I am in Italy on a trip about death but also life. A great man, Giancarlo DiTrapano, is dead and I am going back to his villa to write. I will go there with other writers who knew him. Giancarlo’s disciples, Giancarlo’s flock. When jet lagged, I am susceptible to great emotions, sensitive to art and more mundane things that seem to approach the tenor and pitch of it. An Ottessa Moshfegh story ends with a woman overwhelmed with a sense of grace upon taking a sip of a McDonald’s Diet Coke. I understand this. It’s how I long to approach the world. There are high subjects and there are low ones. We live somewhere in-between. On the autostrada at twilight, speeding out of Rome, from the passenger seat, I look out above the business district, the EUR, and see starlings. The murmurations. Ancients looked at them and believed their shifts and undulations might reveal the will of gods. I say, ‘The starlings,’ and Catherine, the foundation’s co-founder, her foot pressing down on the accelerator, says, ‘They do that all the time.’

Villa DiTrapano is perched atop the hill town of Sezze that sits high above the Pontine plain. From the terrace, I see hills and farms below and if the day is clear enough, the Tyrrhenian Sea. Only a slight shift of colour stops it from merging completely with the sky. At dinner we eat outside and watch the fog blanketing the marsh slowly rise to cover the town. When it reaches Sezze, the fog turns a sickly yellow and glows like vapour in a neon tube.

I spend the mornings writing, stop at noon and pass the long hours to aperitivo hour, alternating between watching The Anna Nicole Show and gazing at clouds. I walk through the villa in the dark. I open the door to my room and see through the window an almost molten sky. In Italy we don’t seem to eat until ten. Last night, almost eleven. At nine the writers talk about art and the world. We talk about the crises when technological advancement and spirituality are out of balance. When religion is too dominant, you have the Dark Ages, people sitting on their ass for a few hundred years. When technology is dominant, with no spirit, you have the Kardashians. Then we speak of dinner. An hour later, it appears.

I lie on a chaise lounge and to block the sun take my singlet off and place it over my head as a shroud. The sun is too much for me. I am a creature of dawn and dusk and incandescent night, when the sky is so vivid it’s as if it were painted. The skies are those of the Venetian masters – Baroque and Rococo skies, Pittoni, the modernist skies of de Chirico, when the horizon shifts and the world is ablaze.

Max and I drive to the CONAD perched up the hill. From the car park you can look out at other hills, the sparse light of farmhouses, and further away, tiny pinpricks of light moving on the autostrada. While you look, old women come out of the supermarket and trudge to their cars.

Inside CONAD, beneath fluorescents, I stand in front of shelves of juice trying to work out if blueberry or pomegranate would be a better substitute for cranberry. I buy the pomegranate and back at the house mix what we christen the ‘Sezze Cosmopolitano’.

It strikes me that I’m now in my room, three Sezze Cosmos down, trying to describe what I christened the most beautiful car park in the world.

Gabe and Sarah, the two lovers, stay in a gigantic apartment in the middle of town. Neither of them like the apartment in Sezze. It’s overly large and filled with objects that disturb them: masks, pottery, pagan faces of green men. Back in their Roman hotel room, Sarah had looked at things to do on her phone. She saw an image of the Bocca Di Veritas. It scared her. She tells us she wouldn’t be able to place her hand inside it. In their apartment there’s a miniature Mouth of Truth hanging on the wall.

It scares all of us in one way or another. The thing about Giancarlo was, he always gave you the courage to place your hand in. He compelled it. That’s what was so miraculous about him.

Catherine and Giuseppe, co-founder and Giancarlo’s husband, have put little writing desks in the studios so people can write in them. The desks are too small for me. Smaller even than card tables. Knowing the desks were for work, Giuseppe set each one up with a vanity mirror. I can’t write there. I think looking at my own writing is already one reflection too many.

We journey to Naples and read aloud in a walled garden in Vomero. Babak reads and Chiara reads and Gabe reads. I read to the crowd in English and an actress reads the translated Italian. The next day we swim in the sea then journey back. We’ve been gone only a night but it’s as if the villa has been closed for a season. Leaves have gathered on the pool cover, the air is stale, the wood wet. We get to work. We open all the doors, start a fire that smokes and smokes until we realise the chimney is closed. We go through the cabinets of the kitchen, the living room, until we find a bottle of red wine. And then, only then, there is life again.

Babak asks me, ‘Were you sick last night? You were talking in your sleep. You kept saying, “Oh God. Oh God.”’ If you lived here I think it would all be quite trying. All this ascending and descending, but it’s good for art. Here, I want to write a sentence as clear as an aphorism, as sharp as a knife and expansive as the sky.

Paul Dalla Rosa is a writer and the author of An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life (2022, Allen & Unwin).