A few months before we left Edinburgh, I decided to run a race while we were in Italy. We had already set our itinerary, so I couldn’t try to arrange stays around where and when races would occur. I started looking up races to see if there were any happening near the cities in which we were going to stay. The first one that came up: a race around Mt. Etna, with allegedly the highest vertical climb of any race in the world, while we were in Sicily. It looked epic, one of those races that people spend a huge amount of time and energy to prepare for and get to from around the world, and it was happening while we were staying just across the island! I checked with Alice, made sure I could get a cheap AirBNB, and paid for the race. Then, I saw that there was a half-marathon in Lucca; I signed up for that, too, as a warm-up.

Note to any runners planning on racing in Italy: don’t.

I didn’t see it in the sign-up, but there is a requirement in Italy that any non-Italian racer has to get a doctor to sign a special medical certificate before they can run in a “competitive” race. If the certificate is not signed, they can’t run. This certificate requires rigorous medical testing and a doctor’s seal, and it is not cheap. My doctor’s office in Edinburgh said that they couldn’t actually do it, and they didn’t know anyone in Scotland who could; I looked online, and it seems that very few places actually do this sort of testing in the UK. One site sold the certificates for a fee, without any testing necessary, but…well, that seemed a bit suspicious to me.

I put it in the back of my head. I figured I would train, go to the races, and try to talk my way in. Best case, I could run; worst case, I would be race-ready and out a few euros.

So I trained. For most of the cities we stayed in, I was up at 6 a.m. to get to the local Anytime Fitness – if you are a member in one, like the one we joined in Bathgate right before we left, you get access to every single club worldwide, and it was an absolutely amazing deal. In Milan, we stayed at Via Norino 10; I would sneak out the door, walk down the stairs, and if there wasn’t a 1930s tram waiting for me at the stop, I would walk down Via Torino all the way to the canals, pass the market, fill my bottle at the fountain, then pass the kebab shop and get to the gym. Sometimes it was busy with fashionable young people not noticing each other; sometimes I just shared it with the nice Tunisian cleaner for two hours. In Florence, I would walk through completely empty plazas that, a few hours later, would be packed with other tourists jostling for unobstructed photos, walk up side streets, and train for an hour before picking up breakfast at Vecchio Forno, or I would run across the bridges, up and down the river, which, hours later, would be too crowded to walk across. In Rome, I would walk down the long hill of Via Federico Ozanam to Via di Donna Olimpia, filling my Nalgene bottle on the corner, then down to the gym next to the mechanic, dodging hastily-parked cars. There was a guy who always arrived before me who had a flattened nose and reminded me of a line from a play we saw in London: “He was constantly at the gym, but always seemed to forget leg day.” It was in that Rome gym where I saw a man hitting a heavy bag one Sunday morning, and, when he was done, I told him that he was the first person I had ever seen hitting a bag in a gym who actually knew how to box. He laughed; he had been a local champion in Russia, spoke fluent English, and said that the fact I could pick that out showed I knew a lot about boxing. In Palermo, I would walk out onto Via Vittorio Emanuele and turn left on Via Roma, past the corner where buggies parked so it smelled always of horse urine, and walk past the cafe in Piazza Due Palme where teenagers drank coffee and smoked and shouted, down to the grand post office that Mussolini built. They never turned on the air conditioning before 7 a.m. in the gym, so I would get back after a workout and complain to Alice that the gym was roasting, and she would go and come back and think I was crazy. I would usually get there just as the cleaning people arrived, and I would tell them how good a job I thought they did; on the last day, I said ciao to them, and grazie mille, and the woman said the only words in English I had ever heard her say: “Very nice to meet you.”

I put hundreds of miles on my shoes in those gyms. Italian cities are generally not set up for running; I could have run around the canals in Milan, or the river paths of Pisa or Florence or perhaps Rome, but it would not have been straightforward.

Anyway, we were in Florence when the Lucca race was scheduled, for a Sunday. On Saturday, we all went to Lucca for the festival. As soon as I got to the registration table, the woman asked to see my medical certificate. I didn’t have one, so she said I couldn’t race.

I was prepared for this. “Is possible t-shirt?”

She shrugged, took me to the t-shirt table, and walked away.

I was a bit disappointed, but thought: I still had my train ticket for the next morning. I have an instinctive dislike of people who wear unearned glory – so many people wear Harvard and Yale and UCLA hoodies here, and I realize it is aspirational, but I still feel like it is a bit too much posturing; esse quam videri. I would not want to wear a shirt for a race I never ran…but what if I ran a half-marathon in Lucca on the day of the race, but just not the half-marathon in Lucca on the day of the race? It wasn’t like I was unprepared or unfit; I was barred on a technicality. I started getting excited again.

So at 5:30 a.m. the next morning, I walked out the door in my race gear, with a bottle of lemon-spiked water, two bananas, and hope. I passed by a 24-hour McDonald’s and got a double espresso, milling with drunk teenage clubbers, then crossed the street to the train station to wait for my 6:03 train. It would get to Lucca just past seven; I could start my run just off the train, go for 13 miles, then relax a bit in the city, get coffee and a cornetto, cheer on the runners as they started their little race, and then get an early train back, beating the rush of sweaty, smelly athletes. I stretched in the station while I waited for the train platform to be announced.

But the train was delayed 20 minutes, then 40, then cancelled. It was hourly, so that wasn’t a big deal; the 7:03 train was still fine, and I would get into Lucca with plenty of time to finish before the real race even started.

Then the 7:03 was delayed 20 minutes, then 40, and cancelled.

At 8:30, with the pattern established, I’d had enough. I went back to our AirBNB, drank some water, kissed Alice and the kids, and set off up the Arno river. I crossed the Ponte Vecchio, already busy, then turned left; I crossed every bridge I could cross, side to side. Finally, in the suburbs, with the sun beating down, I crossed the last bridge, went around a brick wall, and got to a dirt path. There, on the ground, was a Bianchi water bottle, dropped, no doubt, by a rich cyclist out on a morning ride.

I picked it up, emptied it, and then held onto it for the rest of the run. Something told me that I got the shirt, and this would be my medal. I ran and ran, keeping an eye on my watch, and was finished by 11:00 – about when I would have been half-way into the race, had I actually been able to run it. I washed the bottle out, then packed it in my suitcase.

It’s now what I use to water plants. Every time I pick it up, I think of that run – of the sun off of the river, of the breeze, of the old man cutting grass near the river and the universal smell of that grass, of the fishermen lined up at carefully measured intervals, their long poles completely still but optimistic, of the gang of young thugs I ran past who seemed to want to say something but then thought better of it, of the graffiti on the railway bridge below the great park. I think of how, later, in Pisa, I ran along the Arno again; how I crossed a bridge to get to the far side, and followed it into the suburbs, past the other “leaning tower” that actually looked more perilous, to the cafe at the roundabout that always opened at 6, and the organic farm that had free fruits and vegetables. And the first long run in Sorrento, when I went down the Corso Italia and then followed Via Capo out onto the cliffs, where there was no sidewalk; how the only reason I was able to do it was because it was so early on Sunday that the only people out were the exceptionally devout, and those people had the mindset of charity. Sorrento smelled of constant burning – if not the exhaust of old, inefficient Vespas, or the constantly smoldering cigarettes, then it was people burning trash in the hills, the smoke rising from citrus fields. I ran and ran, around hairpin curves and through stone villages, up and up, past marble walls and olive groves and citrus fields covered with black nets, then plunged down a side road toward a cove, Santa Fortunata, with a few fishing huts and a couple of hotels, the switchback slope more and more severe. I paused at one of the turns and looked down; an old woman opened a window at the top floor of a building, flung out a rug, and shook the accumulated dust out. I thought of the line in Gatsby when Nick watches a maid look out of one of the mansion’s window, but unfortunately, my woman never “spat meditatively,” and I kept running to the bottom where a German couple dressed all in white were waiting for a taxi with their bags, a honeymoon glow behind their unnecessary sunglasses, and I walked to the edge of the beach and dipped my toes in the water, an almost religious motion, baptising them before I started back up again. The Germans were still waiting when I started running up again. My competitiveness drove me to run up the steep incline hard, wanting to beat their taxi, and I never did see it, coming down for them or taking them back up. I did find a squared piece of marble on the side of the road, a construction castoff, and I picked it up and carried it back, thinking that if I was hit by a car I could Hail Mary the stone and shatter its windshield so it could be identified, so that’s another souvenir of those runs.

Sorrento is an adult tourist haven. It is almost entirely set up for non-Italians, and I’d estimate that the average age of visitors is probably in the late 40s; mostly Americans and Brits, with some other Europeans and a few Asians. The average store sells various textiles with lemons printed on it, ceramics with lemons, limoncello, and maybe baseball hats with “Italia” or “Sorrento” or “Napoli” printed on them. These hats are generally worn immediately, by men who think that that the hats give them an incredible camouflage that allows them to blend in with the other locals who wear such hats to display their civic pride. There are not a lot of things for kids to do in Sorrento, so, when I had to take the kids for a few hours, we often would walk out to Parco di Villa Fiorentino, where they had toilets, a water fountain, and a playground that was, in theory, dog-free.

The kids wanted to go on the swings, so I was pushing them when I looked down at the sandy dirt below them and saw a round thing. I am trying to cure myself of this: I often look down compulsively for money, and I often feel like looking for spare change keeps me from looking at the beauty all around me – the sky, buildings, trees, public art. Is it worth missing the sunrise because I was on the lookout for, at most, twenty cents? But I saw this round thing, and it seemed a bit too perfect, so I bent down to pick it up. I looked again, and saw another one, and then a nail.

“Daddy, what is it?” Daniel said.

“Roman coins,” I said.

I put them carefully in my wallet, and brought them home. A bit of research showed that the big one seemed to have the image of Emperor Probus on its head-side; he was emperor from 276 to 282.

A few days later, I went on a run toward the end of our trip and stumbled down to Veniva dal mare Lucio Dalla, where I got coffee and then ran back. After I’d had breakfast and showered, I brought the boys down to see it, to run on the sand and be near the water. When we were walking back, in a hole in a rock, I saw another coin – this time, it was hexagonal. I have no idea how it got there, or how I was the one to see it, but, as I absolutely despise lemon-printed textiles, three 1800-or-so-year-old Roman coins turned out to be pretty good souvenirs.