Civitavecchia: The Port Where Beneath Mediterranean Skies Begins

• 

Every book has a hinge point, a single place where everything before it clicks into everything after. For Beneath Mediterranean Skies, that place is Civitavecchia. It's a working port city outside Rome, not the kind of place most travelers linger, but it's exactly where I needed Olivia and Lance's story to turn, and it's exactly where my wife and I found ourselves at the start of our own Mediterranean cruise.

Beneath Mediterranean Skies, Book 2 of the Uncharted Horizons series, releases October 1. The opening chapters follow Lance on a repositioning cruise crossing the Atlantic, arriving into Civitavecchia alone, carrying the weight of a business crisis he's been managing by phone the entire voyage. Olivia joins him here, stepping aboard for the ship's next sailing. It's their reunion, and I wanted the setting to feel like exactly what Civitavecchia is: a threshold, a place you pass through on your way to somewhere bigger, but one that leaves its own mark anyway.

The Kiss on the Waterfront

• 

• 

There's a towering statue on the Civitavecchia promenade, a sailor bent low over a nurse in a sweeping kiss, palm trees framing the harbor behind them. It's modeled after the famous Times Square photograph of the sailor kissing a nurse on V-J Day, the moment the world learned World War II had ended. Seeing that image reimagined in bronze on an Italian waterfront, of all places, was unforgettable, and I knew immediately it belonged in the book. It became the visual heart of the waterfront café scene where Lance and Olivia reunite, that enormous, almost theatrical kiss looking out over the same water their ship would soon carry them across. Sometimes a place hands you its own metaphor and all you have to do is write it down.

Day Before the Ship

• 

Before the ship, there's the town itself: a little seaside café with red tablecloths, espresso poured into a glass marked with careful measurements, a croissant split open with Nutella melting into the layers. This is the exact café where Olivia and Lance's reunion scene plays out, the red tablecloths and the view of the water became the setting itself. We spent our first morning there, watching pigeons hop between empty chairs while the Mediterranean sat flat and grey under a cloudy sky. It's an unglamorous kind of beautiful, and it gave me the texture I needed for the quiet, waiting mood of Lance's early chapters, a man who has crossed an ocean and is now simply killing time until the woman he loves arrives.

• 

For dinner, we found our way to Caffé Europa, a lounge bar with a striped awning, tucked in among the breakfast-and-cocktail spots along the promenade. It's the kind of easy, unhurried evening that felt right for the night of Olivia's arrival, and it fed directly into the mood of that stretch of the book.

The Room Above the Street

• 

We stayed at a small guesthouse called the Museum House, in a room with a rose-colored accent wall, curtains the color of wine, and a window that opened straight onto the piazza below, trucks and scooters and a fortress wall visible in the distance. My wife leaned out that window more than once, taking in the street noise and the low golden buildings of the old town. That view, and that particular feeling of having just arrived somewhere with your suitcases still zipped, found its way into the texture of the opening chapters even where it isn't stated outright. Civitavecchia isn't a place you photograph for its grandeur. It's a place you remember for the specific, small details: the light through velvet curtains, the sound of the piazza waking up.

• 

The Small Absurdities

Not every detail that makes a setting feel real is romantic. Civitavecchia has these small, deadpan signs posted along the promenade forbidding dogs from peeing on the grass, and there's something about that blunt, unglamorous municipal humor that stuck with us. It's the kind of detail that reminds you a place is lived in, not just visited, and it found its way into the book as one of those small, wry observations that ground a scene in a real town rather than a postcard version of one.

• 

And then there was the afternoon my wife realized her phone, with her credit cards tucked into the case, was gone. We retraced our steps in a small panic, and by some stroke of luck it turned up back at the ship, handed in exactly where we'd left it. I gave Olivia and Lance almost the same scare, the same sinking realization and the same relief when it's returned, because that particular flavor of panic, the sudden fear of losing everything that keeps a trip running, felt too true to leave out.

My wife also noticed something else as we wandered the town: the Italian men seemed to have claimed every café chair for themselves, sitting around smoking and gossiping the morning away, while the women moved briskly past them, clearly in the middle of actual work. It's a small slice-of-life observation, but it's the kind of thing that makes a place feel specific rather than generic, and a version of it made its way into the background texture of the Civitavecchia scenes.

More than once, we also watched families of tourists dragging their suitcases the long stretch between the train station and the bus to the cruise port, that particular mix of exhaustion and determination on their faces. It's such a small, unremarkable thing to witness, but it captures exactly what Civitavecchia is for most people passing through it: not a destination, but a gauntlet you get through on the way to the real trip. That image made its way into the book too, a reminder that everyone arriving at that port is carrying something, whether it's luggage or otherwise.

Why Civitavecchia Had to Be the Start

I could have opened the book anywhere on the itinerary. Naples, Athens, Santorini, any of them would have made for a more obvious postcard opening. But Civitavecchia is a port of transition, a place people pass through rather than stay in, and that felt like the right note for two people about to step back into each other's lives after time apart. It isn't a grand introduction. It's a quiet one, a café table, a kiss frozen in bronze overhead, a ship waiting at the dock. Sometimes that's exactly the kind of beginning a story needs.

Beneath Mediterranean Skies releases October 1. If you've passed through Civitavecchia on your way to Rome or out to sea, I'd love to hear what stuck with you.