emerged from the narrow lane and entered Ravello’s pristine town square, I felt the zing of Cupid’s arrow hitting my heart. I was smitten instantly. But why Ravello? I wondered. Why didn’t I fall for sparkling Amalfi or dazzling Positano? For some reason I found myself comparing the three towns to men. If Amalfi were a man, I thought, he’d be dressed by Calvin Klein and reading Tom Clancy. Positano would wear Armani and carry a book by John Le Carré. But if Ravello were a man—ah, Ravello!—he would be in chinos and a fresh white oxford shirt with no tie, buried in a book by Graham Greene.

After spending the morning touring one of Ravello’s spectacular cliffside villas, the entire group gathered for lunch. We met at Salvatore’s, a family-run trattoria overlooking the Gulf of Salerno. For me it was a good-bye luncheon; after returning to Rome that night I would be leaving the group.

We ate outside on a vine-covered terrace that jutted out over the cliff’s edge, above the blue basin of the sea; it was like being suspended in midair. Since Salvatore and members of his family cooked each dish from scratch, there was time between courses to enjoy a brief stroll through the nearby cypress trees, or change tables to catch up with the others, or, best of all, to simply sit breathing in the lemon-scented mountain air as it moved through the lemon groves and down the hillside to us.

I looked around at the faces that over the past weeks had become familiar to me. La famiglia, I thought. Family. I knew, of course, that most of the faces, and the names that went with them, would fade quickly once normal life took over again. But in a way we had briefly, very briefly, been a family. And who’s to say that just because something lasts only a short time, it has little value?

By the end of the afternoon, as we trudged back to the bus waiting to take us to Rome, it came to me, the reason I’d fallen for this village. Unlike the spun-sugar appeal of other Amalfi towns, Ravello personified simple elegance. It had the kind